Our favorite things: gear, gadgets, and other stuff

Life these days can be very complicated, and many of us — I’d guess that most of us — are constantly looking for the best method to keep our lives in order. What do you need on your grocery list? When is that work project due, and who is working on it with you? A friend wants to do a movie-watching session, but is that the same day you promised your parents to help clean the garage? Which bills are due, and can you afford to pay them all? Where is that article about which masks to wear? And on and on.

So we’ve asked the staff of The Verge what they use to keep track of all their appointments, tasks, projects, and workflows. And it turns out that they use a variety of different apps or some fairly old-fashioned paper-and-pen solutions — or both.

Okay, let’s face it — there’s a thrill when you go into a store and try out, or even buy, an $1,800 Samsung Z-Fold 5 or a $999 iPhone 14 Pro. But sometimes, you can feel a real sense of accomplishment when you find that you own something that costs under $50 and turns out to be something you really, really enjoy using.

We asked the staff of The Verge to come up with their favorite inexpensive items, and we got some really interesting answers, ranging from electric screwdrivers and wired earbuds to stick vacuum cleaners and snazzy watch bands.

Now that most of us are traveling around again — to work, to the movies, to friends, or just to get outside and experience the summer — we are pulling our favorite backpacks and bags from our closets and filling them up with laptops, phones, cameras, clothes, groceries, and other stuff. (Not to mention trying to figure out if they might suit any kids of our acquaintance for back-to-school purposes.)

Here are some of the carry-alls that we here at The Verge have been using. As you will read, most of these have gotten months or even years of good use — which is what you want in a good backpack or bag.

It’s travel season, which means it’s time to pack your bathing suit, your hiking boots — and your tech. We asked the staff of The Verge what their favorite travel gear was, and as you can imagine, we got a wide range of answers — from backpacks and travel apps to power strips and selfie sticks.

So sit back, think about vacation, and take a look at some of the stuff that our editors and writers find most useful when it’s time to get out of the house and on their way to relaxation or adventure.

Recently — this week, in fact — I purchased my first Stream Deck. Specifically, I decided to try the Stream Deck Mini, the smallest and most inexpensive model. Why? Because I saw how much fun many of my colleagues were having with theirs.

The Stream Deck is a device that lets you program a series of physical buttons (and, in the case of the Plus, knobs) to perform a single task or a series of tasks on your computer or on your home’s smart devices. In other words, it lets you do something that usually demands several keystrokes — say, starting a new email, dropping in a template, and sending it to a specific contact list — with a single button press. Neat, right?

If you’ve got a pet, it’s likely you have something cool that you use to either feed the pet, amuse the pet, watch the pet, track the pet, or travel with the pet. Well, the folks here at The Verge are no different: many have animal companions whom they feed, pamper, worry about — even obsess about — and totally enjoy.

We asked our co-workers to tell us about some of the techie (and not-so-techie) gadgets that they use to keep their pets clean, fed, and amused — along with portraits of the much-loved dogs and cats. We’ve got some great photos to show you. Enjoy.

We’ve all got to eat, and unless you’re the type of person who lives on instant meals and takeout, you probably need to cook as well. Most of The Verge’s staff not only cook but enjoy cooking, so we asked them to tell us what type of kitchen tools they are using these days.

We got a wide variety of answers — and at least one debate. We have recommendations for instant thermometers, rice cookers, and toaster ovens as well as a back-and-forth about the best way to grind your coffee beans, and more.

Some people work at home with a speaker system droning out their favorite background music. Some sit in an open office with a carefully assembled playlist blasting through their headphones. And some scrub the toilet while singing to the latest pop songs vibrating in their earbuds.

While there are people who prefer to work in silence, others feel more comfortable laboring to the beat of their favorite tunes. We asked staff members of The Verge what kind of music — if any — they liked to play while they worked. Here is a sampling of the very varied answers we got.

It’s hard to admit, but it’s all too easy to get caught up in obsessive behavior occasionally, especially when it comes to entertainment. It can be a TV series, a game, a series of novels, a comic book universe... It’s the kind of thing where you look up and suddenly realize that it’s 2AM and you have to get up early for work, and then you think, “Well, one more episode won’t hurt,” or, “If I try one more time, I can survive into the next round.”

We asked the staff of The Verge what their current media obsessions were. Here are the answers we got, divided into four categories: games, TV series, books, and music. Maybe you even share the enthusiasm they have for some of these.

In August 2021, we asked the staff of The Verge to tell us about their go-to laptop bags. Now, a year later, some are still using the same bags — but not all.

It’s surprising how attached you can get to a bag — especially the bag that you use to carry your laptop, your sweater, your lunch, your notebook, your exercise shoes, your kids’ diapers, or any of the other stuff you need. Whether you’re heading to the office, visiting a friend, hanging in a coffee shop, going on a hike, or just sitting outdoors to read or work, having a bag that can accommodate everything on your “gotta have this” list can help you avoid a lot of aggravation.

It’s been a really stressful few years. We’ve all been living through pandemics (plural!), political upheaval, economic awfulness — you name it. And this isn’t even mentioning the normal pressure of work and family. So how do you deal?

We asked the staff of The Verge to let us know how they cope with the anxiety and pressures of living in today’s world (including having to write about these problems on a day-to-day basis). We got a variety of answers, ranging from running and meditation to pulling weeds and creating chain mail.

Life these days can be very complicated, and many of us — I’d guess that most of us — are constantly looking for the best method to keep our lives in order. What do you need on your grocery list? When is that work project due, and who is working on it with you? A friend wants to do a movie-watching session, but is that the same day you promised your parents to help clean the garage? Which bills are due, and can you afford to pay them all? Where is that article about which masks to wear? And on and on.

So we’ve asked the staff of The Verge what they use to keep track of all their appointments, tasks, projects, and workflows. And it turns out that they use a variety of different apps or some fairly old-fashioned paper-and-pen solutions — or both.

When it comes to taking photographs, the range of interest and knowledge among practitioners — and the range of the equipment they use — can be immense. You can be happy just taking the occasional snapshot with your phone; you can own a reasonably priced camera and a couple of decent lenses; you can save up your salary for your dream camera along with some really good lenses, straps, and tripods; or you can be a pro whose expertise demands a major investment in top-line equipment.

So, when we asked a staff as diverse as The Verge’s about their favorite camera gear, it wasn’t surprising that we got back a wide variety of answers. Recommendations ranged from $37 backpacks and $58 mini tripods to $450 roller bags and $2,000 lenses.

When you’re stuck at home because of pandemics, bad weather, or just because you don’t feel like going out, there’s nothing more satisfying than cooking something really fantastic. Even if you’re not an experienced or enthusiastic cook, sometimes it’s really satisfying to create a new and tasty dish for you, your friends, and / or family.

We asked the staff of The Verge what kinds of equipment, gadgets, and tools they use to make their kitchen adventures better tasting, easier, or just more fun. Here are some of the answers we got.

Cars have become bastions of electronic gadgetry — but that doesn’t mean that we can’t add a few of our own. Some of us are simply not content with what came with our vehicles, some of us want to have emergency gear available just in case, and some of us have older cars that need help in order to be able to accommodate modern electronics. 

Here are some of the gadgets that staffers at The Verge have used to upgrade their various vehicles.

Sumer is icumen in — or, in other words (and if you’re not Chaucer), “Get ready, summer’s around the corner!” Especially if you’ve been cooped up all winter watching the COVID stats and waiting for a chance to get outdoors, now’s the time to get ready to see the sky.

We asked the staff of The Verge to tell us about their favorite gear to help them enjoy the outdoors, whether it was on a bike, on a scooter, hiking, camping, or just hanging out and watching the world go by. Here’s what they reported.

Let’s admit it — most, if not all, of the people who work here at The Verge are gadget enthusiasts. But while most of those gadgets come under the heading of tech — headphones, smartphones, laptops, speakers, and all the other electronic gear that we love to play with — there are also some really interesting, fun, and useful gadgets out there that we don’t usually think of as tech, per se.

So, for this article, we asked the staff to come up with their favorite non-tech gadgets — things that don’t have Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or an app. Admittedly, some of what they came up with sit on the border between tech and non-tech — where, for example, do espresso machines belong? But hey, let’s not be picky. Here are the kitchen gear, home tools, and personal items that we most treasure.

It’s been about a year since we first asked the staff of The Verge to tell us about some of their favorite audio gear. As we said in last year’s piece, the people here spend a lot of time listening to a variety of music, podcasts, and other interesting sounds — and that hasn’t changed. Many of us have used music to get through the ups and downs of the past year, and our audio devices have made it possible not only to lose ourselves in our tunes but to communicate with remote friends and relatives and to get work done via Zoom, Slack, and other apps.

But that isn’t to say that we have the same tastes in music or tech. The Verge is an assembly of distinct personalities, and our tastes in music — and the tech we use to listen to that music — is distinct as well.

We all have stuff that we’ve bought ourselves — or asked others to buy for us — that makes us happy, even if we suspect our friends may not understand why it’s so great. It could be a $100-plus coffee cup that keeps your liquid at the exact right temperature. Or a video game that you’ve been playing for years. Or a hair styler that is way expensive but would make you look fabulous.

We asked the staff of The Verge what some of their guilty pleasures are, and the braver among us volunteered some answers. Here they are.

Let’s face it — somewhere inside us all is a greedy five-year-old who wants that wonderful, beautiful, fascinating toy that seems completely out of reach. But what that toy is depends very much on who we are. So, just out of curiosity, we asked the staff of The Verge to tell us something that they would love to get for the holidays — if money (and opportunity) was no object. (And the rule was that idealistic longings like world peace or the end of the pandemic didn’t count — for this once, we were not going for idealism.)

So let’s see what hidden longings lie in the hearts of The Verge’s staff...

After over a year of indoor living, people are finally able to go out and enjoy the outdoors: beaches, sports, hiking, camping, bird-watching, bicycling, picnics… you name it. We asked some of our colleagues from The Verge what they were planning to take with them in their outdoor escapes. Here are some of their recommendations, including outdoor tech, camera gear, rugged footwear, and gadgets that help you take it easy.

Twelve months predominantly spent indoors did wonders for my battery anxiety. Not only was I using my phone less, thanks to having constant easy access to a tablet and laptop, but even when my phone got close to running out, my trusty charger was never far out of reach. However, I know that’s going to change this summer, and I’ll be confronted by the fact that my shiny new iPhone 12 Pro’s battery life really isn’t as great as I’d like it to be. 

The last few years have been incredibly hard for almost everyone, so now that summer is about here, it’s a good idea to step outside and decompress a bit with whatever activity suits you best — whether it’s a favorite sport, a long hike, overnight camping, bird-watching, bicycling, or just sitting on a beach and watching the waves come in.

As we’ve done for the last couple of years, we asked some of our colleagues from The Verge what they were planning to take with them in their outdoor escapes. Here are some of their recommendations, including outdoor tech, camera gear, rugged footwear, and gadgets that help them take it easy.

When you’ve been through tough times — and we all have — sometimes you just need a distraction or something that just makes you feel good to get you through it. We asked the staff of The Verge what they’ve treated themselves to in order to help make all the upheavals and lockdowns of the past year just a bit more bearable.

These are some of the things that made them smile over the past year. Hopefully, you’ve got something that made you smile as well.

No matter what you do during your waking hours — work at home or outside of it; commute in a car, a train, or by walking from your bedroom to your living room; or spend your days watching the kids or job hunting — you’re probably spending at least some of that time listening to music. But where do you find that music? And if you already have a site you go to regularly, would you like to try something new?

There is a wealth of streaming music services now available to anyone who wants to listen and experiment. Some offer both free and paid subscription versions. Others are completely free.