Used to homebrew. At first I thought it’d be cheaper than buying my own beer but it quickly ratcheted-up with grain mills, larger and larger pots and burners, finding places to store the fermenting/aging beer, finding time to brew, finding time to bottle/keg, the clean-up and mess…and, in certain cases, you go through the whole process to find an entire batch has been ruined.
As an alternative view, I homebrew and while the cost to get in can be a bit steep, the long term costs are actually pretty good. I looked at the cost to get equipment as a loss and just wrote it off. Electronic kettle and automation was pricey, but luckily I was able to have some costs offset with work benefits. Realistically though, in actual ingredients, between $30-50 USD for 5 gallons of beer and about 8 hours total of time for cleaning, brewing, fermenting and packaging, it’s not too bad.
I tend to be very meticulous though with my brew process, so I haven’t lost a batch, at least not due to contamination. I’ve had some beers that weren’t great, but when you put it in perspective, a 12 ounce serving probably cost me about $0.50 - 1.00. Comparatively, while not great, it was still drinkable and as good as anything I could get for that price.
Being able to make decent sized quantities of good beer to take to parties, give as gifts, and just have on hand really diminishes the hit of the cost of equipment. I feel like it’s been worth it.
See if there’s a homebrew club in your area that runs bulk buys, you can drop your per-batch price by a fair amount with buying ingredients in bulk. Un-milled grains last a long time if stored properly, hops can be stored in the freezer and I’ve used them up to a year after opening without a significant drop in quality. Same goes for yeast if you get dry. I have a 500g bag of US-04 that is over a year old and still ferments just fine, I transferred it to a mason jar and keep it in the coldest part of my fridge. I was able to drop my per-batch cost to around $20 CAD or less for most beers that I brew, and having the ingredients on-hand means I can brew whenever I feel like it.
$20 CAD for a brew!!! That’s really impressive and an amazing value. We do have a great local homebrew scene here and our local suppliers offer pretty good value for equipment and supplies. I probably could get similar costs as well. Unfortunately like the OP in the thread I don’t have the kind of space for bulk grain and milling machines or other bulk storage. Being in an apartment has it’s limits and Ive pretty much hit them. I’m satisfied with my cost efficiency even knowing it could be better under different circumstances.
Cool to hear that you have great cost efficiency! That’s awesome to see. Thanks for sharing!
But specifically the music production; started off as “I’ll by FL Studio and muck around with it” to “I need ALL THE VSTs!”. I’ve sunk like $2500 into it in the last two months (which is a hell of a lot of money to me), and I keep buying shit for it.
Am I any good at it? Fuck no. But it’s not stopping me from keeping at it and buying shit I probably don’t need :P
And the IT stuff consists of rack-mount servers and Pi’s. I’ve sunk around $25k into it all over the last 12 years.
Same. I started with the Akai MPC mini 2 and Ableton Live lite. Now I have a Yamaha P 515, a couple of Genelec 8341, a Sabaj a20d 2022 DAC, A MacBook Pro 2021 with Ableton Suite, Pianoteq 8 and Spitfire’s BBC Orchestra on it and I only sold 2 songs on Bandcamp for a total of 10 euros…But boy is it fun!
Man server racks are so overpriced. I wanted one for my home server but after seeing the cost for a couple pieces of metal, I said fuck that and just put it in a regular pc case. In retrospect I wish I had put it in a NUC and gotten an external drive bay for the NAS
I think the only cure for gear acquisition syndrome is experience. After a few years of buying everything in sight, I noticed that I really only used my FabFilter and Universal Audio plugins, with occasional instances of Soothe2 and MH Thump. When I changed computers, I didn’t reinstall 70% of my plugins.
After a few years of composing, I noticed I only really used my samples from East-West, ProjectSAM, and Cinesamples.
I thought, I can buy a Hornady press, use range brass, and same some cash!
And, well, kind of. But mostly no. Yes, buying primers, bullets, and powder, and using range brass is indeed cheaper than buying boxes or cases of ammunition on a per bullet basis. Sure, a set of dies can get expensive ($200+ for match-grade dies if you do, e.g. long range shooting competitions). Oh, and you need to clean your brass, preferably in a wet tumbler, and then dry your brass, and also get a trim station to trim to length, and possibly a primer pocket swager if you’ve picked up military brass with crimped primer pockets… And a scale, you gotta have a good scale so that you know exactly how much powder you’re using (seriously; you need a good scale, you cannot skip this), and you need a chronography to measure speeds to develop the most accurate loads…
…And then you start getting into progressive reloading presses that are intended for really high volume shooting that start at around $2000, and top out at around $10k, plus things like annealing stations so that your neck tension is always consistent after you’ve crimped the case, and powder tricklers for when volumetric powder dispensers aren’t accurate enough…
But the real expense hits when you’re shooting 10x as much because now ammunition is “cheap”.
BRB, gonna spend $400 on 8# of Varget powder and $300 on 1000 Hornady ELD-M .224 bullets.
I bought a kit that included a reasonably sized 360° magnet, rope, grappling hook and protective cover for about £120 thinking that it would be good enough to keep me satisfied for a while.
After my first trip out and having to carry a load of scrap metal about a mile back to the car, I bought a cart for £80 so I could cart it all back instead. After having to use my car to pull my magnet out of the harbour on Saturday I’ve bought a cheap winch and a tow rope to anchor it to things for £25 for when it gets stuck somewhere I can’t use my car.
And of course I wanted a bigger magnet almost immediately, but I’ve managed to hold off on that so far. Saying that it’s fairly likely I will get an upgrade from Bondi magnets when the site launches as long as the price is competitive with Magnetar (I suspect it’s a partnership and the magnets will be identical, but we’ll see)
I don’t know, I didn’t pull the object out with it. I’m guessing it got caught on something large and got wedged in so I couldn’t just overcome the force of the magnet to get it off. Could have been something huge and magnetic, or could’ve just been stuck between rocks. I was just happy to not lose my magnet
Every damn time I get into something, I over do it.
I spent $13k on my kitchen stove, this one keeps giving, but that is $13,000.00 USD! Just for my kitchen stove. My range hood because it is required with my high output stove was $3k, and then let’s talk makeup air to replace what is taken out by it.
Or what about woodworking? Yep, I wanted to do it, and still do. I have a half completed work bench, and some basic tools… That will be about $2k…
Let’s buy a boat! Yep 29 years old, runs great… Break out another thousand…
But most recently, Plex… You know, let’s get rid of subscriptions… Yeah, this year alone I have put $900 or so into that. Yep I sure saved money on canceling Netflix!
I’m currently considering setting up Jellyfin to host movies for the times I lose internet. Something small, you know? No more than a terabyte… but that’s a lie. I’m looking at NAS and I’m already realizing that this could turn into a problem.
Yeah I wish NAS devices were cheaper. You forget how big shows are these days and that it’s still over $200 for a single big enough hard drive.
But a couple tips that I’m not using myself because of weird configuration requirements.
• You don’t really need raid if you feel comfortable having to get all the files again • You don’t need a true NAS device. Ebay and Craigslist can be your friend for getting either a used NAS or just a workstation PC for cheap (I don’t have a pi but a micro PC that was like $85 running a lot of server configs on it and it’s a 12th gen Intel chip) • Look for companies selling server or parts or old media drives they are generally models that last super well and even used will have plenty of life on them at a discount.
For the cost of just a year of HBO Max I now have ad blocking on my whole wifi, the ability to spin up custom websites and email addresses, and remote storage access on top of my jellyfin that I’m able to share and watch my 500+ TV shows with friends
It really can get expensive cause PC parts aren’t always cheap but like… We have so much tech scrap a quick dumpster dive would net you a lot of usable stuff
I recently set up a Plex server on a machine I was given that I also run my home assistant server on.
The machine crashes every few weeks and it is me thinking really hard about getting something else to use. I’d love to use a Pi, but have yet to find one at anything close to MSRP, so I’m eyeing different netbooks that I can run Linux on.
The rest of my home theater is just about where I want it for now (Onkyo TX-NR5100, Klipsch Reference all around with the 820f’s for my mains, r-32c center channel, r-52 bookshelves for my rears, r-120sw, and r-41sa for upward firing atmos which I’m not thrilled with and want to switch to in-ceiling speakers) and fills my small media room very, very well. But I see another few thousand dollars, at least, in my future here.
I’d love to use a Pi, but have yet to find one at anything close to MSRP, so I’m eyeing different netbooks that I can run Linux on.
I don’t know if Plex supports this feature but I’m running Jellyfin on a RPi 4B and Jellyfin support live transcoding for video formats that are not natively supported by the streaming client. Although RPi 4B supports hardware encoding of h264 1080p30, it performs badly.
So if you’re using live transcoding maybe opt for hardware with more oomph.
I’m just torrenting media that’s hard to get, namely now that I’m cutting subscriptions more and more, nothing terribly special. I honestly don’t even know what I’d need live transcoding for lol.
Generally for bigger transcoding jobs you need a legit graphics card however just modern CPUs with internal graphics can do a lot even if they are a bit slower.
It’s free and just as easy. You miss a few plex only features but they’re not worth their money. Although I did get a lifetime license for 75$. Otherwise plex is too expensive if it’s the monthly sub for the pass. Feature wise, but thats probably personal.
So far I haven’t found the Plex pass to be necessary for me at all. I torrent my media and that’s it. I have Apple Music for my music, which allows for lossless downloads, I don’t care about skipping credits, and love tv doesn’t matter to me at all. Since the free tier with Plex serves my needs well, I’m not sure why I should look at Jellyfin when by all accounts it’s more difficult to use and I’d have to make my friends switch to a new means of accessing my library.
It’s open source and gives you a lot of fantastic features that are locked behind paywalls and more on plex. But I will be honest it’s not nearly as simple and setting it up so I could use it outside of my home network took a week of figuring out issues with proxies.
You can keep using plex but if you have a good tech understanding jellyfin is pretty nice.
For your computer troubles I would say you can skip the pi completely if you have the space and get something like a cheap optiplex. They are dirt cheap used and can give more oomph and customization for hardware later on and are really simple to get any Linux distro on.
Videogames. It has not been super expensive as I enjoy indie games the most, but still.
Pen and paper organization. This is recent. Due to a couple of mental disorders, I have problems remembering things and keeping organized. I was using a to-do list for my phone, but it was becoming less and less effective with time.
So I found a weekly planner online and I bought it telling myself that it was expensive, but it would be enough for a year and I wouldn’t need anything else.
The planner has been great, by the way. Yet, when it arrived, I liked it so much that I had this classic feeling of not wanting to ruin it with my handwriting. I needed a good mechanical pencil! Erasable, yet stylized.
Then I thought the pages looked clean, but monotone. Stickers! What about my own creations? Thermal printer with sticker rolls! And so on and so on.
I am productive …and addicted to stationery items.
Buy a good mechanical pencil and coloured and black leads made by Pentel, Ain Stein model, or Uni’s equivalent. You need not sink money when you get the colour variety with leads.
Collecting vinyl records. I started 10 years ago when you could get lots of records for 3-5$ per record. Now everyone is crazy about collecting and they can cost 40-50$. Was a great investment if I sell them. But I enjoyed collecting them regardless of value.
Lots of towels and a big bin. And for the turntable just pray I guess. I haven’t figured out an answer for that yet other than my new one (from 1986) that actually has an arm lock.
So…I’ve actually had great success with LP boxes…(I’ll look up which brand, I’ve bought two and one sucks) plus there’s a company that makes a 35L XL plastic tub that holds records perfectly too. That one up at The container store. BCW is the best brand box…I’ve used them multiple times
Oh, I don’t really recommend copper as someone that cooks.
Like, you can accidentally poison yourself or possibly give yourself early dementia. They are a pain to clean unless you are willing to buff them constantly to keep the shine… Do yourself a favor and get like a couple decorative pieces if you really want copper but cook with steel/iron
Oh… Yeah… Good luck getting it to keep that lining.
If you want to do it for just the experience go ahead but also still don’t cook with it.
Tin sucks. Like straight up. Super soft. Scratches easy. Melts easy. It’s not nonstick and things will stick to it and the act of scrubbing it will potentially strip the tin off and make you get to enjoy relining it again, and again, and again, and again and…
Copper is pretty, but you’d have to really put a gun to my head to make me want to cook with it ever
I’ve had amazing luck with hobbys that should be expensive, but weren’t.
Me & some friends have a small computer museum. We collect minicomputers & workstations. (Stuff used in science & academia.) We have computers dating back to the early 60s. But we started in the mid 90s, when NO ONE was interested. So we got everything for free. (Well… for the cost of renting large trucks.)
I’m a photographer. My DSLR is old, from just when DSLR’s were getting “good enough” at a reasonable price. I bought it used when it was already “obsolete”. And then someone gave me an exotic industrial camera they had at work which was “broken”. It was too broken for industrial use, but works fine for studio use. I had to build some hardware & write all the software to use it, but… the results are fantastic. It blows away my DSLR. (But uses the same lenses!)
My library has probably cost a lot, but that’s spread out over 40 years, so I don’t notice it. (Also, I worked in a used bookstore for a bit, and that’s a good way to get a lot of books CHEEEEEEEAP. Employee discount? Yes. Discount on books in the back that are slightly damaged and unsellable? YES.) And I’ve occasionally sold a rare book, so that offsets things.
Etc.
(Note: my home computer collection spans ten full-height racks. A few of those are on loan from the museum, but most are mine. Spent close to nothing on that. Somehow.)
There’s a whole class of cameras called “machine vision cameras” - a DSLR-quality sensor in a box with no user interface, intended to be embedded in a machine. Factory automation, scanning cinema film, hunter-killer robots, etc. The one I have has a 35mm sensor and an f-mount adaptor, so it’s compatible with old manual Nikon lenses. (Nikon lenses were really popular in scientific and industrial applications all thought the 70s/80s/90s. Probably not so much now.)
I had a small 160L tank, cost about 1000 dollars. Kept spending money buying more zoas and palys before I realized the filefish was eating them - he never did it while I was watching and started about 3 months after having him. Cute little gobshite though. Isolated him in a temporary tank, but then aiptasia started growing. Filefish back, zoas got munched. Left the hobby now but I fear I might do it all again.
Just a tank and some lights, add some flow and boom! You’re there. Just get some salt and testing kits to keep things in balance. Those Hanna checkers are nice if you want to splurge - but that’s it, you’re done! I mean…. You have to get the fish and corals too - but you can make friends and get frags for free! Then you’re really done. Everything beyond that is automation, you don’t have to do any of it (although you can really dial in your nutrient balance if you use protein skimmer, algae scrubber, refugium, media reactors). But you don’t want to do that because then you’ll need a sump (but aren’t sumps handy? Who doesn’t want a sump?). Just make sure your stand accommodates everything-you don’t want to rebuild a stand. Leave room for controllers and uv meters and all that other stuff just in case you add it in the future - which you’re not going to becasue it’s expensive and overkill…
D&D. When I got back into it as an adult it was mostly because I could get into it for $0. I was dead broke at the time. I pirated the books downloaded the free basic rules 😉 on my trash find laptop and was good to go.
But man once I had money it turns out I really like collecting books and the D&D ones are not cheap. I do not want to think about how much I’ve spent.
The real flood gates opened when the license controversy happened and I decided to try other RPGs. Multiple core books of multiple RPGs gets expensive fast 😁
I’m a few hundred dollars in and I’m actually on my way out thanks to their grossness this spring. I’m too slow to have gone for many modules, but rules books were super fun and thus a money sink. I’m trying to move my group over to PbtA (cheap by comparison) or Genesys (have you seen the cost of those DICE?!).
I started to really get into it back in 2015 with a Sony A6000 and a kit lens. Then you buy more, higher quality lenses. Then you buy better camera bodies with full frame sensor, then lenses that are full frame compatible. Then the various odds and end accessories. Then trips around the world to take pictures of things.
I have taken a break from photography recently, on account that having a kid doesn’t allow me a lot of opportunity to edit my photos anymore. They say the best camera you have is the one that is on you. That has proven to be true while I try to be as present as possible around my daughter. I can quickly take out my phone, capture the moment and it will take care of most of the post processing edits that I can share with family later.
I picked up photography back in May which just started by getting an old point and shoot digicam to take convincing liminal space photos, then I got another… then another… then some film old cameras, a cheap DSLR a set of lens, etc. Etc. It’s become a full on addiction at this point lol
Getting fed up strimming our 4 acre, very steep field.
I looked at remote control mowers. At the time they were all well over £6k, so I thought I’d try building one. Well, I’ve done it and it works well, but it’s taken three years and cost over a grand so far in parts.
Um, how? I’ve strapped physical electrocal devices and petrol powered motors together. Nothing I’ve done is unique, I hold no IP or copyright and anyone can copy it.
If you mean show others - then sure, I’ve done that!
For me, it’s board games. I figured a few good board games could last a while. I’m sure you are (incorrectly) guessing the next step, that I just bought too many.
No, I bought Kingdom Death: Monster. And now I want the expansion packs, which combine to nearly $3000.
KD:M may have its imperfections, but I don’t think I’ve ever played another game quite so beautiful (if you’re into that existential dread type of beauty).
Maybe you can help me. I don’t understand “boardgame people.” Like, enjoy boardgames and tabletop games, but not playing a brand new one every time we get together.
What’s wrong with playing poker or Catan or NBA Jam for the thousandth time?
A lot of board game geeks hate Catan. I also hate Catan, but my reasons probably aren’t their reasons. So there’s that.
But I don’t entirely disagree. It’s complicated. I bought multiple games to find ones I’d love more. I find most people with board game obsession still have a favorite.
Like me, I’ve spent more time playing KD:M and Spirit Island than the next 5 combined.
I also have a butt load of boardgames, I like playing Catan not a lot but maybe once a year. The ones I keep going back to are Star wars epic duels, Eldritch Horror, and Arcadia/Starcadia Quest.
Eldrich Horror is on my to-buy list. My wife got really burned out on board games so I’ve leaned into my ultra-crunchy solo-friendly stuff, but she enjoyed Arkham horror for quite a while.
But yeah. Last time I played Catan I wanted it to stop by round 2. I have horrible dice-luck, so a game’s gotta be fun when I roll worst-case 5-10 rounds in a row. In Catan, it means I get all nerdy placing my towns on strategically sound intersections, and then watch everyone else play and I pass as numbers like 6 and 8 never roll for an entire game. My record is like the first half of the game getting no resources. Then getting one or two. Something about seeing the 3rd or 4th 2 roll give someone resources before you’ve gotten anything just makes you want to flip the table.
I get what you mean lol. I used to get pissed at the luck, but enjoyed when I was outsmarted. Now I enjoy all outcomes cause I have been able to get others into boardgames. If I play with new people I try to play towards getting them to win cause that gets them to want to play more. And once everyone knows how to play I get to play an earnest game. I’ll even take a day off work every month to get friends together for boardgames, food, and drinks.
I guess that’s kind of a reason I have so many boardgames, depending who’s playing we might enjoy one more than another. But I noticed more people liking the co-op ones more than vs games lately. Started with pandemic, then Arkham Horror and Mansions of Madness, and now Eldritch Horror is what we’ve played most. Hopefully I get to try some of the new ones I got, looking forward to Unfathomable.
I agree re: coop. They seem to be the way of the future. Some people I game with get really frustrated being less competitive than the rest in games like Dominion, where taking your time and planning out your turns has huge return but makes everyone have to sit and wait (and don’t talk to me, I’m figuring out whether I’m going to play my Laboratory or my Sentry first!)
For some reason, though, Pandemic goes over like a dead weight to most people. So much so, I’ve never bought Pandemic Legacy as good as it looks. Arkham horror is too crunchy for some, but just right for others. Spirit Island, surprisingly, has been a sweet spot for some recently. It’s a little hard to get good at, but the sliding difficulty scale is really granular.
Oh man, my friend bought that game and has been trying to get us to play it, but I had twins, and have not more time for board games. It looked fun though
It’s incredible, and a blast. A full campaign (assuming you don’t lose halfway through) runs about 60 hours. So I get it :)
The digital version might be more accessible. I really wish they’d sell it without the minis. I just don’t have the time to paint minis, which means I don’t get the value worth in minis.
I had the good fortune of meeting a couple of board game nerds before getting into the hobby myself. They had a seperate insurance policy specifically for their games.
Interesting. Because you were doing too well? The only way KD:M gets a little boring to me is if I’m trying to min-max and only fighting the most appropriate monster for maximum return at each twist or turn. All those underleveled lions for 15 rounds, then all those antelopes, avoiding phoenix and any unique monsters, etc. I did a playthrough where I suicided extra population against most bosses instead of risking my better ones. Ok, that can get boring.
But throw all those in? Nothing quite like going for the overpowered unique phoenix and trying to land his death bonus on my character with Immortal disorder. Also nothing quite like that character making it, then constantly being targeted with “instead of damage, roll on critical injury table” and having to blow my party’s rerolls to save her. (For the record, no she didn’t make it to LY30)
But honestly, to each their own. I really enjoy it. And adding a few more hunt or showdown monsters (when you really “know” your base prey) is enough to keep an entire campaign fresh. And if not, PotSun and PotStars is a blast (said in Tabletop Simulator because I can’t afford all that)
Comparison with Kingdom Death? Interesting. I made a point of watching a few let’s plays of Pathfinder the Adventure Card game, and it seems to me as similar as Catan and Pandemic (which is, not at all)
The comparison I see is Townfolk Tussle, which I intend to someday buy for a faster/easier campaign.
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