Min-maxing quality of life enhancements

Published 20^th March 2024
Last modified 30^th November 2024

I’ve come to believe that for each respective QoL enhancement there is an optimal level of engagement at which you reap pretty much all of the benefit, and any further cognitive energy and money you funnel into it is just chasing a non-existent white whale.

In an effort to make hundreds of hours of forum-trawling worth something, below is a list of the various niches I’ve become obsessed with over the years and associated products which I think represent the pragmatic peak. Go no further, just buy it and enjoy it and do more useful things with your time.

Coffee

• Clever Dripper
  • Follow this recipe
• KINGrinder P2 hand-crank grinder
• Bulk purchase “house blend” beans from a home-delivery roaster

Tea

• Generic cup infuser (example)
• Try green teas, oolongs, and black teas to figure out what you like
  • Gyokuro is a Japanese tea, and it is good representative for greens
  • Jin Xuan, also known as ‘milk oolong’ is Chinese, and is worth trying for its naturally creamy flavour — in a good milk oolong, no milk is actually used in the preparation process
  • Darjeeling is a good representative for Indian black teas
• Pick a vendor from this list and you’ll probably end up with something good

Mechanical keyboards

• Anything from Keychron that fits your preferred keyboard layout and size
• In terms of key switches:
  • Clicky (blue) if you want something loud and mechanical-feeling, avoid if you are going to use in a communal space _ Tactile (brown) if you just want to type — middle of the road option
  • Linear (red/yellow) if you are going to game on your computer
• Unicomp make replicas of the IBM Model M buckling spring keyboards; extremely loud but feel great

Shaving

• Merkur 34C safety razor and whatever canned shaving foam you prefer
• Get a blade sampler pack from somewhere like here and start with Personna blades

Writing implements

• Fountain pen: Lamy Safari
• Ballpoint: Uniball Jetstream
• Rollerball: Uniball Vision Elite UB-200
• Gel: Pentel EnerGel
• Pencil: Staedler 925 35-05 with Pentel Hi Polymer Super 0.5mm 2B lead

Headphones

• Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro 80-ohm
  • If you have a Mac, you don’t need a DAC
  • If you don’t, then purchase the FiiO K3 and the 256-ohm version of these headphones

Printers

• Any black-and-white Brother laser printer, and use it wired if you can
• Not even AGI will solve printer wireless networking