I am a designer, so for me anything anyhow connected with visual aspects.
Someone already posted about old coins and film photography so I will add:
· Watching Movies — at least once for the story and overall feeling, then for the story again and visuals, colors etc., later for techniques, ideas, framing, music, rhythm, cuts and so on.
· Stamps (Philately) — what more can I say, sometimes I forget about my unsegregated albums, but when I reopen them or find something to add, I am gone.
· Collecting well designed magazines and other printed materials — this one was a big one for me, for a long, looong time. Still, from time to time I will find a great business card or a catalogue, as they are becoming scarce now, or in the ocean of very poor design — it always feels like finding a real treasure.
Gardening. There are a million things to learn, and every year is an adventure.
Also making things from yarn. So many different techniques, yarns, styles, and colors. And if you have a project that is easy, you can binge watch at the same time.
I can’t speak for other collectors but my focus is on ancient coins, mostly Roman imperials.
The amount of history and artistry in those coins is off the charts amazing, and every single one is like a tiny window into the past. To many outsiders it seems like one of the stuffiest things to do. It does require a good bit of research which can get a bit dry at times, but nothing beats that feeling of holding literal treasure of 2000+ years old.
Trust me, it gets deep and expensive. The almost irresistible desire to increase the size of one’s “stash” by buying models you’ll never get around to building. The need to have the exact shade of paint used on a 1942 tropical BF109. The need for at least 3 airbrushes. The obsession with the tools.
HELP!
But it’s really quite enjoyable and once you accept that if what you’ve built gives you pleasure and that you’re happy with it, you’ve got it beat.
I’m afraid not. Tbh, my main sources of inspiration are YouTube channels. There are also many Facebook groups dedicated to scale modelling, some of which don’t even count rivets! 😀
Film photography. With smartphones having taken over the roll of point and shoots and covering the majority of people’s photography needs, it’s quite a different experience breaking out a half century old camera. Everything is more tactile, your shots are finite, and the result is a 100% determined by your decisions. Different films produce different results, and if you get into developing your own film you get to play mad chemist in the bathroom.
There’s a learning curve, but if you’re already into photography and understand the basics it’s really not that hard. Labs still exist to develop for you if you’d rather not go down that rabbit hole. The results may surprise you!
I started to get deep into film photography but when I realized I was researching hospital grade HEPA filters so I could put a darkroom into the bedroom closet I decided I needed to take a step back.
I love film photography and the fact that I recently moved a very short distance from the Kodak film plant in NY is slowly drawing me back into it.
I wonder if the local community college has a dark room I could rent.
I mostly shoot with a DSLR (or did, the pandemic has apparently killed a lot of my enthusiasm for that particular hobby). But I have occasionally picked up a film camera just to play around. It always takes me about half the roll to stop checking the results on the display on the back of the camera…
Self Hosting. I love optimizing my securing my life while improving my family’s privacy. Nextcloud to store and backup media, contacts, and knowledge base. Hosting a free remote VPN on OCI, remote encrypted backups to a fellow enthusiast’s server…I love that while my data is local, if my house was to burn down, the years of pictures and precious memories will still be available. I also like being able to use this tech to help people close to me, doing backups for them, sharing ISO’s, etc.
I host it on my own server at home :) Low latency and secure. Partially because I don’t trust myself to keep things secure, so the less I can have things publicly accessible, the better I feel
Yes! It’s a hobby that can go as deep as you want it to.
Though it doesn’t produce physical outputs like many others :/
Once you start getting deeper into computational and stored requirements the costs really start to shoot up. Networking, device management, storage management, power usage, heat & noise, orchestration…etc
I hear that! Admittedly, I’ve gotten grumpy at myself a few times for “not being able to make something practical,” but I’m reminded when my wife thanks me occasionally for our home server setup (she loves Nextcloud), that it is practical and we use it all the time.
I’ve got my Wireguard I’m hosting on OCI (they give you 2 free VM instances), and looking to use the second instance to host SearXNG, then have Azure AD for free Active Directory, Home Assistant & Mycroft on Pi’s, and otherwise, hosting local VM’s via Proxmox on some older servers. I haven’t gone too hard into clustering or orchestration yet, though I’m looking to replace most of those VM’s with Docker instances at some point here, reduce compute reservations. Most of my power reduction has been through logical means, not yet through hardware, the costs involved keep me from leaping too hard quite yet. (Hard to drop big money on servers when rent is over half of my income) But I’ll get there! I love seeing how much I can do with very little, so it at least scratches that part of the brain in the meantime :)
Historically it is a hobby that’s had a high financial barrier to entry.
But the past decade has had a huge flourish of affordable and unique synthesizers and related musical equipment show up on the market. A lot of this stuff can be a TON of fun regardless of your musical knowledge/skill level. A few days on YouTube and a hundred bucks and beginners can be making their own music, with or without a computer with audio software.
It starts simple, and can go to endless depths of creativity.
I super agree! I helped my daughter attend a zoom class on software based synths during covid, and had so much fun fiddling with making weird sounds and loops within loops. I forget the name, algorithm or something? Pd?. And you can get kits to solder up little real life circuits to string together, each one adds a whole dimension to what you can make the sounds do. Easy to get into and incrementally build on.
To anyone that might be interested in this you should check out VCV rack. It’s a free software emulation of modular euroracks. They even have software recreations of classic modules that would be considered standard for most racks.
Obviously this route lacks the major aspect of physical interaction and feedback which many say is a large component in there enjoyment of the hobby but you can still learn all the basic and experiment to find out if it’s something that grabs your interests.
Fair warning: If you do catch the bug there will be a point in time where you start trying to justify spending $400 on a single LFO module. This is normal. Don’t be afraid.
Gets a lot deeper than I ever thought it could. The mechanics of making a car go around turns better/faster gets very in depth. Lots of trial and error. Race every 2 weeks so tons of time to experiment with adjustments between race days.
Ages range from near 80 to 10… everyone out just having a good time and helping each other for a few hours. During winter, Florida busy season, we have 50+ people racing 5-6 different classes in a public parking lot.
Started with a used off the shelf car for $75 from a club memeber 5 months ago… now building competition grade kits and put up shelves in the bedroom for all 7 of my cars. Almost all used for VERY cheap that just needed a bit of love to be competitive again.
I have not tried that yet. I did nitro off-road bashing years ago and have dabled in rock crawling with a little SCX-24. There’s a local indoor track with a drifting course… not real fond of management otherwise I’d race in the air conditioning a lot more.
Its different, very slow. I figured it would be a little more relaxing but definitely not the case. Anxiety builds trying to figure out ways to climb without flipping repeatedly. Florida is flat and mostly sand so there’s not very much in the way of natural places to run it. I resorted to taking rocks off of construction sites to make a small course in the corner of the yard.
hardware hacking, it feels like you are trying to solve a weird puzzle in which sometimes even the dumbest things may work, and at the end you have a device you can do whatever you want with.
I’m sincerely confused as to why you would want more than one keyboard. To me it sounds like owning more than one printer, but even less convenient. Can you explain it to me?
Not OP, but personally I own 4 or 5 different keebs and I like swapping between them for different reasons. Sometimes it’s just because they’re different colors/lighting options and I want to switch up the look of my desk, other times it’s because I want the feel of a linear switch for long bouts of typing for the feel of a blue switch for precise feedback in gaming.
I think of it like knives in a kitchen. Yes, you could just use a very nice chef’s knife, but knives come in all shapes and sizes for different applications.
I think for others it’s having different switches and keycaps for different feeling when typing. For me it’s trying to find what I think is the most optimal typing experience and the least amount of strains on my hands while typing.
That’s why I’ve gone from row stagger and qwerty to Ortholinear. I switched to that because it makes sense to me that your fingers move up and down better than they move laterally. Lateral movement like in a row stagger layout is more strain since you have to stretch to reach keys. Qwerty also never made sense to me since alphas aren’t optimized based on location but rather purposefully unoptimized as a hold over from the typewriter days in order to slow down typists to help stop keys from jamming.
When I was on my Ortho boards I learned about layer switching that allows for keys that are further away to be moved under my fingers by activating a second layer. This was when I moved from my 60% Ortho to my 40% Ortho.
After that I got interested in ColemakDh since it fixed a lot of what is wrong with qwerty. So I decided to learn it. Then I got real into column stagger and wanted to try my hand at soldering. I ordered the parts to make a board called a Cantor Remix. I had enough parts to build 2 and did that. Building my own keyboard from basically parts and programming was a lot of fun and I got bit by the bug.
It’s a dumb argument since most people don’t care but I believe that something like a column staggered layout and something like Colemak or Canary should be the standard keyboard format. It’s hard to relearn typing all over again as an adult so the default is an archaic row stagger that feels unnatural and a very unoptimized alpha layout. I know most people just don’t care and I hyper focus on stuff so it’s just something I don’t bother telling most people, unless they ask of course.
I don’t think everyone needs a bunch of keyboards but I’m on this weird journey to find what feels the most optimized for me. I’m deep in the rabbit hole lol.
I got into it cause you can switch out the keys for custom keys. Plus I really like specific aesthetics so I have a pink keyboard and one in lavender where the keys look like sweet tarts candy.
I got started simply because I had been using the same dirty gaming keyboard for over a decade and it finally died. I knew from peripheral experience that most consumer electronic devices are e-waste so I went the custom route so that I could control the quality.
I settles on a case pretty quickly but couldn’t decide on switches. I got a sampler pack but that doesn’t really give you a good idea of the full typing experience so I went ahead and just bought 3 full sets of switches.
I quickly got tired of switching the out of the keyboard whenever I wanted to try a different set so I went out and got a second good but not AS good case just to serve as a test bed.
Well that meant I needed another set of keycaps. So I went looking and there was a deal I found for purchasing multiple sets.
If you are counting we are now at 3 sets of switches, 3 sets of caps, and 2 cases. I think you can see where this is headed.
What I ended up learning is that you can REALLY dial in the feel and responsiveness of a keyboard for what you want.
Do you want a commanding, powerful keyboard that feels like you are accomplishing something with every keystroke? Heavy, clicky switches with THICK PBT caps.
Do want a smooth fast speed demon for gaming/typing? Start looking into shirt throw linear switches with choc caps.
Good every day workhorse for all around use? Tactile are a great place to start?
But what case material do I choose? Metal, resin, plastic? Gasket mount pcb? Foam underlayment? What type of Keycap material do I like? PBT, ABS? maybe some resin, or metal even. How about some exotic ceramic keycaps?
How am I going to discover the combo that I like the best? You try them all and end up with a massive collection.
BUUuuuuUuut… There are several different ways to make your own keycaps.
Silicon molds for resin pours. Sometimes even multistage pours for different parts of the cap.
3d printing/laser sintering is also an option and probably the easiest entry point into custom keycaps.
Clay/Ceramic can be sculpted to make caps.
You can order blank PCB caps in nearly every style of profile possible. You can then custom design your own legends and dye sublimate then onto the keys.
Some actual lunatic even went as far to manually load every blank Keycap into a CNC mill to carve out the letters so he could backfill it with a different material of his choice (I don’t remember the specifics).
I taught myself using videos and became - over years - an advanced knitter. My goal was; i want to be able to design and knit anything i want to, and i achieved that goal (not always flawlessly, but still). It’s fun, colorful, the knitting communities are great, and you will boost your self esteem, because even though you will make tons of mistakes (even at an advanced level), you will also learn how to fix them, or hide them. Edit to change teached into taught…
She’s definitely enthusiastic. She spins when we watch movies, she knits when we go out to see friends or wait at the doctor, she weaves on her schacht inkle loom sometimes, she dyes fiber, the whole gamut. The only reason we don’t have a sheep is because the dog would endlessly harass it.
She doesn’t, because when we had a really sheddy dog I suggested she spin yarn from the dog’s hair and then knit a sweater for the dog. She wouldn’t do it.
This is me with embroidery. I started out making a couple of friendship bracelets in June. And then I thought, “Hey, now I have a bunch of extra floss, why don’t I try to embroider something?” So I bought a couple of kits to practice, and now like 2 months later, I have a full box of floss including some fancy shit from Japan, a boatload of hoops, and piles of colored cotton. I moved from printing other people’s patterns to customizing them in like, a week. I created my own monster. And now my favorite supply store has patterns for tiny embroidered felt animals so I’m starting a set of dinosaurs.
The real issue is what the fuck do I do with all this stuff I’m making. I don’t want to monetize it and I’m not really good enough for that anyway, but it’s gonna be a problem soon.
My wife is there with you too. She has a huge toolbox full of embroidery floss. And you should see her “craft room,” which is pretty much our house’s dining room.
I like her, she seems cool. I purposely built a crafting area with a huge closet when I finished the basement. At a certain point, you just have to accept that the crafts have taken over your life and home.
There was one thing I had to put my foot down on finally. She had a loom that was the size of a washer and dryer and she used it maybe a couple of weeks a year. Eventually I had to insist she get rid of it and she agreed. Now she has a couple of small looms, which is fine.
Home Automation. It can be as simple as buying a hub and some devices. But, I went the self-hosted route using Home Assistant to give me more control of what it can do.
I have some automations that turn on a certain set of lights on when the sun sets and off when it rises. It’s pretty simple, but saves electricity because I used to leave my front porch light on 24/7.
I just set up an automation last night that sends me a discord notification when the laundry machine finishes and the same for the dryer. I can’t hear the beeping because I am always too far from the laundry room. This one has me so excited!
I’ve seen people automate gardens which seems really neat. Really, your only limit is your imagination. I also just really like having an app on my phone to toggle power to random lights and fans around my house. It helps me get out of bed because I can turn the fan off when I’m cold in bed.
My favourite one I’ve done so far: I put a motion sensor near where my cat goes every morning when she wants to look outside. This then opens the blinds enough for her to see.
This works better than a simple timer because the blinds are loud enough to wake us up sometimes and she doesn’t want to necessarily look outside every day.
I’m messing with domoticz, but looking to home automation as well. I got an RF link from a colleague and I’m now managing light via the socket units of 3 mutual incompatible systems and it works great. I’m thinking of combining it with zigbee and see if I can do more nice things, as range is my biggest issue now.
t an RF link from a colleague and I’m now managing light via the socket units of
I have been waiting on Thread/Matter to be bigger and more adopted before I buy most devices. Everything I use right now is on Wi-Fi (using ESPHome). But, I am in no rush. Just having fun slowly building it out. :)
I just had the Dutch system Klik aan klik uit (kaku), both the old and the new units. Those 2 versions are incompatible and this way I can use both. I used just the new system, but with adding the old units as well I can now make nicer scenes. (turn lights on in a natural ‘entering the room’ order and turn them off the other way around, mimicking leaving the same room.
I’m just messing about as well and I don’t want to use wifi, that’s why I’m half looking at zugbee. (And Ikea uses that system, so I guess it’ll be available for a while)
I was worried about drowning out my network with Wi-Fi devices but I don’t want to invest in Z-Wave or Zigbee unless Thread falls through. Here’s to hoping 🤞
Here it’s just rf433 for now. No need for more (apart from messing around with new stuff). As far as I understand Zigbee doesn’t use wifi, but it can be in the 2.4 GHz band.
I am using a Shelly EM to monitor the power usage of two circuits, One phase of the Dryer and the whole circuit for the Washing Machine. Monitoring only one phase of a two-phase circuit makes it inaccurate. But, I just did one phase because I only care to know if it’s off or on.
I used ESPHome to add it to HomeAssistant and this guide to setup the automation.
My people! I knew I was starting to get into it when I built some multisensors and a garage door switch controlled by esp32s. Still haven’t done too many very complex things with automations, basically situational lighting and so on.
Nah, I just put a relay and esp32 together and connected it alongside the garage door switch (super old school). It sits on top of the opener in a little enclosure. I originally controlled it with mqtt, but later reflashed the esp with esphome.
The Discord notification thing actually is actually a really cool idea. That’s where it feels like it moves from hobby into daily practical use kind of stuff.
One question I have, if you don’t mind - did the washer/dryer come with some smart functionality, or did you have to do somethin like opening them up and wiring into the electrical line for the beep speaker to sense voltage?
My washer/dryer has no smart functionality. I explained it here but I put a device in my breaker box with a clamp on the two lines and that just sends the current to Home Assistant. I read a bunch before I ever tried it and many people have put vibration sensors in/in their dryers. But, this way seems more reliable.
I did my laundry 3 hours faster than usual today because I actually knew when it was done. Worth it to me.
I would love to get into HA more, and I have it installed and working on my RPi, but the technical aspects are overwhelming. I’m very techy but I wish HA had a “simple” mode the same way my 3D printing software does. That allowed me to become actually decent at printing at a reasonable pace.
This was a relatively short-term thing, but I think it counts loosely as hobbyish… in my 20s, I was determined to find the best bloody mary in town. I went to every single bar, restaurant, etc. and tried each one in turn.
Which sounds boring, I know, but I had so many great conversations and met so many interesting people.
And to answer your likely question: Surprisingly, Red Lobster, which made its own mix from real tomato juice and didn’t use some crappy bloody mary mix. This was in the 90s, so I can’t endorse their current bloody mary.
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