With rising costs and unoptanium graphics cards, I don't blame you guys
for being upset whenever we cover the latest and greatest tech. But what if I
told you I had the solution? Tech adjacent products that are not only
under $100, but some might even say
handy. That's right. It's back. Handy under $100. And today we have seven
products ranging all the way from a magnetic wristband to a solution that
will fix any controllers's stick drift.
And the best part is everything that we're showing off today comes in at less
than $100 combined. And while I could
jump straight to showing you the stick drift fix, let's switch the stick and
chat a bit about this. A tiny USB stick.
No, this thing puts the micro in
microphone. Coming in at $7, your gut instinct is telling you
this sounds like poo poo. But guess what? Let's test it. While I'm about
arms length away from the laptop, it's a bit quieter than my laptop's mic. But if
I can get it out. As you can probably hear, it sounds
a lot clearer. And a laptop is a perfect use case for this little thing since you
can just leave it plugged in when you're on the go. Or if the internal microphone
dies, you can get a quick fix up and running instead of paying an arm and a
leg for it. But what about my desktop? Well, because this little guy is only
using USB 2, you could pick up a longer than normal USB extension and route it,
I don't know, anywhere on your desk, under your monitor, or maybe even to
your headset. And even if you combined the cost of this and a USB cable, it is
still cheaper than some of the top results on Amazon. It can even record
this segue to our sponsor, Boot.dev.
Good job, Han. Love seeing you get into backend. Thanks, Vape. Honestly, it's
been a lot of fun. And tonight I think you unlocked the next level.
boot.dev. Learn backend the fun way.
Thanks Elijah. I was working on a CPU cooling project recently and noticed
something that drove me nuts. Being the absolute klutz that I am, I bent the
fins on a tower cooler and it feels impossible to straighten them back out
without just making the whole situation worse. But that's where the fin comb
straightener air conditioner condenser car automotive AC condenser radiator
evaporator comb straightener rake air conditioning tool comes in. And it's
only $10 or if you have a 3D printer less. It has different blade
thicknesses to accommodate a wide range of coolers and even comes with a handle
to make sure that your fingies stay clear of those sharp fins. Ouch. One
weakness we found is that it doesn't work well with corrugated V-shaped
radiator fins like the ones found on your liquid coolers. But regardless of
what kind of fins your cooler has, you should bear in mind that damage to a small number of them probably doesn't
have any measurable impact on your cooling performance. But you're the only one who has to look at your PC, so maybe
the peace of mind and the better aesthetic is worth the $10
anyway. But if you want a real tool, one that's made of metal and made for water
cooling, check out the Nifx Cobra XS water pliers. This little guy can grab
things up to 1 in diameter, and it is crazy
strong. And it is also very
sackable. And to help keep you organized, you can slap on the tools for
men magnetic wristband for holding screws. Super strong mag. Okay, that's
enough. Despite the marketing being a bit 2000 and late and there being a
little bit of a learning curve since the
magnet doesn't go all the way around for 15 bucks if you're under a desk or in an
awkward spot where reaching or holding a bunch of screws would be annoying. The
powerful magnets prevent you from dropping those
tiny screws on your shag carpet. It also has tiny pouches behind the magnets so
storing longer items like an Allen wrench or cable ties is easy. Well,
that's my addition to the tech sack. You definitely shouldn't just get normal
pliers and a magnetic part
tray. Check out the tech sack itself,
ltstore.com. I have a super light, well,
light, just a simple USB to LED light
that allows you to be hands-free if you have to work in a dark server room or
down behind a desk. Cable managing, just plug this into the back of your
motherboard. The main reason we were drawn to this is because of the value.
You get eight of them for $7.50, meaning every kid at the party
leaves with one in their goodie bag. Or combine them all in a hub dongle to make
a flashbang. Speaking of bright lights,
some are just too damn bright. And while
yes, you could buy a roll of electrical tape to cover them up, some LEDs are
important to know the status of, but just you just don't need to be that
bright. The answer, stickers. Yeah. Okay, stay with me here, guys. These are
actually not that lame. This kit comes with both black and white stickers,
depending on the color of your device, that are both matte or gloss. They also
range from 50% opacity to zero, meaning
I could color match to my specific product, while also being able to see
the status of my AC unit, so I know if my cat has walked on it, and change the
mode. But will there be residue when I peel it off? That is a good question. It
seems like this this is a low residue product, I'd
say. All right, that's enough teasing. Let's get this stuff into the sack and
pass it back to Elijah to show you what you've been waiting for. How to fix
stick drift for less than $3. Oh god.
Uh, good. Stick drift is when your
controller's potentiometer wears out, causing the center point to drift. Kind
of obvious. Almost all of the big players that make controllers use the
same potentiometer, which is rated for about 2 million cycles, or as iFixit
estimates, about 400 hours of Call of Duty War Zone. And since the lawsuits
about this issue aren't doing anything, and you don't want to have to buy a new
controller every year, you're going to need these. These are flexible little
pads that once they are soldered to the back of the controller, allow you to
adjust the center point of where the stick lies. Let me show you. Just five
quick screws later and we have access to the back where you can see we already
did a little bit of movie magic. Justin has already soldered our little adjuster
boards to the back of the control sticks here. And all you'll need to do to
adjust them is take your little screwdriver and twist this screw. You
guys want to see it on the computer? Okay, our controller is plugged in. Now all we need to do is if we just grab one
of these screws and start twisting, we should see
uh Yeah, I'm not I'm not great at screwing. And let's see if we can start
adjusting. Oh, there you go. See? So, now we've obviously ruined this
controller. But if your controller was showing these types of symptoms, you
just come back in and use one of these alignments. Try to get it as close to
center as possible. And then the other one also goes on the other axis. Isn't
that cool? I mean, what would be cooler is if you didn't have to do this. Hall
effect joysticks, often seen on third party controllers, are designed to never
suffer from this problem. It just sucks that the big three refuse to put them
even in their flagship products. Now, while these pads themselves can be found
for as cheap as $1 each, you do need a
soldering iron to do the job. So, depending on your skill level and if you
even have access to a soldering station, you may just want to pick up a new
controller. And that's okay. Or this is now your chance to learn something new.
Maybe we should try to find a soldering station for under $100 for our next
video. If you want to give these a try, we're going to have these and every other product we showed off today linked
down below. Can you hold this for me? Uh, sure. Have you heard of our sponsor,
Buda Def? You have something in your eyes. Oh, do you want to play a video
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life. Check out boot.dev and use code
LTT to get 25% off your first month or
year. If you guys enjoyed this video, go check out the last time we did a handy
tech episode. We actually made a DIY volume controller for your PC and we
showed off, you know, some other