David's favorite gadgets of 2024
What makes a gadget great in 2024? David’s curated favorites reveal surprising features and upgrades you didn’t know you needed.
I’m David Gewirtz. This is a special holiday edition of the Advanced Geekery newsletter. In this issue, I’ll spotlight a gaggle of gadgets I found to be geekily glorious in 2024. All are Amazon links because I dig that free shipping. Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
My favorite gadgets
Let’s dig in. Most of these are small and easy to gift.
I consider this to be the single most important, single most life-changing purchase I’ve made in the last 20 years. It keeps my coffee warm all day. Every single sip of coffee I take now is cozy hot. Nobody should have to live life without this. It’s fairly inexpensive, too. I consider it the perfect gift.
This is what I use to keep my iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods Pro 2 charged all the time. I particularly like the little indent for the AirPods case, so I always know it’s seated exactly where it will get charged.
The Meta Quest 3 provides an amazing experience for both gaming and augmented reality, all for a fairly affordable price. Here’s my article about how Meta seems to be crushing Apple in the new mixed reality world. Right now, the Quest 3 is shipping with the Arkham Shadow video game.
If you want to save $200 over the Quest 3, the Quest 3S will get you there. Here’s my article about why I consider this to be the ultimate 2024 holiday gadget gift. It, too, comes with a Batman game.
This moisture meter really came in clutch when we were trying to find a leak. The ball sensor allows you to simply touch drywall without leaving puncture marks, and easily determine the moisture content.
I really like this little light. It has three areas that light up, and it can be very bright, indeed. Plus it has a couple of strong magnets, so I can slap it onto anything ferrous and it holds on tight. Seems to hold a charge for quite a while as well.
I’ve gone through a whole bunch of different smartphone gimbals, but this one has achieved a permanent position in my kit bag. Although it has a bunch of app-controlled features, I don’t use them. What I like is that I can set it up, attach my phone, turn it on, and make one or two ridiculous gestures and it follows me pretty darn near perfectly. The ability to use it with anything, without having to dive into some custom app, is a big win.
I’ve been printing constantly for months, setting up my charging station. One of the problems was making sure I didn’t start a long print without enough filament. I found this very special purpose filament scale, meant for Creality printers. But there are a couple of screw holes on the bottom of that mount, so you can use it on anything. Measure an empty spool, so you have a baseline. Then measure the spool you have, and if there’s more grammage than your slicer says you need, you’re golden.
In my ongoing quest for some sense of organization, label makers are important. Like just about everyone, I had a standard label maker with the little keyboard. But this little device (which, for the record, is not a cube and looks more like an Apple TV) is great. In any case, it works from an app via Bluetooth and takes a very, very wide range of specialty labels. If you want to seriously up your label-making game, this is the right tool.
This is a Space Mouse and it makes editing in Fusion much more natural. It’s a stationary device and quite heavy. You move the knob to rotate, pan, and tilt your objects. I’ll admit, it took me a while to get used to it, but it’s recently become second nature and I can’t imagine doing 3D modeling in Fusion without it.
Send in your projects
I’d like to regularly spotlight a reader project or two here. Your project doesn’t have to be a big Kickstarter launch. If you’ve built something cool, it has some pretty pictures, and you’re proud of it, I might be able to share it here.
If you have a photogenic reader project, send an email to me at david@zatz.com with the subject “READER PROJECT,” a few pictures, and a short one-paragraph description. If you have a social media link or a link to the project, include that, too.
Both my EPs are now streaming
Available on all your favorite streaming services.
More clicky
I’ve got a lot happening all over the web. Here are links to my various stuff:
House of the Head: home for my published music
ZATZ Labs: where I host my published software projects
Feel free to dig around, visit, and say hey!
Leave some comments
Substack supports comments, so feel free to leave some. I promise to read them. Just, please, let’s keep our personal politics out of any discussion.
That should do it for this week. This newsletter is really starting to pick up subscribers. Please help it out by sharing links on all your socials.
Have a great week!