u/ispiuspious

I am building a new home and thinking about adding hardwired emergency lights with battery backup. The house will have a finished basement with medium size windows. If the power goes out, it will be a little bit dark down there. I have looked at commercial grade emergency lights on Alibaba, Amazon, and eBay where some are designed for office buildings. Has anyone here installed these in a residential home ? I am also considering just using plug in lights that turn on during an outage.

Just got back from China and wanted to share some tips for anyone planning a trip.

Apps

WeChat and Alipay, download both. They pretty much do the same things but I'd say having both saved me at one point because my Alipay randomly wouldn't go through on a payment so I just switched to WeChat Pay and it worked fine.

I downloaded EasyGo China and grabbed their itinerary package which saved me a ton of time on trip planning. It also has audio guides for attractions and some really handy tips built in, probably the most useful app I downloaded for this trip.

Rednote is great for finding local restaurant and drink recs but heads up some posts are sponsored by the businesses so use your judgment.

Amap, highly recommend using this over Google Maps in China. I noticed Google Maps was missing some smaller streets and paths, probably just not updated as frequently. Google still works in a pinch if you forget to download Amap but it's not as accurate.

Food

If you have a Chinese phone number you can use Meituan to order delivery and it's insanely convenient. Usually arrives in 30 mins to an hour. And if you put your hotel room number in they'll send a little robot up to your floor with your food which is pretty cool.

Transportation

I mostly took taxis and the metro. For shorter distances I just walked to take in the surroundings. For the metro you can set up a QR code right in Alipay so you don't need to buy physical tickets. For taxis just use Didi through the WeChat or Alipay mini program, super easy.

General tips

Avoid Chinese public holidays if you can, everywhere will be packed and you'll need to book tickets on trip.com in advance or they sell out fast. Also if you're flying make sure your power bank has CCC certification or it might get confiscated at the airport.

Lastly everyone I met in China was super friendly and I felt safe the entire time. Don't hesitate to go, you'll have a great time.

I have been seeing more people carry small personal alarms on their keychains or bags. You pull a pin and they make a very loud sound. I have looked at them on Alibaba, Amazon and eBay. Some cost as little as five dollars while others are twenty. I am wondering if these devices actually work as a deterrent. Would a loud siren scare off an attacker or would people just ignore it like a car alarm? I am thinking of getting one for my daily walk. But I do not want to rely on something that might fail when I need it most.

We have a large rooftop tent that fits our whole family but our little ones always want their own space to play with toys and store their things. I was thinking about getting a small pop up toy tent to set up inside our rooftop tent. Something just for them. I have seen cheap ones on Alibaba , eBay and Amazon for under twenty dollars. They fold flat so packing would be easy. Has anyone here tried putting a kids play tent inside their rooftop tent? Does it work well or just take up too much room? I would love to hear your experiences before I buy one. Thank you.

I recently saw a commercial floor scrubbing robot at a friend's warehouse. This thing navigates around forklifts and pallets on its own. I had no idea this technology was already this advanced. I started looking at different models online on Alibaba, Amazon, and eBay. Some claim to run for eight hours on a single charge. Others have apps that show you cleaning reports and battery levels. Has anyone here used one of these in their business? I am curious about real world reliability. Do they actually save time or just create more maintenance work? I also thought of.. is is possible to integrate AI in these robots.. and if they would be intergrated would it be worth?

Hey everyone. I am a kids coding instructor and I recently quit my agency job to start my own independent teaching studio. While being my own boss is awesome and the revenue bump is great, the entire burden of acquiring new clients is now completely on my shoulders.To drive enrollment, I started a TikTok and YouTube channel to post clips of my actual classes. I have a massive backlog of raw footage sitting around, everything from 1-on-1 sessions to offline bootcamps and online webinars. But honestly, having this much raw material is making the editing process an absolute nightmare. I desperately need an efficiency tool to streamline my content creation so I do not burn out.Here is what I am looking for in an ideal tool:Text based editing. My classes are super information dense. Scrubbing through a traditional timeline is brutal and a huge waste of time. Being able to just edit the video by deleting text in a transcript would be way more efficient.Highly accurate auto captions. I know there are a ton of auto caption apps out there right now, but a lot of them have absolute trash accuracy, especially with technical terms. I really do not want kids or their parents watching my courses with embarrassing typos all over the screen.Automated long to short repurposing. The biggest time sink for me is hunting through hours of raw footage just to find a solid 60 second highlight that fits the short form algorithm. I need a tool that can automatically scan and extract these viral clips to save me from losing my sanity.If any of you have tested tools that fit this exact workflow, please drop your recs below! I am going to test a few out and I will definitely share a roundup list with you guys later.Thanks in advance!

I am making this post because I wish someone told me not to cheap out when I first started.

I have noticed over and over on this thread and many others, young starters are terrified with using superior platforms that cost $5-$10 more per month such asShopify, accio work and are willing to settle for the cheaper platform.

what everyone needs to understand is that the proven platforms that cost a few bucks more are often worth it.they typically come with more features, support,themes, workability,much more.our worst customers have typically been the ones who wanted the best deal.seen much people missing/mixing "cheap" as "value",met so many companies that want cheap and expect cheap to behave like quality/value, which doesn't make sense!

whenever I meet clients that want cheap and compared,I often send them away to my competitors instead of cutting price to bring them in, because cheap clients aren't my target market. they take much more time and return much lesser returns, and the worst is that they expect a lot more and bring a lot more grief to my people.

If someones has a Client A at $X and a Client B at $X/2 for the same service, you can bet your ass they will work harder for Client A.

cheap out by buying a cheaper drink or asking for a water cup, do not cheap out on your business.Cheaping out on your business only hurts yourself in the long run. You will lose unsatisfied customers,retain lower conversion rates, and deal with a ton of headaches if your business picks up.

I discovered that my local library has a huge collection of digital books by different authors. I can borrow them for free using Libby and Overdrive. But reading on my phone hurts my eyes after a while. I want to buy an ebook reader that works well with library borrowing apps. I have been searching online across Alibaba, Amazon, and eBay for affordable devices. I know Kindles work with Libby in the US. But I am not sure about other brands like Kobo or PocketBook. For readers here who borrow library ebooks, what device do you use? Does it integrate smoothly with Libby? I want to read more Black literature without spending too much money. Please share your recommendations. Thanks.

this was so awkward

i sat in the wrong class for like 10 mins before realizing. i even wrote the date down and everything

then it hit me none of this made sense and i checked my schedule… wrong room

had to stand up and walk out in front of everyone, no way to play that off

We had the full analog command center going for years. Whiteboard, wall calendar, printed chore charts, sticky notes. It worked well enough until it didn't. Three kids with increasingly complicated schedules, sports, school events, two adults with work calendars that weren't talking to any of it. The whiteboard was always out of date. The wall calendar required someone to manually transfer everything from our phones. I was spending real time maintaining a system that was supposed to save me time.

So I started looking at digital options specifically from the perspective of what actually replaces the wall calendar, not what adds another screen to the house.

Cozi and google calendar, nope. You still have to open an app. The whole point of the whiteboard was that it just existed in the room, nobody had to do anything, that's not how apps work.

Skylight was pretty good actually, I didn't expect to like it as much as I did when I was researching. It's on the wall unlike the apps, for families who just need a shared calendar that everyone can see I think it's probably the right call and it's a lot cheaper.

We went with hearth because we weren't just replacing a wall calendar, we were replacing all of it. The chore charts, meal planning, the routines for kids etc, it's all there. And the new function that sums up how the household is actually functioning not just what's on the schedule. The whiteboard showed us what to do but this shows us how we're actually doing. It made us realise our youngest one isn't really following the routine as good as we thought before and in all the morning rush I never noticed it. We made sure to pay more attention to him so overall it was a very useful upgrade

Price is genuinely high and I won't pretend it isn't. For us it made sense given everything we were replacing for the people who just need a calendar, I wouldn't overbuy

what you get: Use the "Invite Friends" link to join, both get 1,000 credits. Also you can stack rewards up to 100,000/month.

What is it: An agentic platform specialized in E-commerce that handles everything from data-backed product sourcing to automated supplier negotiation and Shopify management.

Why use it: Accio Work finds winning products with real data, calculates tariffs/MOQs, builds your Shopify store, and even automates abandoned cart recovery.

steps:

share your link to your friends

new users download accio work via your link and complete their first paid subscription

both of you get 1000 credits (within 30days)

who qualifies: globally.

expires: you can earn up to 100,000 credits every month!

I honestly didn’t expect to ever be posting about this, but here we are.Recently started dealing with hemorrhoids and wow… this is way more uncomfortable than I imagined they're so painfull especially when shitting which comes with blood . I’ve been trying to figure out what helps diet, water, not straining, etc., but I’d love to hear from people who’ve actually dealt with it.What worked for you, and how long did it take to improve?

Yep. It keeps offering to do things it can’t do. Yesterday I got, ‘would you like me to unlock the pdf, fill out all the fields, and redact the sensitive information?’ I said yep, when it was done I got an error even just to download the pdf

I tried all sorts of custom instructions and I couldn't get rid of it. Maybe ALI should give us an option to turn it off like gpt. Cuz it's really annoying.

I hope this gets rid of those annoying questions.ali teams....