Can you elaborate on the issues you're talking about? I support a couple of creators and my interactions with the site have been fine, so I'm curious what issues you have with it.
I bought a few 8th gen intel NUC mainboards off of ebay. I loaded them up with an SSD and RAM they work very well. Depending on how you want to manage your containers/VMs, a hypervisor is something to look into. I've been trying Proxmox on all my NUCs and they perform great, but there are other hypervisors out there.
I ordered two DIY pro kits (with the TVOC sensors) earlier this month and went to start working on them yesterday. After flashing the firmware, neither one would create a hotspot for me to connect to. Looking at them and doing some googling, i found they include knock-off Wemos D1 minis (labeled "mimi"). It looks like they're aware there are Wi-Fi issues, but the chips are still being used [0][1]. I sent in an email yesterday but I'm not expecting a response until at least tomorrow.
As others have said, the Wadworth Constant. You used to be able to add &wadsworth=1 to any youtube url and it would automatically skip ahead. They got rid of it at some point though.
I use them with my Pixel 5. They work fine. No spatial audio and no battery status for the case or headphones. You can get apps that unreliably show that info but they require excessive permissions and are loaded with ads. Occasionally the headphones won't connect or one headphone won't play audio. Toggling bluetooth or rebooting my phone is usually required at that point.
I got mine in February 2021, I would say that connection issues have improved since then through a couple firmware updates. But you can only install the firmware updates if you have an iphone/ipad/mac so thats another barrier.
Someone did this with my Ebay account. They changed the phone number, email (same email, except it was @outlook.com), and password. Thankfully, Ebay has an account takeover department that helped me fix the issue within an hour.
For fun, I ended up emailing that @outlook.com email asking them why/how they did it and they just replied back "why can't you just let go of it...".
I've replaced almost all the bulbs in my house with the 800 lumen white & color hue bulbs and find them plenty bright. However, they recently came out with 1600 lumen (16W/100W equiv.) bulbs which doubles the lumens of the standard ones. I haven't tried them but I'm hoping to soon.
I have a Withings Scanwatch. It monitors steps, activity, heartrate, oxygen levels at night, and does on-demand ECG and SPO2 measurements. There is some regulation around the ECG portion which requires some sort of doctor approval, though, it only took around 15 minutes to be approved after submitting my reading. They have a similar watch without the SPO2 and ECG, the Steel HR. It's almost identical and cheaper if you don't actually need the extra features.
Overall I like it, it looks like a normal watch with a small circular display which also gives me notifications. You can customize which app notifications show up on the watch. They have an API you can sign up for to pull your data but I haven't tried that yet.
I used this when it was announced but it's been a while since I even thought about it. I decided to dig up some old emails and see how it went for me.
Invited and signed up on 2015-04-28, service ended 2017-01-17. I had a $2 monthly reoccurring charge to fund the account, but I just accrued a balance, so I cancelled the charge in 2015-11-15 and that balance lasted until the service ended. In the final email they sent they included some stats:
> Thanks for being a Contributor! Your contribution of $14.01 helped to fund 351 sites! A refund for your remaining balance of -$0.02 is being processed and your account is now closed.
I don't remember it being particularly noticeable, and I think on some sites it would just replace the ads with a banner saying something like "Thanks for being a contributor". I also recall there being tiers / budgets you could set.
I refinanced back in November. I'd say the process was very easy, at least compared to getting my original loan in 2015. Went through pre-approval online, talked to someone on the phone for 5 minutes, and was pretty much scheduled. E-signed a few docs and then they sent someone to my home to finalize it. From pre-approval to closing, the whole process took about 3 weeks.
My local rates were over 3% for a 15 year, they got me 2.25% + .25% in points.
I've dabbled with Kdenlive[0] and Shotcut[1]. They're cross platform desktop apps. I'm not sure how they would handle stickers/giphys, might be worth a try though.