Some tech gift ideas for Monday, or you know, just hug them

Man I’d love to make a crap ton of money selling stuff, but yeah, not really feeling it. I’m going to tell you things I’ve gotten or reviewed and enjoyed and you can see if they line up with your needs. As per usual, don’t buy something because you think you have to. Guilt is garbage, but I just got back from vacation so I’m pretty much lacking Monday content at the moment.

The Plant Air purifier

First thing to note is these don’t work like most people claim they work. The NASA study that’s referenced, you really should actually read what it stated as all these claims of X plant being able to sustain your life by cleaning the air, are for the most part, very close to complete garbage.

The study referenced looked at a few compounds and pulling air through various bases that a plant was in. Later studies show that some of the cleaning was done by organisms in soil (removing benzene,) and much was done just by pulling air through charcoal an dirt.

However, what it does do is clean the air a little, help with smells, and seems to either help the plants with their growth or perhaps pulling much of the dust in the area into the root system helps.

You want a good article on why your friend’s “5 houseplants that will literally clean every inch of your air” is garbage, click here. A plant in this base will work well. This does clean the air, but not to the extremes people think. Not that the Plant Air Purifier claims that.

This is the website. They are still too expensive.

The Sense Home Energy Monitor

I never paid a dime for the Sense Home Energy Monitor due to PR, but I did track down enough waste that the thing would have paid for itself in the first year. The general argument against these is “I can already turn off a lightbulb, there’s no savings.” but can you see that your hot water heater has been running non-stop for five days? Can you see that in the past two months your fridge has been running longer and longer?

I have serious issues with this product and how the machine learning works, but I still recommend it to people as I probably saved $300+ knowing the water heater was royally messed up, tracing down a 70 watt energy vampire that had probably cost me a couple of hundred dollars over a couple of years.

Being able to see power draws within a couple of seconds of flipping a breaker or unplugging a gadget is obscenely useful in tracking down things. Being able to set an alarm that if a hair curling iron is on over 20 minutes to alert me on my phone is also useful. Not being able to specifically train the Sense Home Energy Monitor to recognize a curling iron is maddening.

You can read my several years of reviews on this thing here.

Freaking connected cameras man.

I hate the idea of a surveillance state, but man they’ve been useful. In the past month I’ve turned over two videos to the police, and managed to figure out what happened before my kids could manage to come up with either an excuse or a lie.

That MyFirst Camera I have issues with

I have a lot of issues with this camera, the support, the software, the image quality, and while I think it’s going to be fixable/surmountable, you should definitely read the series of problems I had. Also be aware if you don’t want the WiFi options, there’re plenty of similar and less expensive options available.

Nothing like the gift of telling them their ass is filthy

Want to give the gift that both captures the hoarding runs on TP of 2020/2021, and may send the message that their butts stink? Give the questionable (in the United States,) gift of a bidet.

Yeah, someone gave me one last year and we’ve gone through like one pack of TP since 2020. Slapped one in at the office to test TP consumption and it’s down quite a bit. Although I will say attempts to metric that are not valid.

You can get them as low as $25, although make sure you read what types of seats they work with. You really don’t want my review on the experience as someone who never came into contact with one for 47 years, or to be thinking about my rear. They’re useful.

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