Best products from r/LearnUselessTalents

We found 22 comments on r/LearnUselessTalents discussing the most recommended products. We ran sentiment analysis on each of these comments to determine how redditors feel about different products. We found 95 products and ranked them based on the amount of positive reactions they received. Here are the top 20.

Top comments mentioning products on r/LearnUselessTalents:

u/le_mous · 187 pointsr/LearnUselessTalents

Take note that fuel he's using is very likely denatured alcohol, also some protips:

For a better looking stove, take some very fine grit sandpaper and sand the paint ends of the cans, while they're full. You can try to sand them when you've emptied them but trust me, full is easier.

Try using cans with wider bases to get a better heating area, think about those Foster's oilcan' beer cans. The aluminium is a little thicker on those as well, so your stove will hold up better.<br /> <br /> Additionally, by picking up some cheap wire fencing you can construct a pretty easy potstand that will keep your food and heating pot/cup off of the direct flame.<br /> <br /> The filler that the constructor is using, is likely fiberglass. Go with that, instead of regular cotton because, well.. duh, flammability. <br /> <br /> These awesome little stoves aren't just used by hoboes but also by a lot of ultralight backpackers who can sacrifice the weight of a can of propane and larger/weightier stove by constructing one of these. Source: I'm an ultralight backpacker who has constructed close to several hundred of these little guys :)<br /> <br /> **Edit:** forgot the word &quot;fuel&quot; and added clarification for &quot;Foster'soilcan' beer cans."

Edit 2: Wow, this got a lot of visibility! Cool! For those backpackers who are looking to lighten your load or for some general backpacking advice, why don't you head over to /r/backpacking and/or /r/Ultralight where there are plenty of knowledgeable folks just waiting to critique your gear list and help get your pack squared away. Also, you don't necessarily need to use denatured alcohol, but isopropyl is dangerous and leaves nasty residue in and on your cooking cup/pot. Plus, I've found that denatured is easier to find in a lot of places. You can also substitute HEET or other jellied alcohols but be warned, there are other stove designs that use that type of fuel a lot more efficiently. Trying to stuff jelly into the one that OP's demonstrating will be an exercise in futility.

Edit 3: For those of you who are looking for some more resources about constructing these things, you should experiment! Jump in and make your own, test them out, experiment!

Also, here's some web links that might help you, that I've found helpful in my journey with making these:

Zen and the art of the alcohol stove.

A drop of rain blog, fuel consumption and weight.

Adventures in stoving, DIY alcohol stove design principals.

And finally, Dave Sailer's book who was almost directly responsible for inspiring me to go ultralight and build a stove in the first place. (Ignore the one bad review, he's an extremely humorous writer and this book is a great read.)

u/bobbyfiend · 2 pointsr/LearnUselessTalents

There are a variety of ways to go about this.

Salience: This means "standing out." In this case, in your mind. If you're trying to memorize a list of really boring stuff, try to visualize or mentally attach it to not-boring stuff. Don't be PC. Don't be kind or gentle in your mind. Be shocking and graphic. To memorize the sequence "Ortho, Meta, Para" in Chemistry, don't use your teacher's lame phrase, "Ortho met a pair of hot ladies." Instead, imagine a person named Ortho, a cruel mockery of the fact that he had to wear orthopedic shoes as a child--he was bullied, beaten, urinated on, by the horrible thugs he called classmates. These wannabe cavemen claimed that his nickname was "So meta" because he actually was ortho! Get it? Huh Huh Huh. He was miserable until he met a paralegal, whose name he could never remember, so he called her "Para." She seemed like the one for him, until one day, in bed, while doing it doggy style, she cried out, "Oh, Ortho!" And he lost it. Killed her with his orthopedic shoes. Then beat himself to death with them.

All because Ortho Met a Para. Or something.

Mnemonics: These are tricks to memorize things. One simple mnemonic is the "One, a bun. Two, a shoe. Three, a tree..." type of thing. You first memorize a simple sequence like this, then to memorize other content you tie it to the easy-to-remember sequence. Another mnemonic technique, as described by /u/The_Cantigaster, is the method of loci.

Let's say you needed to memorize these facts: (a) The first psychological laboratory was in Germany; (b) Titchener, Wundt's student, brought Wundt's ideas to the US, and (c) William James made psychology popular through easy-to-understand books and lectures.

Using the first method, you might spend time vividly imagining:

(a) A wound (sounds like Wundt?) in a delicious German bun (maybe it has sausage in it?), oozing blood.

(b) A twitchy student with a twitchy shoe--really twitching like crazy--traveling from Germany to the US ('twitchy' sounds kind of like Titchener?)

(c) A tree with huge branches shaped like a "W" and a big swing hanging down, shaped like a "J" (William James) planted in the dead center of the US, being chopped down to make popular psychology books.

OK, so YMMV.


Repetition: In itself, it's not very good as a memorizing strategy; however, if you leverage it right, you can get some serious gains. Hermann Ebbinghaus (sp?) started research on "forgetting curves," which are just line graphs of how much you remember about stuff you've tried to memorize, over time. You can find literature online about how to use that research to maximize memorization, mostly by setting a schedule of exactly when to repeat your study of new material. The key to really efficient memorizing by this method is to refresh your memory/studying, multiple times, at just the right point in the forgetting curve. See the next point.

Get this book: Make it stick. The second author (Roediger) has been leading a bit of a large leap forward in the science of how to learn things. He uses cognitive psychology methods, rather than traditional educational theory or more fancy stuff, which has sometimes made him unpopular in certain fields--but overall his stuff has been well received. Don't be fooled by the casual tone of writing (the first author's doing); Roediger and colleagues have racked up an impressive, well-thought-out mountain of empirical research that has led them to some great insights about how to learn. Notably, he has sort-of based a lot of his research on Ebbinghaus' original "forgetting curves" studies. This book--or rather, the research it's based on--will help pretty much anyone improve their learning of pretty much anything, a great deal. Another reason Roediger's work has been pooh-poohed by some is that he focuses on memorizing, not fancy higher-order learning. However, he has found that memorizing well actually promotes that higher-order critical-thinking type of learning, and that the techniques for doing both kinds of things are not terribly different, anyway, if you want to do them efficiently and well.

Going from pure memory here (my copy of the book is lent out), Roediger suggests some overall principles:

  1. Study less; test more. Test yourself over and over, repeatedly. Read one page, then test yourself on what you remember. Then do that again. Don't read twice; read once, then test twice. Read again if necessary, but test, test, and test more. Flash cards. Make your own phone-app quizzes. Get your friends to test you. Testing makes you learn more fully, more deeply, and more quickly than studying or reading or merely repeating does.

  2. Test yourself even on things that you think you know. Roediger has found that people trying to learn/memorize things often stop when they have a 'feeling of learning.' That feeling is often a lie. Test and retest. In fact, the "feeling of learning" is very frequently an illusion. Part of learning well involves ignoring that feeling and basing your self-assessment of learning on... assessment. So keep testing yourself, not just to learn, but to really see what you are (and aren't) learning.

  3. Lots of booster/follow-up tests. This is in line with "forgetting curve" research. As you slowly begin to forget, revisit your earlier material over and over, at various points later. This locks things in better. Roediger, in the book, has some suggestions for how often to revisit/retest. If you look up his academic papers, you'll find more specific recommendations, if you want.

  4. Mix up your testing. Use different methods, etc., but--more importantly--test yourself on all kinds of different things all mixed together. Don't give in to the temptation to study only one thing at a time. Mix various things you're studying in one course (if you're in school), and mix your studying for various classes together. If you can't mix them, then at least alternate. Spend 30 minutes studying your vocabulary lists for Advanced Finnish and then 30 minutes studying your lists of ions for Intro Chem. Don't make a "Finnish study" night and a "Chem study night." You need to remember this stuff later, possibly in a different and confusing context. Force/fool your brain to learn how to recall things in various contexts. Train your brain to "switch gears" quickly.

  5. The harder you work to learn, the better you learn. My students hate me telling them this, but it's a solid, well-established fact. You have to make your brain work. Give yourself problems to solve that you can't quite solve. That you need Google and a couple of phone calls to friends and looking through your 7th-grade math textbook to solve. Read things that require a dictionary to look up the hard words (and maybe the words used to define the hard words in the dictionary). Write your own questions and problems. Give them to friends/family/homeless people for five bucks. See if they can understand and answer them. Answer them yourself. The more your brain works at processing, slicing, dicing, and--importantly--making connections with what you're learning, the better you will learn it. Things like "mind maps" and writing your own summaries of what you've learned will help with this. You might also try explaining your learning to someone else.

    Hope this gives some ideas. There's a perfectly enormous amount of work that has been put into answering your question over the last... um... few thousand years. And there have been great leaps forward in the last ten or twenty.
u/benjerryicecream · 15 pointsr/LearnUselessTalents

Magician here. Head on over to the sidebar at /r/Magic - there's plenty of information on exactly where to start.

For my money, there's no better place to start than a cheap book. For card magic, look to "The Royal Road to Card Magic". For coins, grab "Modern Coin Magic". For general magic, pick up either Mark Wilson's Complete Course or Joshua Jay's Complete Course.

None of those books should run you more than fifteen bucks. Grab a copy and just read it until you get bored.

Also, please, don't ever learn magic on youtube. The thing that's hard for those new to magic to understand is that it is a craft that has been worked on for thousands of years. Every secret, every beautiful piece of magic ever invented has been based on the work of others, which couldn't have existed if it weren't for the work of others even before them. Every secret, as minute as you can imagine, deserves to be shared with the express permission of the person who put in the hours, days, and years of work it took to discover that secret. YouTube magic schools rarely give proper credit, and truthfully, they rarely teach a magic trick very well at all. You can also never be truly sure that a YouTube magician is worth their salt, whereas you can see--from the fact that these books are decades old yet still being heralded as some of the best magic books out there--that we magicians think they are worth reading.

Bottom line: youtube will teach you secrets. A good magic book, like the ones I recommended, will teach you how to be a magician.

u/FAMEinvt · 119 pointsr/LearnUselessTalents

So the Dr. (who is such a good person, like look at him, he totally made that kids day) is using these little fake thumbs that have lights inside of them that turn on when you press them against something (that’s why he looks like he’s doing 👌🏻all the time). From personal experience they are super fun and a great little toy, however unless you have big enough thumbs it doesn’t quite work, also if you were to drop one or the kid were to figure it out it would be a no bueno. I’ve copied an amazon link to the ones that he is using, let us know how it works out!
https://www.amazon.com/Magic-Makers-Light-Thumb-Tips/dp/B00XWTVV9U

u/mxchickmagnet86 · 29 pointsr/LearnUselessTalents

Great info here. If anyone is looking for more stuff like this, I'd suggest this book, it's a pretty easy, fun read.

u/baldylox · 15 pointsr/LearnUselessTalents

That helps, yes. My wife and I have a farm in middle Tennessee, and there are a LOT of bugs out in the country, and I'm sure y'all know.

We put up a bunch of Purple Martin houses as well as a few bat houses in the barn. Every year we attract dozens of Purple Martins, Tree Swallows and the bats stay year-round. Those birds eat thousands of mosquitoes every single day. They're also fun to watch dance around the sky eating every mosquito in sight.

The first year we lived out here was unbearable. Since then, we rarely get bit by mosquitoes.

Get some Purple Martin houses. They'll come back every year and you can watch generations of them devour your little blood-sucking vermin.

THIS is the kind we have.

u/Jazzspasm · 3 pointsr/LearnUselessTalents

Reading the answers there's some great banter, but here's some more practical info - in case you were actually serious in your question.

If you're after Judeo-Christian concepts, then look up Gustav Davidson's Dictionary of Angels as it lists numerous demons.

Another guide would be the Lesser Key of Solomon which has detailed demon descriptions and guides for summoning.

Another place to start would be Enochian Magic principles. Put the three together and you're off to a good start... but

Read this before you do anything, Dion Fortune's Psychic Self Defense.

/u/Insanelopez has the best advice so far - if you're being serious. Don't get stuck into something too quickly that you don't know anything about.

u/did_you_read_it · 2 pointsr/LearnUselessTalents

You can buy something like this thing. it tries to detect REM then "wake you up" a bit.

If you don't want to spend any money you can look at a sleep cycle chart and set a light alarm around the time you would be experiencing REM sleep. The goal would be to either not fully wake you or wake up, turn off the alarm and pretty much immediately fall asleep. This should put you as close to waking while still dreaming and give you the greatest chance of remembering your dreams and being conscious enough to recognize you are dreaming.

My most vivid dreams usually occur between snooze button cycles in the morning.

u/SmoSays · 2 pointsr/LearnUselessTalents

From the flute-beatboxing guy.

Edit: You don't actually need to be able to play the flute for this to be useful.

Also, a metronome will be useful to get some beat/rhythm. I've found a free app for both Android and ipod/iphone/ipad. Here's one for mac and one for PC. If you prefer the real version, here's a digital one and an pendulum one.

u/Hellbilly_Slim · 3 pointsr/LearnUselessTalents

I'm currently reading Josh Kaufman's book The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast!. Have yet to apply his process to my list of skills I hope to acquire, the first few chapters are pretty good, they delve into his process of acquiring new skills. From what I can tell the remainder of the book takes some of the skills interesting to Mr. Kaufman and walks through them.

u/IMessedUpReadBad · 1 pointr/LearnUselessTalents

211 Things a Bright Boy can do is pretty cool, it just has a bunch of neat activities and diy projects that aren't time consuming kind of useless really

http://www.amazon.ca/211-Things-Bright-Boy-Can/dp/0399534156


The book of secrets is kind of the same story really neat as well

http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/afb6/

u/SCUMDOG_MILLIONAIRE · 79 pointsr/LearnUselessTalents

It is an excellent idea, but if you want a low effort dessert that will let you fuck then do this:

  • But these. They are called ramekins and they are the key to everything. You can probably buy them individually at your grocery store, make sure you get the 8oz size.

  • Buy a bag of frozen mixed berries. Blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, are all game.

  • Buy cobbler topping. It comes in a box in the baking section. Try not to eat it out of the box with a spoon because this shit is crack.

  • Put the berries in the ramekin til almost full, then top with cobbler mix, then throw those ramekins in the toast-r-oven at 350 until the berries start bubbling up through the crust.

  • Now here's the kicker... you're gonna make your own whipped cream to top it off with.. this is gonna make her panties literally fly away from her body. It's super easy to make
u/davidb_ · 17 pointsr/LearnUselessTalents

They come from this book: http://www.amazon.com/Super-Smutty-Language-Kristin-Henson/dp/1250026210

Of youtube fame (Dirty Signs with Kristin): https://www.youtube.com/user/thfemale

I went to school with her and knew her while there. Our campus was shared with the national technical institute for the deaf (NTID). So, there is a large deaf population and many programs and classes on ASL available. I am fairly certain that she took some american sign language classes while in school, though that was not her major. She got a lot of criticism over the book (people pointing out some inaccuracies or claiming it is exploitative), though I think many people found it amusing. I don't know much about the backlash from the deaf community, but you can tell from the amazon reviews that there were quite a number of vocal critics. I'd say like almost every group, deaf people are sensitive when it seems someone is trying to exploit their culture. She had a couple of interpreters help her, so I think the message would be able to be understood for the most part by a deaf person (even if it overlooks colloquialisms of the language).

u/Sneevius · 4 pointsr/LearnUselessTalents

I think this a project by Lance Akiyama, he has a few books about making cool things with everyday objects. Projects like this are especially great for kids. Rubber Band Engineer

u/dr_obfuscation · 133 pointsr/LearnUselessTalents

I'll help you out. That's a pasta maker with a fettuccini cutter attachment.

Fun Fact: It also makes pasta!

u/metallic201 · 639 pointsr/LearnUselessTalents

I could be wrong but I believe you just buy special caps for your thumbs like these that light up when you press them.