I bought a vinyl copy of Beggars’ Banquet by the Rolling Stones for 50p despite not having a record player. Fast forward six years and I now have a full stereo system, a collection worth over £10k and regularly order limited edition albums from small bands costing me large amounts each time. Send help.
Homelab (running home servers). Especially since I’m in Canada so I pay out the ass for shipping. Got into it purely out of interest for server administration, programming (computer science in general really) and the desire to experiment on my own hardware, but I’ll have you know I have a total of 48 processing cores and 30 TB of storage running my personal fileserver and “private cloud!” Though not relying on the likes of Google for data storage and “cloud” services is a massive genuine benefit!
I also run BOINC and Folding@Home on the excess computing power in the winter, essentially “donating” it to science, which is perfect because my house only has electric baseboard heating anyway so I’m consuming the same amount of electricity for heating either way, and the electricity sources are mostly renewables where I live! The home office is toasty all winter, if kind of loud.
I also run BOINC and Folding@Home on the excess computing power in the winter, essentially “donating” it to science, which is perfect because my house only has electric baseboard heating anyway so I’m consuming the same amount of electricity for heating either way, and the electricity sources are mostly renewables where I live! The home office is toasty all winter, if kind of loud.
If this was a standard home feature in cold climates that would be awesome. There’s schemes where they have farms that pipe their heat into homes, but that’s a lot of extra infrastructure for something that’s fundamentally easy to decentralise.
I’ve heard people proposing a “computational electric heater” in the past where it’s just a really powerful computer that can do citizen science processing (or presumably whatever you want on it). I suppose the only issue is cost of sufficiently powerful processors that generate enough heat to actually work as a heater, as well as the thermal regulation system since semiconductors are way more temperature sensitive than a coil of resistive wire, shorter lifespan too I imagine. Though if we can overcome these issues that would be a massive technological milestone.
It would be a really good use of old computers instead of throwing them out though, could use them as space heaters in a place where you don’t mind the noise and/or find a way to dampen the noise while allowing the heat to come through.
Come to think of it, I actually don’t know what the compute footprint of an average first-world person is. If we moved all the racks into people’s houses (in a sound-proof enclosure or something) would that be enough?
It doesn’t have to be that expensive if you keep it modest though. I have an old Dell Optiplex (I think from 2012?) that I run a fair amount of stuff on. Things like Jellyfin (with Sonarr/Radarr/etc), a finance tracking web app, Home Assistant, a wiki, and some other miscellaneous stuff. I don’t have a ton of storage though. Currently just the 512gb SSD that the OS is on. I have a couple 8TB HDDs that I want to get setup but they’re a little loud for being in my bedroom.
The big thing I notice is that it can really struggle to encode media if it’s not in the right format. It doesn’t have much of a GPU though so that doesn’t help. And more modern hardware would be much better too, but this is fine for my needs at the moment.
Similarly, sim racing. Went from a Logitech G920 to a direct drive wheel base, VR headset, and fancy pedals. The temptation to save up for a triple or ultrawide monitor setup is real.
selfhosting/homelab. Originally started just using retired gaming PC parts to build a server. All it cost was the power to run the system. Years later and with more things/content I have, I just added a 5x 18tb hard drives and 3x 8tb. Just the 5 18tb drives was like $1500.
I have 65 TB of movies and shows for a Plex server. That is what the 5x 18tb drives are for. I download primarily REMUXes or highest quality available.
The other drives are for backing up photos, my server, and anything important.
This is honestly why I pirate. I don’t agree with the pricing model and 9/10 I find out I didn’t enjoy the game after all. I do buy games that are reasonably priced and I did enjoy, the latest one being ember knights. Fantastic.
I started gaming back in 90’s and here it was just buy a game and you got i all. Then I got to pc gaming and watercooling, in the 00-10, And then something happend in these Decades becous what I used to pay fore a full pc with high end components and watercooling is the damn price fore the RAM.
Here I am thinking “I need to get more active and it’ll be fun to do stuff with my best bud Link” (Link is a 4 year old golden retriever)
Starts with basic training obedience classes, no biggy. Then they offer Rally classes, which is basically obedience plus some fun stuff, cool, I’ll take that class. Oh, I can get a cool title for him? Sure, we already trained him, why not! Ok he needs 3 successful runs, and each run attempt is $25…? k…
Rally Novice acquired…fun but… Was that really worth 150 for the class + $75 for the three runs? …sure whatever
Ooooo agility sounds fun! Let’s do that! $150 for a 6 week session, that’s not bad! 6 months and many sessions later + buying practice equipment… I’m officially poor. My dog is a happy boy, and I’m more active, but FML this is a rabbit hole lol
We’re having a lot of fun, and my dog is a happier more obedient boy, but man was I not expecting the crazy expense. Those people with the dogs that have a bazillion titles and letters after their names? They’ve spent a literal fortune on that dog. It’s absolutely mind boggling.
From the Canine Competition universe… confirming fortune spent on doggos. I definitely did not spend 4 figures on entries fees for 3 dogs in a multitude of sports in one weekend… ~
I used to be there… now I’ve got three sets of shelves from Costco full up of boxes, bins, trays, tools, bits, and bobs. Finding used electronics bench devices like power supplies, multimeters, oscopes, and soldering stations is an ongoing effort to do at a reasonable price point.
I started knitting for my kids when we were living in colorado.
so I ended up processing wool from raw fleece -> hat
raw merino fleece, raw alpaca fleece, Scouring soap, dye, dyeing classes with natalie redding, spinning wheel, drum carder, hackle, table loom, warping thing for yarn
Math
ended up going to school for math education (with pell grant $500 per 6 month term) I can’t pass the exit exam. tried 5 times out of those I had to pay out of pocket for 4 of them $480.
and surprise, I got dxed with ADHD. That’s why I couldn’t pass the tests. now I pay $50 a month for it (doc + meds)
My sister has knitted since she was a kid. Later started creating fleece items. Then she bought raw wool, washed, spun and dyed it. Then bought a wooden … loom? to make carpets from it.
Film photography. Started with a camera I got for free, and $20 worth of film. Quickly spiraled into many cameras that I bought or inherited, and so much money on film and development
I must have $700 worth of floss a 200$ custom stand and then accessories, I just gave away 82 skeins of off brand that advertised dmc dye standards, but WEREN’T. Don’t buy floss from Amazon kids, it’s worth it to do a custom order from joanns or Michael’s mid project.
It started with wanting to do a fun little Christmas ornament project with the Littles and now I have 7 mid finished projects including a massive LOTR project I’ve restated 3 times, that has 1 of 12 8×11 pages done on this beast l nearly 3’x2’ Aida cloth.
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