Posting meme: Top 5 pieces of tech

[extrapenguin]

December posting meme. china_shop asked for the top five pieces of tech I use, and/or top five types of fictional tech. Here goes!

1. My rice cooker
It's from Zojirushi. It has a timer function with two saveable time slots! It has a regular and a fast cook function! It can also be used for steaming and like 5 other different things! It good; I like. It is so good I only use a soft dough scraper to remove rice from it lest I damage the nonstick coating.

2. My kettle
It has 4 different temperature settings: 40°C, 60°C, 80°C, and 100°C. It is very good for tea preparation. It is 1 L in size, as is my teapot.

3. My noise-canceling headphones
From Bose. A birthday present a few years back. Very good, immeasurably improved all my travel experiences, especially airplanes but trains as well.

4. My phone
A BlackBerry Android with a physical keyboard. (RIP BlackBerry's phone manufacturing.) My previous keyboard phone (HTC Desire Z) lasted 8 years before Android passed it by. Let's hope this one lasts as long as well! I hate replacing phones.

5. My laptop
A refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad. Okay to write with, very portable, good value for money. I would've picked my desktop, except that the processor fan (and honestly probably also the processor) is due for a replacement that I keep procrastinating on ordering. (I might also need to upgrade the motherboard due to design specs changing in the decade-ish since I built this damn thing, and then I need to check to see whether it'll fit in the case...)

Comments

[solo]

It has 4 different temperature settings: 40°C, 60°C, 80°C, and 100°C.

I have one like that! Great for green tea!

My noise-canceling headphones From Bose.

And I just got those on Black Friday! Looking forward to using them!

[extrapenguin]

Also for activating dried yeast! (Requires 42°C; I figure 40°C is close enough.)

[superborb]

I was wondering why you might need a 40C setting on a kettle, that makes sense! (Mine has presets for various teas, but they start over 70C)

[extrapenguin]

I, too, wondered that for the longest time, but then I once had dried yeast and made the connection. I'm not sure if it's the intended use, but it is a use. Haven't used the 60°C one for anything yet.

[atamascolily]

Does your rice cooker sing to you? My Zojirushi does, and it's adorable. Once I forgot to close the lid and it made perfect rice anyway. I would be much more accepting of driverless cars if they could show that kind of judgment (which is delightfully described on the box as "neurofuzzy" logic). Or if a driverless car could also make perfect rice.

[extrapenguin]

Yes! Twinkle Twinkle Little Star whenever I turn it on and whenever it's ready. It's adorable.

[china_shop]

Ah, that's a great collection! I enjoyed all the details. I had to google Blackberry Androids with physical keyboards to see what that would look like. Do you still type with your thumbs?

And now I'm resisting the temptation to get a rice cooker. Do not need! But it sounds awesome. :-)

[extrapenguin]

Yep, I type with my thumbs! BOTH thumbs. As fast as I like! (Whenever I've tried a soft keyboard, I've discovered it invariably misses up to 50% of my inputs because of accidental double-press protection or something. I don't think my typing speed is some immense outlier but apparently it is?)

Rice cookers are awesome! And very useful, if you, like me, have rice as your starch of choice. I think whenever I cook, 99 times out of 100, it's with rice. Perfectly fluffy, amazingly warm rice.

[china_shop]

We tend to vary our starches: rice, noodles, pasta, potatoes. So when I cook rice, I do it on the stove-top using the absorption method. But yum, that does sound delicious!