Does anyone have any particularly happy endings to the title sentence? A product that turned out to be a lifesaver? Just curious to hear.
This one definitely won’t be a worthwhile investment, but I might get one anyway lol
I have two coin shops that are local, I’m going to check with them and see if they can get it cheaper. Theres like 12£ shipping from the UK making the 13£ coin into essentially a $30 coin for Americans. And the denomination is 2£
Name checks out…
Well, at least a coin doesn’t take up much room.
That is… unless…
So that’s a… Tolkien Token?
By the way, the character Token on South Park…
It was revealed that his real name is Tolkien. 
I do have a coin collection, and a lot of collections in general 
Luckily I tend to fixate on one thing or the other so I don’t have a continuous “multi-threaded” drain on my spendable income.
I’m resisting the urge to start a keyboard collection now, but I’ll probably go the same route I went with headphones. Get 2-3 nice mid-range options with very different characteristics, and call it good.
@Lightbringer @raccoon Oh yea, I heard Southpark did that and saw a clip on YT. I’m not really sure why they changed his name tbh but I’m not a big fan of ret-cons in general. I guess the joke of everyone getting his name wrong is kinda funny. But is it really in character for him to never bring it up? I remember Token being pretty blunt about things he wasn’t on board with.
I take a similar stance. I’ve collected things in many different arenas, but I refrain from getting into the “collect all variants” thing.
I really like that Tolkien commemorative coin. I wonder if there’s access for sales to USA without adding too much cost? I’m not a coin collector per-se. I’ve got a few old ones like Liberty dollar coins and Mercury dimes.
I’ve been very tempted to get into keyboards. I’m astonished at how blown out is that genre. There are real serious collectors in that arena, many having limited run editions. I think it’s a bit nuts, because these take up a lot of space fairly quickly. Anyway, I found an old IBM PS/2 keyboard, totally original, and was planning to sell it. Then… somehow it slipped off a stack of things and crashed on a hard floor. It fractured a corner and while there was one piece that could be glued back, other bits fractured into very tiny particles that were impossible to gather back up. So, value tanked right there. I wouldn’t use it, because it’s a beast. And I don’t like that loud heavy mechanical noise. Apparently there are like 5 or so color coded tension and noise levels for key switches. One day I may pick up a board, but for now my modern back lit Logitech keyboard works great for me.
I have that one silver Tolkien coin limited to 2000 pieces for £128.50 (£106.25, £12.50 shipping, + £23 VAT and customs to EU) so full price somethin about £141,75 . It is really nice coin, but it is no big (24.00 g) and (Inner: .925 sterling silver. Outer: .925 sterling silver plated with fine gold). It is lot of money… 
but I understand the price, it is Tolkien and Royal mint… and of course limited one
Several years ago, when they were in style, I bought a couple of fidget spinners.
I gave one to my niece, and I kept the other one.
I don’t know why I felt that I needed one because fidget spinners are mostly useless.
At least I got a couple of pretty good ones, and they weren’t all that expensive. 
A few years ago my younger brother, who has lived most of his adult life in Canada, gave me a 2 CAD coin with GITD properties. Do I need it: no. Can I buy something with it: well, not over here. Do I keep it: certainly for ever!
My coin collection is not very professional. I mostly collect coins for having neat designs and whatnot. I definitely don’t look at it as an investment and have never purchased coins with the intention of building the collection’s value. This would be the first purchase from a coin shop or mint in my adult life.
Regarding the Tolkien Coin, the Royal Mint ships to the US for about 12 pounds sterling. But, I was hoping a local dealer might have gotten a better bulk rate and be able to sell them for less.
I agree about the space concerns of collecting something like keyboards. I just wouldn’t want to store too many boards. And yea, the $200 key cap sets are nutso lol. Can’t argue that some of the boards I’ve seen aren’t gorgeous though. Too bad about the IBM keyboard. I bet it’s still worth a mint in parts actually.
The color coded switch types are just scratching the surface!
If I understand correctly:
With tactile switches, there’s tactile force, actuation force, and bottom-out force.
tactile force - maximum force needed to pass tactile bump
actuation force -maximum force needed to activate key-press
bottom out force - force required to hold the key at the lowest position
Some people hate bottoming out keys when typing so I think they use something with low actuation force and higher bottom out force so they can stop short of bottoming out. But if you use your keyboard for games and hold down the W key alot, you might want the bottom-out force to be lower. Or if your your entire goal is minimum resistance for sustained typing, you want to check that tactile force since it’s not always listed as obviously as the activation force from what I’ve seen.
I see now that there were four variants originally and that all three of the high-end variants are sold out. Wow! That’s pretty cool, I bet yours will be worth a fair bit some day.
Paprika app for my phone.
It’s a local or cloud based recipe manager app that also does meal planning and associated tasks.
I like to cook and it had a free trial so I tried it out not knowing just how much I was going to love it. It makes organizing recipes really easy, but the part I didn’t know I was going to love is it’s browser feature. Put in the URL for a recipe, hit download, and it pulls the recipe and instructions out. No more having to hunt through some blogger’s entire life story on a poorly laid out website to find the actual recipe- one button and you’ve got it in an easy to read and follow format and you can categorize and save it from there.
I didn’t need yet another flashlight. But something about the Skilhunt EC300 really appealed to me. I found one used in pretty much mint condition for a good $20 off Skilhunt’s price.
It’s actually very good! I really like the versatility. And the machining of the body is fantastic. Beautifully done. I doubt I’ll ever really use green or blue aux LED’s but RBG disco mode is kind of cool. SST-20’s… which are old. I think this light shouldn’t be too hard to upgrade emitters. But I tucked in a minus-green filter and it looks really nicely neutral. The good thing is that the optic is a quad Carclo. So I could order several variations from LED Supply rather cheaply (although recently shipping jumped to $3.99).
