I got myself involved with a nonprofit local group preserving local pioneer era apple trees. They've been DNA testing and cataloging the trees, and had all the info stashed away in google drive and onedrive folders. The founder was looking to step back so they asked me if I wanted to step up as project lead, which I did.
I took the info and organized it into a nice wiki-style site with maps and descriptions so everyone in the community can learn about the old orchards.
I've also learned how to prune and graft hundred year old apple trees and now have a couple dozen young grafted trees growing in my garage, all clones of local hundred year old trees, some of which genetically tested unique and are of currently unknown varieties.
Thats awesome! I'm doing apple stuff on the other side of the Cascades (Eugene), starting a cidery and trying to find rare varieties to graft. And doing little software projects like https://pomological.art/. Would love to get in touch if you want people to propagate these varieties you're finding and would potentially be interested in sharing some scion wood!
I'm in the middle of building out a similar big project that takes a different tack: looking through every period pomological text (e.g. Apple of New York, Fruits and Fruit Trees of America) and pulling the images, descriptions, etc for every heritage apple variety. Includes the watercolors too. I also pull in every scanned catalog from nurseries selling fruit trees in the PNW from the late 1800s.
The goal is a tool we can use to identify apples, and also have comprehensive info on every variety, using public domain period content.
I think we grafted ~90 scions this year. A lot of them we haven't actually DNA tested yet so no idea what they are. So many of these trees are on their last legs, so our priority is cloning them first, and then once the clones grow, DNA test those as funds are available.
I make my own cider too (though as a hobby). If we ever find ourselves in the same city I'd love to meet up and we can swap scions/cider/etc.
I love that idea, actually started something similar awhile back but didn't get far and ran out of time/energy. If you need any help/contributions I'd love to pitch in. And sounds great! I'll shoot you an email with my contact info
I have done similar grafting experiments, although at present I am navigating a change in motivation. I got into apples through cider, but gave up alcohol this year. (As an aside, this was a long time coming and absolutely worth some small sacrifices!)
While I’m interested in heritage apples, I think it’s probably more important to find and cultivate wild apples showing attributes that can keep them hardy in 21st century climate. An apple that thrived over a century ago depended on conditions that are different today and are continuing to change.
> I think it’s probably more important to find and cultivate wild apples showing attributes that can keep them hardy in 21st century climate.
The neat thing is that these tend to be self-selecting! These older orchards drop a lot of fruit and can self-propagate new seedlings. The ones that manage to survive are the ones well adapted to current local conditions.
Chuck Wendig's 2023 novel Black River Orchard has an apple historian as one of the protagonists. Lots of talk of scion wood and girdling and colonial era apple varieties. You may find this interesting.
A friend in Palouse has found several heritage apple trees and has spent at least a decade grafting and working with them. It’s an interesting hobby to watch him experiment with.
Apple trees are pretty easy to propagate if they're alive. Snip off a twig, graft it onto another tree, and away it goes.
Some poor-condition trees can certainly present a challenge in terms of finding ideal graftable wood, but even a poor-quality scion is a lot easier to propagate via grafting than trying to culture in a petri dish.
We work with Dr Cameron Peace's lab at WSU. They send us test tubes, we send the tubes back with leaves in them, they run the DNA tests and compare against an apple ID database they've built. We pay ~$50 per test, which is what most of the groups budget goes towards.
I started designing my own clothes. The insight was that I spend 80% money on suits that I wear 2 times a year, and the rest was low quality clothing I actually wore.
I flipped it, and made suits and pants that I could wear everyday.
The fast fashion stores were crap quality, my body is not a template size and I care about fabric and comfort.
The process was to learn how to sketch, to determine fabrics, colors and fit. I made pants that stay comfortable even after I eat food, I made suits that I can wear casually.
I don’t stitch myself, for that I worked with multiple workshops, until I found one that works for me.
Took me about 3 years to reach a point where all my wardrobe is designed by and for me.
There were multiple side effects on my confidence, my life, and the opportunities coming my way.
That's pretty neat, and we should talk. In my household we are currently producing about 75% of our clothing, mostly out of a desire to avoid using fabrics that generate a lot of microplastic waste + observing that newer clothes/fabrics wear out quickly.
OK, fairly specific question - how did You get to that pants silouhete? It seems from the pics You went for something like a straight leg plus some extra room and fairly fitted waist / butt. Is that a response to a trend (oversized work clothes seem to be the thing these past few years), or is there some practical reason too (mainly for the extra room in the leg shape)?
No classes. I was probably hyper aware of how my body reacts to clothing.
For example, the waist of almost every pant became uncomfortable when I sat down after eating food.
The area below arm pits and close to thighs was always tight. The length of pants was always long for the waist.
-
To determine my taste, I looked at various styles of women clothing (on Pinterest).
Then for the models I found most attractive, I imagined what would the clothes they have put on look like if they were men. That led me to the realisation that I like formal aesthetic, reserved and subtle colors.
I would love to talk to you if you're willing, email in my profile, I'm in SL right now and was thinking of trying something like this but it sounds like you've gone through this journey and are a lot more experienced than me
Fast fashion forces you to dress for the masses. Loose shirts, baggy pants and shallow pockets is not fashion, its cost optimisation for brands.
I didn't want to dress up like a boy. Me and my friend were in Paris when we got inspired by the floor(fashion_sense). I was already working on my clothing, but that day we promised each other that we will not be underdressed anymore.
He opted for off-the-shelf formal clothing: high quality shirts, and pants. I went all in.
First I found markets that sell cheap fabrics, so I can experiment. I travel a lot, so my clothing had to be designed for all weathers. I'm Indian (Bharat), but look racially ambiguous, so I also wanted my clothing to reflect my roots and culture, yet be modern enough for any room in the world.
I run a company, and write code, so comfort was paramount. But I also had meetings or presentations so I wanted to be presentable.
Started with pants, because I thought pants are easy to optimise, and I just need a black, gray and dark blue one. Over 5 iterations, I reached a design with elastic straps on the side (because when I eat food, my tummy bloats a little and its uncomfortable to sit down), and loose on the thighs. Imagine pyjamas, that look like pants.
Then next step was to experiment with jackets and shirts. I played with fabric, patterns, and finish (zippers, titch buttons, different cuff lengths and styles, different collars).
My friends started noticing, and I also consulted some clients. Then I gave a talk about it. This is one of my skills that I discovered by first principles. The best part is that I met my girlfriend because she noticed my aesthetics, and she told me that she makes her own clothes too.
Alternatively, one can create bespoke patterns. There is a lovely little open source community of pattern designers at https://seamly.io
I got myself a pattern drafting book and started working on shirts and pants. The neat thing is one can design the draft pieces to be completely parametric, so adapting the pattern to different persons is as simple as entering new measurements.
My hobby is organizing in-person meetups for random people to get together, chat and make friends. Barely structured, if at all. I've found this rewarding and ended up making friends this way.
You have to accept that 5-15% of the people who would show up to something like this are genuine weirdos you probably don't want to be around. And another 10% at any given meetup are autistic or neuro-divergent but well-meaning, kind and full of interesting insights and hobbies, although perhaps difficult to socialize with, at least until they get to know you're well-meaning too.
These challenges come with the territory. You end up talking to people you'd otherwise never meet in the normal course of your life, and it's neutral at worst and wonderful at best.
I'm on the other side of this, in that I attend a lot of these.
I made a big effort about 12 years ago to go to a bunch of these (like three meetups a week and trying out a variety of different meetups), but now I mostly stick to a couple of them as I don't have as much time or energy for it anymore. But I've met most of my current friends through those meetups.
Find one you like and keep showing up until you're a regular, and get to know people slowly, and if they like you they start inviting you to things outside of the meetup, and then eventually you end up being friends.
I've done this with three different groups over the years and despite naturally being shy and an introvert I've ended up making friends at each one.
At the height of me doing this (like ten years ago), it got to the point where I'd go about my daily life and about once every other month I'd run into random people I've met at meetups also out and about. Like go out to dinner and spot someone I knew from a meetup also showing up to the same place, or run into them shopping at a Best Buy or something.
Meetups where you do a shared activity seems to be the best, like hikes or movies (+ dinner afterwards) or board games, since you can always focus on the activity if you don't feel like being social, and you have that activity you can always talk about as a subject.
Between the genuine weirdos, the autistic and/or the neuro-divergent, is there anyone left, really? Do the "normies" genuinely exist? Happy-go-lucky, knows a bit about everything but doesn't nerd out on anything, picks up every conversation subject and listens and holds their own in a manner that is just right? I am genuinely curious about the existence of these "superhumans".
There are many many of these socially-skilled normies. But, by virtue of being socially skilled, most have already pretty much filled up their social capacity and don't tend to show up at the kind of venues dedicated to helping under-socialized people meet up.
The "normie" doesn't really exist. Everyone is kind of weird in some aspect, which might not be obvious on a surface level.
But having gone to a bunch of programming meetups, the majority of people are perfectly pleasant and good to socialise with. The weirdos are usually non tech people who have an app or crypto idea they want help with. Or just total crazy people who just showed up to the first event they could find regardless of topic.
While there is often a "normal" (bell-curve fitting) distribution for individual factors, putting them together can be counter-intuitive.
> Even when considering just three dimensions, fewer than 5% of pilots were “average” in all. [1]
I would guess many/most people probably think they fall into either (1) the normal bucket or (変) the weird/fringe bucket. Either "I am pretty normal" or "I am an outsider". How many think "We're all fairly different once you cluster in any 3 interesting dimensions!"?
But people feel that dichotomy, which makes me think it is largely about perception relative to a dominant culture: the in-group versus out-group feeling. For example, atheists might feel like outsiders in many parts of the U.S., but less so in big cities and in other countries. In dense urban walkable cities (like NYC), people see diversity more directly and more often. Seeing a bunch of people is different than seeing a bunch of cars.
it's a Japanese word for "weird". I'm guessing that OP is a bit of an Otaku (aka "obsessed with Japan") -- which is either ironic or completely appropriate.
My first thought was that they were an LLM, but then checking their profile it seems they've been around since 2012 and have a comment expressing that they seem to get accused of being an LLM a lot, and suggesting people don't do that.
> Quite soon these accusations will nearly always be accurate.
/headscratching They don't have to be, do they? It is possible that some people will build identity systems with norms that e.g. humans type with their own hands. These could become popular, at least conceivably, in certain areas. Hard to enforce for sure. And getting harder and harder to distinguish reliably.
Sounds like a really cool idea. How do you organize the meetup and promote it to people if it ends up being random people? Do you set it up on meetup.com and have a theme at the minimum?
I've been to a lot of meetups and it's definitely hit or miss and obviously depends on the sociability of the people that show up. The better ones I've attended are generally ones where people aren't trying to network for work purposes and are there literally to just socialize. The networking ones I find very dull as it's people just talking shop and career and if you've nothing to offer them on the career front, they move on quickly.
I have literally never been to any kind of organized gathering where this wasn't the objective of most of the people there. Family and children's events excluded (sometimes).
I have been in partying in my teens and twens, 3 years somehow "heavily". When I turned 40, I found out the only reason I went to parties and clubs for me was to meet girls.
This reminds me of [0], basically just inviting the most interesting people I know (also transitively the most interesting people they know), and just getting to meet people.
I would really like to do this, but half the most interesting people I know are PhD professors I rant with because I'm next to them in a lab. Maybe once my network gets bigger.
But I would still like to know more about how you do this, as other people doing this accidentally made me some good friendships, and I'd like to repay this favor to others
How I do it is context-specific. I used to live in a place where it's undoable and I was very lonely there. I moved to a place where people are much more open to it culturally and there's enough population to +/- bring in a constant flow of 4:1 regulars to newbies.
I advertise on local meetup platforms and in local social media. And I go to so many meetups myself that when people ask me what my hobbies are and I tell them, they get curious and self-invite.
Easy two-part process: First part is putting our "feelers", ask/tell a bunch of people "You know, I'm thinking of maybe hosting a dinner party/barbecue/beach day" and see what reaction you get from people. If sufficient people (sometimes just 2) give somewhat interested vibes, ask again what dates people could do it at, then you send out an invite.
You'd get a bunch of people who say yes but then don't show, this is normal and don't take it personally. Secondly, maybe the first 2-3 times it'd be hard to get people to commit, but once you do it more regularly, people will find it easier to commit to something they know you're already committed to.
Similarly, I did group therapy for a few years, and found it highly and profoundly rewarding.
It's much more structured, with a facilitator to help reduce the possibility of dangerous behaviours. It forced me to confront aspects of myself I otherwise might never have. It also (I think) gave me greater insight into what might be behind people's public faces.
I use Blood on the Clocktower to do this, it's a social deduction game (that's just not randomly accusing each other) so it gets everyone talking easily
It has been my experience that social deduction games are very attractive to folks who have problems socializing in day-to-day life. You can see them almost come alive when they are given the permission.
I think a lot of people need prompting for something to talk about. They have no confidence that topics they bring up will be interesting to anyone else. So any kind of gathering that takes that pressure off will be attractive.
I've been trying to come up with some interesting prompts after observing just asking someone "What's been happening" yields nothing but "Oh not much, work". So far the old classics of just probing in to what they do for work, what they did last weekend, etc and then finding any bit of info to drill down in to more interesting topics works best.
Also very important to recognize most conversation starters are someone serving the ball to you, you need to hit it back with a continuation. If you're giving one word dead end answers you've just caught the ball and dropped it.
I was a bit surprised to read this. I didn't think I'd stand out in the sea of comments here. But to this, since a couple of years ago I had a break up, moved city, quit all social media and went outside to real events. HN is the only place I still comment on.
Yes and the reverse is also true. I don’t like to play social games at my meetups because that’s a framework that seems to stifle genuine conversation. I do sometimes provide hypothetical questions as a bit of scaffolding.
> You can receive $1 million immediately for every 1 year of your life you are willing to give up (taken off the end of your life). How many years, if any, do you sell?
> You get to ask a "Cosmic Google" one single question about any mystery in history (e.g., "Who was Jack the Ripper?" or "Are we alone in the universe?") and get the absolute truth. What are you asking?
> If everyone in the world had a floating stat above their head (like "lies told" or "pizzas eaten"), which stat would you want to be able to see?
Same. I don't like to yuck other people's yums, but I don't get a lot from those kinds of games. Talking to strangers is not a problem for me.
I have been spending a bit of time at the local board game shops and the crowd sounds quite similar to the crowd you are attracting. On a very basic level I just try to model being a social adult and hope it rubs off.
the one and only meetup i ever went to (that wasn't something vaguely work-related) was a Werewolf meetup (the game). It actually wasn't very social, but it was a bunch of people who were really into Werewolf. Which, really, was what it was meant to be (and it was fun, because i love to play Werewolf)
Although I've had some fun with deduction games, I'm usually extremely averse to them. Forced to sit down and try to lie while listen to my voice suspiciously, then having the group turn against me and all my friends and randos interrogating and accusing me... it's like a special hell-dream come to life.
Indeed, and if you're especially good at it and win the game, then everybody knows from then on that you can't be trusted because you can't be easily read.
Be courteous, kind, don't accept invites, tell them you're not interested if they're making unwanted advances, and treat them as humans. If they seem receptive and able to handle constructive feedback, tell them what sticks out to you, otherwise just ignore it and move on.
Basically the same way you handle the exact same situation outside of organizing meetups, but maybe a bit extra on the friendly-and-try-to-not-traumatize-people-who-might-be-trying side of things.
`embedding-shape` answered it better than I could have, but I will add: I "ban" people from meetups who are overall bad for the group.
E.g. people who register to take up a (free) spot and then don't show up after multiple reminders, people who are especially rude to somebody fragile, even people who are unconstructively / loudly negative (picture the equivalent of walking into an auditorium of 800+ people, picking up the microphone on stage to yell "this meetup sucks!" then walking out).
This policy is controversial and I'm always trying to find the balance between being as welcoming as possible to people who aren't neurotypical or are going through a hard time and need the social interaction (e.g. me, multiple times in my life)... and people who just come off as jerks and are a net negative to the group.
I'm in multiple groups myself and I always measure myself by whether my showing up that day was a net positive, neutral or a net negative. If the latter, I don't belong there... at least not until I fix whatever was wrong.
Huh? I have zero stubbed toe anxiety. If it happens it happens.
But knowing that I'm being classified by event organizers (and that there's a 10% chance I will be labeled "complete weirdo")? That will keep me from participating in events.
Which is too bad because I already have enough reasons not to participate in events without adding neuroses on top of them.
I'm pretty sure the OP didn't mean they literally put a note in an excel document next to your name. So to explore the issue, is your anxiety around the fact that some people will think some aspects of your personality or behavior or weird? Because I could drop you into the middle of Vietnam (or whatever, pick some country you've never been to) and like 90% of people would think you're a bit weird. It's not really a bad thing, is it?
Anyway in my experience what the OP is referring to is less "nuerodivergent weirdness" and more "Will this person do violence" weirdness. Or, like, people that are just coming to events to try to fuck, and being obnoxious about it.
It's not necessary to literally put an asterisk in an Excel doc: we all know off-hand who the weirdos of concern are.
"Do violence" from a meetup event is rarely a concern in most countries, but never 0.
Mainly the people I'm concerned about are the ones who make others want to leave and never come back.
E.g. by asking uncomfortable and/or sexual questions (which is mostly fine) but not having the EQ after a few iterations to let the person politely weasel out of answering and change the subject. If they really press people, or monopolize the conversation to the point the person wonders why they would show up just to be lectured at, then that's a no-go.
We can all tolerate people who mean well and are mostly easy-going but not good at hangouts. Whereas the ones who are actively repelling newbies from being able to join and enjoy the event are the main challenge.
For example, at other meetups I go to, we've got a fellow who can't take feedback. He knows he made a newbie uncomfortable to the point of standing up and going home, but he makes a joke out of it when he's told what happened and why. Every time... and so the pattern repeats.
I imagined everyone at these events independently classifying everyone else and just sort of nodding knowingly at each other about who the weirdos are.
And so the fact that I don't do that must mean that I'm one of the weirdos. And sure, it doesn't really matter other than it's a reason to avoid events.
I organise events as well and I'm wondering if you ever charged for them. I used to do them for free but so many people signed up and didn't attend later that it was hard to put numbers to book a venue to meet. How did you solve this?
i would do free venues only. usually restaurants are free because you consume food. if that is not an option, it depends on the cost. i have seen events where people were asked to contribute something when they arrive. you can usually announce the cost of the venue and ask everyone to contribute appropriately. if you fall short then next time ask people to contribute more. or keep a running tally during the event until the venue cost is met. from my personal feeling, if it costs more than $1-2 per person the venue is too expensive. find a cheaper one.
If you had to guess how I'd suggest you start, what would you think I'd say? My advice is probably just that or something no better that what you'd guess.
You start by starting. The first meetup will have a couple people and you let it be awkward and not quite right. Then you do a second, and a third...
In German speaking areas there's an app called Spontacts where one can advertise any sorts of events and people can sign up. Like MeetUp but free and it actually works. Lots of people offer board games, walks, brunch. I got into it recently advertising spontaneous ping pong get togethers. Met some really cool people so far.
Context dependant. I do similar to the OP. Sometimes my events have one other person, sometimes 40.
First, you have to do whatever it takes to make you able to just do things alone, frequently, and then go ahead and do things alone, frequently. Picnics, cafe co-working, reading in a lounge/cafe/bar, walks, bike rides, hikes, photo walks, star gazing, whatever. Literally anything.
You'll probably meet people while doing this. Get their contact info. Eventually, mention "oh hey I play basketball a couple times a month, want me to text you next time I'm planning?" Repeat, you have a crew or five. A couple group chats.
Then start planning bigger events. Book 8 person tables at a restaurant, then drop a note in your chat like this:
```
Reservation for 8 at UR Meat on Tuesday April whatever, 7pm, the new kbbq place near zhongxiao fuxing station.
1. komali2
2.
3.
4...
```
People will copy/paste adding their name so you can see how many seats are filled. I've tried 10 other booking platforms, apps, whatever, nothing beats the group text thing. The group chat is where shit happens.
For more casual events like picnics, just drop a maps link and a time, remind people a couple days before, day before, and day of send a pic with where you are in the park or whatever (the "final push" for people are hesitant but see that it's really real and thus come).
Repeat, scale as desired. The consistent thread is that you have to Just Do Stuff, and people have to know that you'll Just Do Stuff regardless if people come or not, so they come see you as a dependable and fun person, a great person to tag along with.
I can confirm that this is a great hobby. I did a weekly meet up, man, nearly 20 years ago, which was at the same time and place every week, and we (me and the core clique which consolidated within a month) advertised it on Twitter, which was niche enough at the time that you’d get a bunch of interesting weirdos showing up.
It’s how I met my wife, how I met a whole bunch of people who still feature in my life decades on, how businesses got started, and so much came out of it for everyone involved. It probably helped that we did it over beer and burgers, as one was a social lubricant and the other robbed people of an excuse to leave early. Plus afterwards it transformed into poker back at my place, which was how I really got to know people fast.
Talking to strangers is fun - as is figuring out which strangers will like which other weirdos you’ve got to know and buddy them up.
Exactly. I actually find normies quite unbearable.
My comment was not very serious. I can easily pull off a normie affect, but the most disappointing thing to me is most people's inability to cope with even a little strangeness.
Write explicit rules about dogs. Many "weirdos" just like their boundaries and basic hygiene. It is hard to socialize, over barking contest and rar dog humpimg your leg.
Almost everything you can do on your own is a "solved problem". Why go into woodworking if you can buy an Ikea stool? The point of hobbies isn't to solve problems - that's called a job - but to learn and have fun.
Find a niche where you can resist the temptation to constantly compare yourself to eight billion other people on the internet. Something where success isn't measured in Github stars, Youtube likes, or Reddit upvotes. Once you get in that mindset, almost anything goes. I know people who collect RPN calculators and are having a blast. All kinds of hands-on crafts are great too. I like making electronic music and I'm pretty bad at it.
“When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.
And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”
And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”
And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.”
I can attest to this, in my own way. I had a headstart since nobody ever pushed me, parents werent competitive fuckups and thus their child wasnt.
I do climbing, hiking, skiing, skitouring, diving, weightlifting, used to do paragliding, now trying to pick up wind surfing. None of those sports on high level, just keeping it cca the same.
Climbing is a good example since every climbing route is exactly graded for overall difficulty. Over years I even went down a bit from levels I used to do. I just go to the gym or rock, enjoy even the simplest routes that some consider for beginners, despite doing sport for 15 years. Many folks around keep pushing themselves hard to progress, I just dont have that bug.
Exactly same could be said for weightlifting, found my set of free weights values and just keep doing them. If I feel extra strong I may do few extra reps but thats it. I was even mocked here for saying this but who cares, I do it for myself and not to impress or do stupid empty status games with others. Its very sustainable that way too.
That sounds awesome! I basically do all the same sports, but I always need to win or to get better at them. I am trying to move in your direction though.
That’s a dour outlook. I don’t cook to be the best at it, I cook to feed my friends. I don’t sing to be the best at it, I do it so I can have fun at karaoke. I don’t boulder to climb mountains, I do it because it makes me feel healthy. I don’t bike to win races, I bike because it’s the fastest way to get around my temperate city. I’m a worse cross-stitcher than my sister but I like that she teaches me. I go to music festivals because it’s the only place you can easily dance for 8 hours straight. I’ve never taken a dance lesson but regularly am asked to join in because I’m having fun!
I totally agree with what you've written - "comparison is the thief of joy" is one of my favorite mantras.
That said, hobbies can be remarkably useful because they allow you to create or engage in something that is uniquely tailored to your own personal interests, and the modern economy often doesn't provide that level of personalization, or if it does it's extremely expensive. E.g. the other commenter that decided to design his own clothes because mass produced clothing is really just tailored to "average".
What defines hobbies is not what or why you do it, but when you do it. The phenomenon of hobbies has been mulled over quite a bit - activities that engage many disciplines of an actual job, activities that for other people actually are jobs. The key difference in the nature of a hobby is that we do the activities on our own schedule - we are in no way compelled to do them but have complete ownership over the execution.
Put it down over winter but just picking it back up.
Bat detection/identification with ultrasonic recordings. It's been fun building the data pipeline to manage the ~30GB+ of WAV files generated every night, run through some identification processes (currently using https://github.com/rdz-oss/BattyBirdNET-Analyzer) and build a UI (mostly vibe coded lol) to help with replay, cataloging, etc.
I'm using an AudioMoth currently (https://www.openacousticdevices.info/audiomoth), am thinking about extending it to do some of the preprocessing in the field to scale things up a bit.
I’m working on a friendlier version of BirdNET-Pi with support of the latest BirdNET 3.0 model, also planning to add the BattyBirdNET later. https://github.com/Suncuss/BirdNET-PiPy
Sorry if this is not the place to do it. I live in a city that has bat at nights, so if you live above 6th floor and you leave your windows open, there are chances some confused bats go into your apartment.
Even worse, they can go into the blind box of your rollover. After two traumatic events where I had bats going into my apartment (and it took me 5 days/nights where I didnt sleep at all to take them out alive), I put something in the opening of the blind box to avoid them getting into it.
However, I don't feel safe. I wake up in the middle of the night with any sound thinking they are trying to get into.
All this introduction is to ask if there is something that detracts bats going near my window. Maybe some kind of ultrasound (that I could play with some kind of speaker), or odor? I don't know, but I'd like to try something that could make me sleep more relaxed.
I asked about this to people who put meshes but they said the mesh goes into the window (it's mostly for mosquitoes), and the open would be outside the mesh, so it wouldn't cover it. I would be OK but I can't find anyone who would be willing to put the mesh on the outside of the window.
Yeah there's quite a bit of opportunity to reduce processing time along the way.
Couple cool things I've learned about bats.
- They are *extremely* loud in the ultrasound range, 130db echolocation calls from something the size of a mouse.
- On an average recording, the ultrasonic range is almost exclusively filled with sound from wildlife (bugs, birds, etc). I'd expected to see lots of harmonics and whatnot from human-generated sounds but there just aren't that many. It's quiet up there.
- You can leverage these two in combination for sampling by just strapping the recording device to the roof of your car and driving around. The wind and road noise is basically absent and the echolocation calls come through loud and clear. The AudioMoth can be fitted with a GPS receiver to correlate the calls to location (and time ofc)
- There are three primary types of echolocation calls: Search - Semiregular calls just to see what's out there. Approach - Faster rate of calls once prey has been identified. Terminal - Aka feeding buzz, very high rate (200hz) of echolocation calls in the last meter or so of approach. Most of the recordings of bat calls you see on YouTube are slowed down 10x to bring the audio into listening range, but this also slows the call tempo by just as much. They make lots of calls.
- Most bat calls use frequency sweeps rather than continuous tones to pick up both distance and relative velocity of the target (akin to FMCW radar).
- There are more bats around than I realized. I started off by looking for 'good spots', but now I just set the device out on a porch. Many times you'll hear me walking up to the recording device at the end of a recording and there will be 2-3 bats overhead that I was perfectly unaware of.
Thanks jcims for sharing this amazing info! However, I wonder how these very loud bats, all in close proximity, don't get confused by each others' calls? Is the answer their frequency sweeping? Or does each have something analogous to a unique "voice"?
Good question! Yes they definitely have unique voices and call signatures. A single string of calls from a single bat will have variation between calls as well (especially in search phase).
It'd imagine there's a lot of neurophysical adaptation involved as well, just like listening to a single conversation in a crowded room.
That said, hunting in an area filled with bats is probably not as effective as being in a quiet place.
Microphone selection is super important and can get extremely spendy very quickly. The AudioMoth device I use comes with a simple mems ultrasonic mic and it's perfectly adequate for what I'm using it for, but loud signals can cause artifacts that wouldn't be present on more expensive ones.
I've been working on trying to help fill out the MeshCore network in our area for off-grid communications. Some of us are setting up solar powered, battery backed MeshCore nodes, they have no connection to power or Internet. You can use a small device (like a credit card or a small walkie-talkie) with a phone, or a blackberry-like device, to send/receive encrypted messages, chat on channels, or communicate on BBS-like "room servers".
It's interesting for if there were some sort of disaster impacting the cell network, or for use in the back woods where you have no cell contact. But it's extremely unreliable. My coworker who is into it, he lives 2-3 miles away but we can rarely communicate because he lives in a bit of a bowl that we don't have reachability into. Meanwhile I'm regularly getting messages from 30-70 miles away no problem.
It reminds me a lot of HAM radio, where there are other better ways to communicate, but if those ways broke it would be nice to have an alternative.
Part of why I'm doing it is my office has a nice, unused tower on top of it. The office itself is ultimately not that high, but the 20ft tower on top of the 3 story building helps a lot. I can JUST reach the 8ft TV antenna mast at my house, depending on tree vegetation (we'll see how much worse it gets as the trees leaf out this spring). It operates in the 900 MHz ISM band, so it can "punch through" more than WiFi can.
I had watched the first half of it a couple weeks ago and it does indeed sound pretty interesting. WiFi HaLow is a long distance capable variant of WiFi and Reticulum is a mesh network protocol.
If I had more people buying into MeshCore, I might push it to doing something like this, but at the moment I think this sort of setup is beyond anything more than just some simple testing in my case.
The ones I built I used the Austin Mesh guidelines, and they use a USB battery setup they've found that is reliable.
I wanted to set up some of the 1 watt radios for the repeaters (more powerful output plus better input stages) have a known problem where if the battery power drops down to 3.3v it goes into a "deep sleep" mode that it won't recover from once the battery pack comes back up to voltage, without physically resetting it. This USB pack is known to provide 5v power as long as it can, and then shut off until it's been charged to the point it can provide 5v again.
Then I plug a solar panel into it. There are also the "SenseCap Solar Nodes" that are a total solution (enclosure, solar panel, radio, batteries) ready to deploy.
I have one of mine on a 20ft tower on the roof at work, I'm not messing with that weekly. I will need to do firmware updates periodically, which can be done via bluetooth.
edit: Forgot to mention that other units can just use little LIon battery packs that plug right into the board and can be charged by a charge controller on the board to a less expensive solution, that's more what the SenseCap uses. Also I think my board has some firmware patches to fix the problem. I just wanted something that was known to not require much messing around with.
They are very similar in function, as another reply said. MeshCore relies more on dedicated repeater infrastructure, and it's design seems to make it more reliable for longer range communications. Most people with solid mesh networks seem to be moving from Meshtastic to MeshCore and having improved experiences with it.
I just started trying to get into this, and so far it's been kinda disappointing. I got a couple of heltec v3s, set them up with meshtastic and found zero other nodes in range. I did a range test by carrying 1 node around with me while I walked my dog, and the other one at home. It maxed out at about a block. I know there are other nodes in the area but I can't reach them unless I turn on MQTT, but at that point you're just using the Internet with extra layers. I'm looking into more powerful antennas, etc, but it looks like a big money sink.
Came here to mention this. I've had a lot of fun putting up stealth repeaters in trees to build out the Meshcore network. One or two nodes in critical places can light up dozens of square miles for the mesh.
Find your local Discord and get rolling. In the Bay Area it's baymc.org.
I build Tiki Tube Amps - hifi stereos inside carved tiki heads. The tikis are carved from solid logs and hollowed out before I wire up all the circuitry inside. It's all analog vacuum-tube-driven circuits soldered point-to-point.
They're really difficult to make but super fun to listen to. When I'm carving I have to plan out how the circuit will be laid out, ensure there's enough space inside for the transformers, consider grounding schemes, etc. Plus mounting components and soldering inside a cramped log is not easy. But when they're done they have such personality. No other stereo listens to music _with_ you.
I love them because they combine many of my disparate interests - woodworking, tiki, electronics, soldering, music, vacuum tubes, metalworking. They're also an excuse to have friends over and throw parties.
If you like to work with your hands and have space, build something physical: big and complex, and actually finish it. I built a single engine two seat kit airplane in my garage, did all the flight testing, and now have an interesting way to travel/commute as a result. The "finish it" part is the most important bit. Computer people spend too much time working on projects that don't have a "done" state. Change that up.
I would start smaller though. There are a lot of half finished airplanes (where the last 20% takes 80% of the time...) and the maker is dead.
I've been working on a ukulele for over a year now and it isn't close to done yet, and this is a much smaller project. (Or maybe I should say I've been working on raising kids for a decade and there is another left?).
Oh, yeah. I’ve been meaning to build an electric ukulele. I’ve built some handmade electric guitars, slide guitars and similar. Mine are rudimentary, more akin to a cigar box guitar (if not less complex).
I've built half a dozen similar box guitars, it's such a fun little thing to build.
Do I see a piezo disk under the bridge in the 3rd instrument? Do you use some kind of preamp with it?
I have been recently experimenting with different kinds of piezo pickups [0] and preamp electronics for them. I've figured out a pretty nice JFET based circuit for the preamp and ordered tiny 13x13mm PCBs with tiny SMT components assembled and it works pretty well (but needs a second revision). They mount directly on the volume potentiometer and fit in a small space.
The one thing I haven't figured out yet is grounding the electronics. In a typical electric guitar you ground the electronics by touching the (grounded) strings, but that doesn't work very well (at all) with slide guitar when your left hand has got a bottle neck slide on it (made of glass or ceramic which is an insulator).
Drop a message below if you want to geek out more about home made guitars and/or related electronics. Depending on your location I could also send some preamp PCBs your way.
I was as confident as I could be. Had multiple tech counselors and A&Ps give it a good look over beforehand. Also had an emergency plan for every 100 feet of altitude post-takeoff. Did the first couple of flight tests in the vicinity of a minor (class D) Bay Area airport and then did the rest of them (including the riskier ones) over the central valley.
In most failure cases, it becomes a glider. I think if it was gonna fall apart around the pilot, it would be obvious long before they got it in the air.
Nope. Given the canopy style of the kit (RV-7A tip-up) and a few build decisions I made (modifications to the original design), actually egressing in-flight would have been infeasible anyway.
6.5 years. What helped most was doing a little bit every day. Taking time off the project would probably have slowed my motivation. Also, at some point, you have spent a lot of money on a project like this, to the point where you kind of have to finish it or you've lost a lot of sunk cost.
I started a few years back and have been doing it off and on since. It's challenging but a lot of fun.
I shoot a lot of older style "recurve" bows, but the main style I shoot are horsebows, that is, bows that were historically shot from horseback.
They're very lightweight and you can shoot much more rapidly than you can with a more modern/mechanical recurve or compound. Right now I shoot around 20-25 arrows a minute. Not amazing compared to experienced archers, but a lot of fun.
I have a number of bows, but here are my favorites:
I highly recommend getting into loudspeakers or audio reproduction in general! Without a doubt the most enjoyable, satisfying, and enriching hobby I've had so far.
A couple years ago I decided to build a pair of synergy horns (look them up!) which included all kinds of interesting stuff! For example, I had to learn CAD, the principles of CNC and how to create toolpaths, what a waveguide is, general woodworking, and lots more. There's also lots of interesting "subhobbies" one may dwelve into such as psychoacoustics, signal processing, LEM/BEM simulations, the optimization of horn geometries (look up AKABAK or Ath4 and their respective DiyAudio threads), analog crossovers, or acoustically treating a room to reduce reverb.
Building speakers and experimenting with bracing and lining/damping have been rewarding for me as determining wether I prefer A or B really requires me to _listen_ in a different way from say, listening to a conversation (or even to music!). It feels very grounding and meditative in a way, and at least in my case, indirectly trains one to notice and appreciate more sounds in everyday life.
A big bonus is that it becomes really easy to throw outdoor parties out in the woods when one doesn't have to rent gear. Loudspeakers and bringing people together is a damn good and rewarding combo.
I was into woodworking, then I got into building fly fishing rods from bamboo.
Fly fishing has been around for a long time. They used to build rods by hand out of bamboo - a specific species of bamboo native to southern China - before factories started making them out of graphite, fiberglass, etc. for cheap.
Modern fly rods are a few hundred bucks. If you try to buy a bamboo rod in a store, they run $2K-$5K. They take a lot of time and meticulous work to build, and the result is a functional work of art.
Woodworking is a ton of fun, and challenging. Bamboo rod making is a niche within a niche, and there are not a whole lot of people who still do it ... mostly retired guys with a lot of time. It's a great tradition, and it's about as far away from computers and technology as I can get.
I didn't even know how to fly fish until I built my first bamboo rod.
> If you try to buy a bamboo rod in a store, they run $2K-$5K.
I got a bunch of cane[0] rods off eBay for relatively cheap[2] (but that was ~2010.) Sadly my fishing activities were strongly curtailed around 2012[1] (due to a family divorce) but I'm hoping to get back to it one day.
When I did get a chance to use them, they were much nicer (to me) than my companion's fancy new rods (even if the bend when fighting a fish was absolutely terrifying.)
[0] I'm not sure if there's any bamboo ones - it's been a while since I've seen them due to [1]
I love how every hobby has its inner nested hobbies and you can seemingly go infinitely deep.
I got back into making electronic music a while ago, and you can dig in deeper by getting into hardware synthesizers. And go deeper by getting into hardware modular synths. And go deeper by building modules from kits. And go deeper by learning electronics and designing your own modules.
It's like a big branching tech tree or tech graph.
With fishing, you can get into fly fishing. And when that's too easy, you start tying flies, or maybe tenkara, or, I guess in your case, making fly rods.
I got into fig (and since then, more broadly, fruit) cultivation. Figs have a rich history, lots of variety, and there are very active online (and in-person) communities where you can buy or exchange plants and cuttings, advice, and fruit. This grew out of an initial interest in gardening, and the long-term goal is to create a food/fruit forest around our house where me, family, friends, and neighbors can walk around, spend time, and eat the absolute best fruit possible.
So far I've got about 40 fig trees in containers (~30 varieties), am focusing a bit more on blackberries this year (4 varieties that were planted last year), and we also have strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, as well as a more standard annual garden with tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, etc as well as some wild edibles: mulberries, wineberries, and black raspberries.
There's a lot of interesting angles to this hobby: fruit selection, cultivation, harvesting, pest management (annoying but still interesting), landscape design, etc. Planning cycles are months at a minimum, and but more often you have to keep in mind what you want the landscape and experience to be like years from now.
It makes it more enjoyable to spend time outside doing physical things when the weather is warm, and I mostly take a break from it (or switch to planning) during the winters here.
You've probably already discovered this, but in case you haven't: watch out for the black raspberries if they're in the ground. They spread at an astronomical rate and are practically unkillable after they're established.
We moved into this house partly bc it had an extra ~acre of space beyond the main "yard" which was starting to turn into a forest. We cleared it of woody stuff but left some black raspberries, maybe 10 plants?
2 years later, it turned into an impenetrable ~1/4 acre thicket of mostly black raspberries with some wild blackberries and wineberries among them. We paid to have it mostly cleared again, and now we are occasionally mowing whatever is not intentionally planted or mulched.
If you're in the right zone, give Pawpaws a chance! North America's largest native fruit! I've got about seven in and around my other trees (they're a forest understory tree) but haven't gotten fruit yet. Any year now...
I started cultivating dewberries and chokecherries because they're dying out near me. The chokecherries are good for like 2 weeks, otherwise they taste like soap.
Dewberries are a real bitch to get started and don't produce a ton of fruit, but are EASILY the best berries you'll ever eat in your life. The native variety are very tart compared to bred plants, but they're legitimately the best things that you can grow. If you have a spot where grass doesn't grow well, plant these!!
I have a volunteer fig tree growing in a container on my patio in the middle of a bunch of onions. I have always heard of people transplanting them from cuttings, presumably because they are difficult to grow from seed. I have no idea how it got there, but I feel fortunate to have been chosen.
Awesome! Curious to hear if it ripens good fruit for you.
In case it's interesting: people normally grow them from cuttings to make sure that the trees will 1. be female (males have figs, but they're not really edible), 2. hold/ripen fruit without pollination, 3. be true to type, and 4. bear fruit sooner (cuttings can bear fruit the first year under the right circumstances).
It's something I got into a few years ago and has been a real eye-opener into the world of perfumery and our wonderful olfactory senses. Strangely, though I suspect is the case with many other hobbies, there is crossover with programming albeit somewhat abstractly.
Often it's about building abstractions and reusable components. For example let's say you wish to create an apple note (typically referred to as an accord). You're not tasked with creating the scent of an actual apple but rather the illusion of apple. This is done by mixing ingredients (usually referred to as raw materials) which are generally split into two categories, synthetic and natural, where a synthetic material if often just an isolated molecule and a natural material may be an oil extracted from nature or a tincture, among other kinds. Once you have mixed the raw materials and are happy with the result, you've essentially created a formula which is a reusable component that can then be used in one or many of your creations.
Aside from the creative process of making the actual perfume, you've then got a ton of applications in which to use it such as a fine fragrance, a candle, room spray, shower gel, shampoo, laundry detergent to name just a few.
With new raw materials becoming available all the time there are just endless possibilities as to what you can create and it, for me, has been a lot of fun both learning the craft and creating actual perfumes that I myself now wear.
I got into HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) fencing last year through a club in my little town. Olympic/sport fencing is fun, but imagine (safely) swinging a 4lbs. steel longsword with two hands at your opponent instead. It's a ton of fun, a great workout (I burn ~1500 calories per class), and competitive so it keeps my interest.
Then there's the whole nerd layer of reading all the original sources from the 15th century, attempting to retain the historical character of the techniques while engaging in real combat, etc. It's both intellectually and physically stimulating.
+1 for martial arts in general. Depending on the art it might not be niche (I'm sure karate and taekwondo are too big for that). But things like HEMA, iaido, eskrima, all kinds of archery, ... are great fun and typically come with smallish & fun communities.
Edit: before you think these arts are immune to tech, I once had a student who built a (truly awful) sword fighting "robot" to help train deflecting strikes. Not quite up to par with Dune's robot swordmasters.
Seconding or thirding martial arts (MA). I do Kung Fu, but I'd bet all the internet cookies there's at least one Brazilian Jujutsu practitioner on HN.
On the point of tech in MA, I recall seeing a documentary where some people got a Xing Yi Quan master to perform a form in mocap gear so they could analyse his movements. I think there's still a lot that kinesiology could learn from the way different people move (especially from Inclusive Karate practitioners).
They're essentially a combination of a plane, spoke-shave, draw-knife and gouge but all in a one handed tool. They were primarily used by Native Americans to build things like canoes, snowshoes, baskets etc. I first found about them from reading John McPhee's Survival of the Bark Canoe [1] but there are lots of uses of them on video on the website below (which I created).
If you want to get into woodworking but want only a few tools and/or a very portable tool, highly recommend.
e.g. in theory you could build an entire canoe with an axe, crooked knife and 3 or 4 sided awl (and a lot of time, patience and materials)
My wife & I are Scottish Country dancers. It's a social dance form (it's traditional to swap partners for every dance so nobody has to bring a partner, though not required). Pretty good cardio, there are groups all over the world, so it's often not that difficult to find a class.
Other similar social dance forms from the UK are Contra dancing, English Country dancing, and Ceilidh dancing. Square dancing in the US developed out of these forms. Many other cultures have their own social dance forms, with varying levels of formalization.
Meaningful contribution is easy: these groups always benefit from more participants. Scottish Country dance has a formalized teaching certificate program, roughly equivalent to a Master's degree worth of work (and if you're a UK resident it qualifies to teach PE in UK schools).
> Meaningful contribution is easy: these groups always benefit from more participants.
Same for probably all small dance communities! While it seems like a different kind of 'contribution' than the OP is looking for, it's very meaningful personally to share music and creativity with people. (Personally, I dance lots of Balboa -- a swing dance with a local scene of probably less than 100 active participants.)
Not sure if you're into 40s music, but there's a little known instrument called a theatre organ. It was conceived when silent films were taking off, and theaters needed some form of background music. Paying an organist was much cheaper than hiring a whole orchestra, so a lot of theaters opted to get an organ as a cost saving measure (imagine, lol). Anyways, a few have survived, and I learned the basics of playing one. It's an absolutely incredible instrument, in terms of the sheer amount of sounds you can make with it. Someone played the star wars overture for example[1]. It also has one of the most flexible interfaces, with the tabs, second touch, and sustenuno pedal on the volume foot controls. It's inspired a lot of my own tinkering with custom sound synthesis too.
I got into designing my own knitting patterns. I enjoy that I can customize everything — the yarn material, color (including marling, helix knitting, double knitting), yarn weight, needle size (e.g., resulting in "airy" vs "packed" textures), knit textures (e.g., stockinette, linen, miss, etc.), construction process (e.g., can I figure out a way to knit in the round vs flat?), cables, gradual increases/decreases, selvedge/cord, desired ease, etc..
The demoscene, while not unknown, is still quite niche amongst technologists and digital artists in the most of the world. It has a pretty thriving scene with dozens of get togethers worldwide (mostly in Europe) each year, is creative, communal, artistic, competitive, multidisciplinary, highly influential, and has a near infinite number of ways to engage with it. It has a long running internal culture, but is welcoming of outsiders willing to learn, and is kind of a "third way" to think about software and technology that can often radically change how you think about computing.
It's also a recognized UNESCO recognized intangible cultural heritage in at least half a dozen countries.
Railway preservation (full size, not model). It looks crowded when a steam train is running and the moths gather around. The reality, when the trains are not running, is typically quite different, with a small dedicated group. If a place looks too crowded, pick a smaller museum.
Think of all the jobs that have to be done to run a railway and you will be able to find a museum that does it: heavy maintenance, boiler work, fitting and turning, blacksmithing, woodwork, upholstering, painting, catering, engine driving, fireman, signalling, customer service, ...
It's a great way to meet people, learn new skills and work with physical things.
Only problem is this really depends on where you live. There is a nice museum 45 minutes from me - far enough that it is hard to get there for a quick evening after work...
Consider mathematics. If you already know enough math to derive the quadratic equation, you might make a small change, like adding X^3 or X^4. See where your own techniques take you before looking up the answer. With just a few pen strokes, you will be playing with an equation for which there is no general solution, or no known solution. In mathematics it will take you very little time to start playing at the boundaries of human knowledge, and it's relatively easy to memorize a few starting points that many hours of passenger travel fly by.
It might be interesting to try your idea, to see for yourself where the difficulty lies, but be warned that finding general solution formulas for degree 3 and 4 equations is kind of brutally difficult. I'd link to the historical developments but it would spoil it for those that nevertheless want to give it a shot. Degree 5 requires some serious far out of the box ideas, if you want to understand what's going on.
But in general the idea of making small changes to solved problems and seeing if you can tackle them is an excellent approach to recreational mathematics! I think I'd start somewhere other than higher degree equations though, that would be a rough start.
I like this. I like crossword puzzles but don't like I'm just solving pre-made puzzles rather than exploring new territory. Math seems the best candidate but are there other fields with similar challenges?
Since I was a kid I was fascinated by computer math, such as a projectile in Scorched Earth (wind, angle, velocity, gravity). I turned 50 this week and I STILL haven’t dug into how even the basics work.
Can still remember the sound of the Funky Bomb firing in Scorched Earth. Thanks fot reminding me of that.
If you're interested in this sort of stuff, the book Nature Of Code is great for exploring this topic by creating simulations. There's a Javascript version and Java based version (using the Processing framework). It isn't actually all that difficult, and I found it very satisfying to work through.
My niche hobbies is carving wooden spoons and I think it balance very well with any work behind a computer.
It’s surprisingly deep for something that looks so simple. You can start with almost nothing: a small axe to split the wood and a knife to shape it. That’s enough to make your first spoon. From there, it can become as technical or as artistic as you want, depending on how far you go.
There’s also a whole international community around it. People organize small gatherings and larger meetups where they carve together, share techniques, compare tools, and pass down very specific bits of knowledge. There is a whole series of videos about this on youtube on a channel named "zed outdoors".
This hobby also had me look around for wood everywhere, when walking or driving and you can do it almost everywhere as long as you have a small knife with you.
Also, using a spoon you made yourself is genuinely satisfying in a way that’s hard to explain. It changes the relationship you have with a very ordinary object.
It looks like a quiet craft, but you can go very far with it.
That actually sounds like a lot of fun. I have lots of various kinds of trees ranging from very soft to extremely hard and dense (juniper!) woods. I think I'll try that sometime.
Not sure if it is niche, but focused on one South Asian music genre -- been working on this personal project to compile, and collect resources from reliable sources along with mapping lineages of people. Also, I archive a lot of music for this genre from different sources before it vanishes from internet!
EDIT: I have one more page but that is not in navigation yet for people not familiar with the genre. The site is still work in progress -- if you have any feedback, please do leave it here, on the website if you can. The content curation is the most tedious part!
https://www.qavvali.com/tradition/
Qawali is some of the best music in the world, but I think it’s a little hard for a western audience to digest, especially without someone providing a running translation and context behind a lot of the things being said.
That being said, your website is wonderful! Nice work.
Thank you, and absolutely! I have been trying to get more people to try — my friend and i host a Zoom listening session every 3 months or so where he curates a playlist to introduce new artists.
sure thing —- feel free to share with anyone else interested. It starts at 1PM EST, and goes on for roughly 8 hours so drop by/tune in anytime you want:
https://luma.com/823kzuci?tk=IiDKu2
Synthesizers! I like it because it's tactile and immediate, and you're not glued to a screen, but can create fun-sounding beats.
Nowadays there are nice, cheapish groove boxes that are perfect for noodling on the couch. I started with the Novation Circuit Tracks, and also really enjoy the Teenage Engineering EP-133. Not to say that I am any good at this, but it's an enjoyable hobby! Bonus if you are friends who are also into it and you can jam together :)
Go to modular meets, music instrument expos like Superbooth, dj sets and live concerts.
I met all my best friends this way, everybody is a record collector, beat maker or techno producer.
Record conventions are also fun, after couple of occasions you will realize how small the scene is.
Deep in the Eurorack rabbit hole myself. Trying to avoid anything that has a screen and anything that requires a computer to interact with. Patching cables and twiddling knobs is great fun. Sometimes it even sounds good xD
My niche hobby is exploring patterns in Islamic Geometry and trying to re create them. It is an art of creating pleasing and aesthetic geometric patterns (from intersecting circles mostly). The art form is very popular in decorating Mosques and other Islamic monuments as human/animal representation is forbidden.
[Edit] The thing that I find the most fascinating is that all the complex design you see, are done with only using a pair of compass and rulers.
This is something I wanted to get into after vising Alhambra, which really is the "mirror of paradise" that it purported to be. You say that the complex designs are done by hand, but given how mathematical they are it left me wondering if there is a thriving scene of computer-generated patterns?
The floral designs (arabesque) are done by hand and the geometric tiling is ruler/compass based. I focus mostly on the geometric part of it, since I dont have the dexterity to do the arabesque by hand.
To your point of Computer generated Imagery, I think it would be too easy, but that would definitely take the fun away
Yeah. So disheartening. Wish you are able to one day and wish none of those have sustained any damage. Many have, in Tehran.
By the way you might like making kaleidoscopes.
I have found using compass and ruler only methods much more accurate because I don't have a drafting board or anything. The usual school supply rulers are not finely graduated enough to rely on them. In fact they aren't long enough for my purposes (although I can get a longer one if I want. The fun of deducing compass constructions is its own reward).
Even simple things such as drawing a parallel can become insufficiently accurate. With compass and ruler, much better. Ideally one should have drafting board and T square.
stunning buildings and patterns. not religious myself but i have to admit that lots of old, religious sites are absolutely beautiful. i just looked at images of some old mosques (not really a thing where i am), and they look gorgeous :) i get why they inspire you artistically.
What I rarely read about as hobby but I really enjoy is touch! Taking massage/therapy classes, like lomi-lomi, craniosacral, acupressure, shiatsu, etc. -- plenty of great courses available. They're typically aimed at professionals since it is "under-explored" as a hobby, but well worth it as self experience. Not only the receiving but also the giving during the training(s), plus all the chances to give nice touch experiences to your friends and family! How many bodies have you deeply touched in your life?
Another niche hobby of mine is constellations groups: you meet with others to simulate and explore a problem somebody within the group is facing; a bit like impro theatre but real-life issues. Very interesting and doesn't require any skills, you just "do". I often just go and participate as a viewer: Better than cinema!
I also like NVC (non-violent communication) classes and trainings. It's a hobby but a bit more effort, you spend time with other likeminded people, learn something about the inner functioning of others, plus it improves my communication and conflict skills, both in personal and business areas.
I hadn't even considered massage as a potential hobby. I love getting massages, but they're not cheap. Taking a course might be a good hack to get cheap massages..
Good massage classes cost quite a bit of money. I still find it well worth it on a lot of levels, even if you're just interested in the receiving (for now)! I would compare it more to other hobbies, which often do cost substantial amounts of money (material, travel, equipment, club fees, etc -- none of which you need for this).
In multi-session trainings, it is often suggested or sometimes even required to meet with other participants to exercise between the official trainings. Even in cases where that's not officially part of the trainings, I want to encourage you to speak up and announce you're willing to provide your body to others for their training (who may be there for a professional career) -- in fact it's not like you're "asking for a free massage", you are offering a very valuable contribution, since you can give them feedback based on what you both learned in class, which is something other people they know will not be able to do. Also, it takes a bit of courage to ask friends, especially at the beginning, and hesitancy to touch friends in new ways; there's something about being in class together that makes it easier to accept touching the other; it's a 'professional' relationship.
Social dancer here -- without hyperbole this was a lifechanging hobby for the better, and while I haven't been able to "meaningfully contribute to" as a criteria, I am a much better person for it.
I'm primarily a salsa dancer (~18 years), but spent a few years doing a buncha other dances to get an understanding of the music and movement so I'm pretty much beginner-intermediate in a buncha other dances (equiv of 1-2 year level dancer) -- Bachata, West Coast Swing, Fusion, and a splash of a ton of other dances.
The best I can explain to most people is that dance is a conversation to a topic (music) through the language of motion instead of sound, and that just like rewarding conversations we can have through verbal language and text, some of the most resonant conversations can be had through connection and touch.
For the subset of folks who happen to be gamers here, this is a massively multiplayer co-op music game with a very high skill curve.
I started dancing due to taking a popular social dance series at college by Richard Powers, and that was the gateway for my lifelong dance practice. It allowed me to indulge in another side of collaborative music, gave me a good relationship with interpersonal connection and physical touch, and provided me with a fairly active and healthy hobby for my life.
Can't say enough good things about it, just that the skill curve for beginners is high -- the first year is known as beginner's hell, but once you establish a basic vocabulary in the dance it becomes so much more artistic and creative.
I want to put extra emphasis on how technically demanding salsa is and how appealing it can be to autists (and how many of them you'll find at the average social/class). Your body, the music, and the people are all puzzles you could spend lifetimes learning to solve. I think about salsa almost as much as I think about software. How to make a lead work, how to improve my alignment, how to interpret instruments.
Id like to recommend that even a bit more, maybe from a different perspective. I took a salsa course back in university because a girl asked me, her boyfriend wasnt interested. That lead to dancing a bit more, bachata was just part of the course especially. But also not just one course: It turned out there were tons of opportunities later to join these dance evenings organized in bars. So doing that one first step enabled so many more.
I never got good, but: It is still a useful skill to even just know a little bit. To have the option to join instead of having to stay put at the table when your group decides to go dance. I wound up meeting people from latin america later, so that was way more often than was reasonable to expect. Im pretty sure having some basic ability helped me win someone over - to be able to show interest in that hobby -, and even just feeling better when showing my child now how to dance is nice.
Especially when you otherwise are mainly interested in technical stuff it is a good counter point.
Love tango as a dance form... but the scene is limited and not very accessible, which limits its popularity.
As an ex-organizer of the salsa scene, IMHO a scene is defined by its ecosystem of newbies converting into regulars, the regulars improving the dance quality over time, and the oldies aging out due to life, family, and what not. The best enduring dance scenes have good feeder intro classes, a dance that doesn't get stale, and a way to handle dancer attrition. IMHO tango just doesn't quite have the feeders into the regular scene, which may be a lack of intro instructors or a lack of accessibility for new learners of the dance.
(For people picking up dance in 2026, even Salsa's not that accessible now... Bachata and Country Swing are the new gateway dances, though I have plenty of reservations for both which is its own nerdy conversation.)
Part of what settled me into salsa vs other dances where I preferred the connection OR the musicality more was that it had critical mass in terms of dancers of all levels and ages -- which meant that it had dancers I hang out with socially for non-dancing things.
Animal tracking. I picked it up in college and it has been a real source of joy and a true challenge. It's also something you can do almost anywhere: urban, suburban, rural, out in "the wild."
A lot of people think of it as looking for paw/hoof marks in the mud, but tracking can actually be quite involved, requiring you to understand the environment and ecology as a whole.
For example, tracking birds is outrageously difficult and when I first started out I didn't think it was possible. But the more I learned about birds, their habits (per species), their environment, I started to see signs everywhere. It really got my eyes open and I started seeing the same old places in completely new ways!
And in terms of contributing something, there are all sorts of apps/organization that can help you identify different species and in turn you give them data in the form of pictures, location, etc. I use iNaturalist myself, but there are others.
My strange hobby was going on what I called "leak walks".
I lived in a town where on any sunny day I could go for a walk and be almost guaranteed to spot a water mains leak I hadn't seen before, which I'd then report and see how long it would be before it was fixed.
There was one I thought was maybe a waste-water leak from the smell, but generally wastewater leaks are much harder to spot, and it's generally CSOs (Combined Sewer Overflows) that are the main problem there, which happen in heavy rainfall and not so much in residential areas.
Mains-water leaks however are easy to spot, because they're damp patches (or flowing/trickling water) in otherwise good weather.
I’m a paraglider pilot and powered paraglider recently. Totally recommended, you get to connect with nature in a meaningful way. Also people who practice this kind of sports are nice. From a tech perspective there are a lot of data generated on each flight you can create your own way to capture that data or use already existing apps.
I got to do this a couple of years ago. It's super cool! Very much recommend it.
But I'll note that it's super...weird? in the sense that it's like halfway between being both relaxing and excitative, nature and machine. I went in expecting a thrill ride and it wasn't quite that, but it wasn't quite relaxing either (though I'd imagine the more you do it the more it feels like the letter!).
The best part is when you can combine your love of engineering and flying and work on your own electric paramotor.
Highly recommend paragliding as an affordable and safe way to experience flight
I’ve been flying since 2012 and I always think about safety. Safety is relative but if you do the things the right way you will be ok. A good common sense is super important, and then keep on your progression, there’s no need to skip steps. Knowing the air is a lifetime journey so there is no rush. Also I feel paramotor is kind of safer because you get to fly with light wind or not wind at all, mostly early in the morning or near sunset. In my personal experience this sport change my life.
I've known 3 people that were into paragliding. 2 of them had near misses from chute collapses and the other flew into a stationery car (he was saved from more serious injury by wearing a full face helmet). So definitely not risk free, based on that sample.
I did it once with an experienced pilot, tandem. An awesome experience. He explained the most dangerous time is when you get slightly confident. That's when most accidents occur, at the intermediate stage. He said you have to be religiously careful at all times, and stay paranoid.
A few days ago I donated all my powered paragliding equipment that I did not use for years. Too many accidents in my circle of friends, I still used to fly planes but not soft wings. If safety would not be a concern, paragliding is indeed very nice, more connected than a glider, fun, not too expensive, but I don't remember any paraglider pilot that I personally know that did not have at least a serious accident.
That could actually lead to a profitable business in the longer run: You will have great insights and lots of working code that may end up in a commercial product that someone is seeking?
Esp since you mentioned unmet requirements, thats actually a good indicator
I do this now! It is wonderful. So many unique projects being worked on that you'd never come across in your daily life. It's always fun to experience a world that is so far removed from tech, and see how clever people are at solving problems without SaaS, apps, or spreadsheets. Not every problem has a tech solution.
And it has turned into a decent chunk of business over the long run.
Oh damn, I love this one. I’ve been vibe coding a ‘public benefit’ app on the side that has a few hundred users but never thought of doing something for an actual non-profit.
Care to elaborate on your process? Curious how you approach them and come up with the best path forward with limited time (assuming you have a full time job as well on the side). Thanks!
I would recommend finding a local non-profit you're interested in helping, and start volunteering. Don't go in guns blazing "I'm here from Hackernews to save you" but get to know the people and what they do, and then how to help will become apparent.
By local I would recommend truly local and not a "division" of a national non-profit; those are an entirely different beast.
I would suggest looking for local charities whose mission you are care about. Then just finding out what issues they have. I ended up building a simple system based on Airtable for a local charity. Although pretty unsophisticated it was transformative for them.
Every couple of months the family and I will book out some long weekend to just go to an Airbnb in some random town with some copy paper and just go around trying to draw what we think is around us. Inevitably the lines collide and we have to ask some local passerby for help, and if they know any interesting places nearby, and before you know it they're following along with a colored pencil and some copy paper against a hardcover book too.
I’m obsessed with powerlifting. Not only because big numbers get bigger but also the physical changes that occur with a healthy dose of lifting each week. It’s also easy to track lifting stats and there are tons of analysis tools out there if data analysis is something you enjoy.
Also, I’m trying to learn guitar - right now following the Justinguitar.com lessons
I do powerlifting 3x a week but I don't otherwise view myself as obsessed with it. I don't have a coach, I don't enter competitions. I know my PRs in my head but I don't keep spreadsheets or stats or have any kind of real programming. I don't video my lifts, I don't post about it on social media. I'm just content with getting stronger.
I really don't get obsessed with anything, which might be a fault as that seems to be a trait of people who are really successful in what they do.
On the other hand, it's the one type of exercise I have actually been able to stick with for any length of time. Started about 5 years ago at age 55. So never too late to try it, even if exercise has never been appealing to you.
ditto. I don't have great numbers, my bench is terrible, not even 1.5x BW, but I did manage to get my DL to ~2.5x in a competition, then tweaked my back and now only double overhand, which means my grip tends to go when I get to ~2x BW (my gym doesn't allow chalk, and I don't use straps, so it is what it is).
Do you mind if I ask what you did which restricts your ability to mixed grip? In terms of loading, I would expect your back to be loaded in a similar manner irrespective of the hand position.
Not who you asked but I use overhand hook grip and do conventional deadlifts (not sumo). I find mixed grip bothers my bicep on the underhand side. I also use chalk, and straps for heavy pulls.
I don't understand a gym that doesn't allow chalk.
somehow mixed grip makes me twist slightly which caused me back problems; after a few tweaks to the lower back, I decided that mixed wasn't worth it (I don't compete anymore). Yes, you are right, I do use the hook grip, since I also do some weightlifting.
+1 on this - powerlifting is great due to 1) Rapid, specific initial progress, 2) Highly structured programming (e.g., RPE based), 3) Focus on strength vs. aesthetics is a great way to be more holistic about health & performance, 4) Forcing function on all downstream decisions (diet, sleep, alcohol). Adding +15 lbs on your deadlift can become strong motivation to drive discipline, 5) Drives the importance of recovery/rest on long term progress
I've started going down the rabbit hole with Reactive Training Systems and Emerging Strategies. Been a very satisfying deep dive into all sorts of data, variables, etc. to play with that has me constantly playing around with different ideas. Their free training tracker is just the tip of the iceberg but focusing on RPEs and protocols already feels like a game changer.
Started with Stronglifts 5x5 a couple of years ago and has definitely been one of the best things for me. I don't compete but love seeing the numbers go up.
I am 2/3x more productive on days that I get a powerlifting session in before work. There is no better feeling than overcoming a plateau through hard work and dedication.
For guitar I followed Justin up into his intermediate level stuff but then switched to in person lesson and they made a big difference for me. I think I got lucky with my first teacher though, as I've not really gelled with teachers I worked with later.
I'm obsessed with Strongman style functional lifting.
one of my favorite parts of powerlifting, opposed to hiit or other fitness lifting, is the lack in physical change. i feel like i look the same but can point to numbers that show im much stronger
When I started stronglifts, I didn't tell anyone and people noticed just from my physique after like ~5 weeks of training. Noob gains are insane and definitely cause physical change.
True - I guess I am more of a power-builder. Which for those that don't know is powerlifting but also incorporates a lot of bodybuilding-type rep work for aesthetics. You lose some specificity doing this arguably so you're expending energy that would be better spent powerlifting if that was your true goal but this trade off is worth it to me.
I absolutely love my ancient machines, and I use them to explore period applications, much more than games.
I also love to restore and preserve them. There’s something magical about a Sun workstation Solaris 2 a Frog Design Trinitron monitor. or a Microvax running VMS and DECWindows. Or a multi-user Altair Z80. I think it’s sad a lot of software was lost and some platforms were denied the documentation that’d enable their preservation (looking at you, IBM - document the AS/400 and release old OS to hobbyists).
I have a lot of fun with my old PDP-11s. Being able to run an original version of Unix on a machine with actual core memory (that I restored to working order) is a real kick for me. Gives a sense of depth to the software I run on my modern Linux laptop.
I have a working Apple II with some of the original games, manuals, etc. Let me know if there's a way to contact you. Happy to send it your way if you cover shipping or something along those lines.
I think a really underrated hobby is amateur Microscopy, I don't know why its not more popular.
Looking at moss, pond water, microbes, tardigrades, paramecia, cells, plants, crystals, stuff around the house
You can get a decent microscope for like $250 and just get a smartphone mount to take high quality pictures/videos.
I feel like with astronomy/telescopes you spend a ton of money just to see a blurry blob whereas microscopes are way more bang-for-buck in terms of how much cool science stuff you can see for cheap.
I can recommend the mono 'zoom tube' industrial cameras with live USB output. Very cheap in China, often expensive when resold overseas. I think a 4k one should be $100 or less. Maybe $150 including stand, ring light, etc. USB UVC control.
Despite AI starting to crowd this space, I've been spending all of my free time learning music production (doing it the old fashion way without AI). It's a great mix of technical and creative problem solving. Mostly focusing on dark ambient/cinematic composition, playing around hardware synths (Prophet 6, Subsequent 37, modular / eurorack, Digitone II).
Very nice listen. Perfect sort of song to have on while working. It reminds me of an album called Obsidian by Jónsi. It had a special exhibit at the museum of old and new art in Tasmania that was stupendous. (https://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/exhibitions/741-jonsi-h...)
That is a mighty compliment that this reminds you of Jónsi, thank you for that! He has been an inspiration of mine for a long time, amongst a long list of other very talented artists.
I had no idea about his Obsidian project, I will certainly be taking a look at that, thanks for the recommendation!
Thank you so much for that! I've actually been debating starting a self hosted blog (or maybe a Substack...) to capture and document my process and provide more context around the music I'm producing, maybe I'll spend some time working on that this weekend!
you know the OP has "ion" and "dust" in the middle so this was hard to find.
I normally can't stand ambient, but you went a different direction in the middle there. You should put out an album, that probably no one will buy, but maybe eventually you get asked to do soundtracks for things.
Walking and finding history if your location has such history to offer to find.
People pay vast accruing cumulative sums over time to go to the gym and my exercise pays me with every single walk. Some of that modern human history I have found dates back hundreds of years in the form of coins and bottles while some of the native human history I have found dates back 10 thousand years. I cannot neglect the fossils either as the oldest I have found reviewed by an expert is said to be Paleozoic tabulate coral being over 251 million years aged.
Thanks to gravity everything lost in the past is under our feet and as digitalization has taken over our global society, created by some of those reading this here, there are not many folks walking let alone looking. I found my first item over 14 years ago now and while my partner HATES the aggregate volume of the things I have collected she cannot neglect the uniqueness, rarity and value of some of those items. Every single walk inspires real motivation however one needs their health first to take that walk.
I have one yes but I rarely take it given the overwhelming amounts of false signals from iron, ironstone, and slag. There are so many surface finds with each tide change that the added human effort of swinging and digging quickly fades.
A town along the water in Maryland founded in 1694 that has documented colonial roots as well with being present in water way form on the only known Native American Chesapeake Bay hand drawn deer hide map, 1590-1620, which still exists in a British museum.
The history here over time is extremely vast and I have been very fortunate in my walks to have located many items related to that history. Speaking only to the Native American finds I have located hundreds of points of vast variety, many hundreds of tools large and small along with objects no expert can explain yet they know to be Native American from their workings. With each tide change the shoreline is manipulated thus revealing more while covering the things missed until another tide change.
One's mind may be curious to ask also of what other things I have found and foregoing specifics I can say as a lead on to those curious that one of the first railroads in the US terminated at the waters edge behind my location. And on that railroad it has been documented that U.S. Presidents, Kings and Queens, Daniel Boone, Benjamin Latrobe, Lafayette and more road those rails and therefore stood on this ground I now walk. Not to far from that railroad was the county's first tavern which hosted those riding the rails and served them libations in bottles while along that journey.
The British landed behind my location too during the War of 1812 and burnt a small supporting outpost town and many boats very near that railroad. In 1999 a water based archeological dig was conducted where a British boat was discovered along with many items in the vessels hull from that era.
I left much out but this alone should reflect the quantity and quality of the items I have found. I have literal buckets of finds and even more buckets of items I have yet to sort.
Watchmaker in training here - after 20 years in startups I am now in my first semester of watchmaking school. It is one of the hardest things I've done in my 47 years, and I am loving every minute of it. It is training my brain, hands, and eyes to see and do things I never thought possible.
Repairing a watch feels similar to dealing with code to me:
- observing to see how/why certain watch components/chunks of code work and interact with each other
- analyzing performance
- disassembling and cleaning parts/"cleaning" code
- troubleshooting why something isn't working
- repairing faults caused by the previous watchmaker/developer
I highly recommend it to anyone needing something physical to do after a day spent staring at a screen. Stare at a watch instead!
It's a great time to get into programming languages stuff: designing domain-specific languages, building new tools/abstractions and, especially, formal verification. If you're mathematically oriented, you can explore formalizing mathematical proofs in Lean.
LLMs have really revitalized interest in these areas. AI can really help navigate the initial learning curve, can do a surprising amount of "heavy lifting" and can make tedious but useful work much easier. Do you want your little language to have a language server and nice editor-specific syntax highlighting? Do you need to write a parser with decent error messages? Do you need to prove a bunch of largely straightforward lemmas to get to the proof you actually care about? All of these things are easier (and, hopefully, more fun) than they were a few years ago. But, at the same time, there is still a lot of room for human insight and design in this process. There are a lot of areas that AI can't handle (or, at least, can't handle well) and, of course, nothing stops you from doing the fun stuff by hand even if you could hand it off to Claude.
And, of course, all this PL stuff was fun before LLMs. It's even more fun now even if you don't want to use AI yourself, because more people are doing and talking about PL stuff online, and there are more tools and libraries you can use yourself.
I've been building small games on and off over the last decade
Started taking it a bit more seriously over the last 3 months and I've started building a specific game that I'm slowly building out
It's a top down ARPG called Mechstain where the player creates and pilots voxel based mechs
Instead of traditional gear, your mech has a physical voxel footprint that you the player have to fit weapons and components inside
Your job is to manage space, power and mass, what you can fit and power directly becomes your stats and abilities, essentially a bin packing problem
Basically take Diablo 2 and remix it with Kerbal Space Program, still fleshing out the various systems, but I'm really enjoying the process of slowly designing systems, iterating on it and fleshing it out
It's quite fun taking thoughts I've been noodling on for years and trying to figure out if they synergise with what I'm looking at and do they provide interesting player decisions
Recently onboarded a 3d artist and it's really making things look a lot better
If anyone has experience lighting this sort of game, I'd love to talk to them, still trying to figure that out =)
I've got a local guy that provides me all my hot sauce. I used to buy from supermarkets but I've become convinced that sourcing everything I eat locally is the way to go.
Anyway I only need to order from him like once per year because he sends me about 1l of this carolina reaper sauce that is so potent it only takes a few drops.
Growing chillies easily becomes its own rabbit-hole. I grow between 30-40 different varieties, which, depending on where you live, can be an interesting and near year-long venture.
My hobby involves trying to help my brother get a job. He has a disability and can only work remotely at low-skill jobs. So, I have spent years applying, starting, and doing work in virtual assistant, support desk, and social media management roles for him. I apply to contract and freelance projects on his behalf, get started with the work, and later try to hand it off to him. He will either say one of two things: "You do it yourself" or that his brain cannot process the work. I make 10-15 times more money at my regular job, so hearing him say "You do it yourself" is not fun.
This hobby also includes trying to convince him that the business schemes he comes up with are not great—they're exclusively fraud-related, such as various forms of gambling and crypto stuff.
Mum keeps telling me that if I do not look after him, he will likely end up in a worst situation. He is in his early 40s by the way.
I did a second job as a hobby so I could just pay him the money, but that did not work because he keeps investing it in one of his schemes. So, I have to find him a job and convince him to keep it. I have a set of fake accounts that I use to apply to jobs and beg him take them on while he continuously says "you do it".
He has a physical disability, and he had major trauma that he is dealing with, but that was more than a decade ago. He went to therapy a few times but a couple of therapist essentially gave up on him. He said they were zoned out when he keeps talking.
I have been at my "limit" for several years already. I have a day job, and at night I am making freaking "Happy Easter" posters in Canva for a print shop with 200 followers on Instagram. Everyday I am begging the guy to take over the contract while he continuously keeps saying "you do it" or that his brain does not work. He is literally doing the whole 9 yards. Even has a podcast and live streams. I am not kidding at all. I told myself maybe talking to the camera is a way for him to connect with his friends and a coping mechanism.
We all carry our burdens. It sounds extremely disrespectful and dishonorable, but without the help of autistic parenting groups, I wouldn’t have lasted this long. He is my platonic autistic surrogate son.
No, I am not. That is the thing—it has been 7 years, and we are stuck in the same loop.
If I were to give your friend advice, it is to send a lot of warm emails. Joining a freelance marketplace is going to be brutal. Connect with folks in different communities, talk with them a bit, and then ask if they have any jobs. The success rate I would say is about 1 out of 50 to 70 outreaches.
I am not sure that is possible because I act as a buffer between him and my parents.
My other siblings drew a line, and they are miserable themselves because they can't help.
He is the kind of guy who will take a mortgage on my parents' house to do some sort of forex play because he has figured out the true intention of US oil policies and how that impacts South East Asian oil-supplying countries—and wants to bet everything on Brunei and Malaysian currency.
I don't think chess engines are a solved problem for some use cases. Yes you can make something strong, maybe even the strongest, but can you create a chess engine perfectly tuned to actually teaching a player? Instead of superhuman perfect lines and inscrutable long-horizon strategy, can you teach nearly optimal human play in a way that's actionable, modular and memorable? Can you improve on tournament prep for players against particular opponents or within a particular metagame?
Also, obviously it's your life, and we're here on Earth to fart around, but I have spent a good portion of my life dipping into one hobby after another, as my dad did before me, so I'm half speaking to myself when I ask this: why do you think you can't meaningfully contribute to any of these realms, even now? To me that sounds like some deep seated fear or doubt, some aversion to competition, some overriding bitterness. I'm slightly worried you'll just be back here in another couple of years trying to find another new hobby, unsullied by the efforts and achievements of others. You won't find that! I would actually suggest a particularly expensive hobby: going to therapy. Try that, and learn that you're already enough, and if your contributions are meaningful to you, that's all that matters. Happy to be way off the mark here though.
This. For those more into reading instead of straight to therapy, Barbara Sher's "Refuse to Choose!" book about living with a multitude of interests can be a good starting point.
Also, making (or maybe tuning) a chess engine to teaching sounds like an interesting challenge, actually.
I’ve started making what I “joy machines” that I am putting up in or near my neighborhood. They’re some combination of public interactive art (e.g. push a button and it prints out a compliment) and little art on display that I design and 3D print for people to take.
I have this delusion of grandeur about starting a movement to take all of the mostly-idle 3D printers in people’s homes and to use them to create little tokens of joy in people’s neighborhoods.
I've been playing exclusively CRPGs for the last 12 months or so, which was kinda a niche genre before the success of BG3. There are tons of way to beat those games and optimizing how you build your party and characters (what players call "min-maxing") while following a highly narrative story is a lot of fun. Most of them are quite old and often on sales for like 5 bucks on Steam, for which you get hundreds of hours of gameplay. A few recommendations: Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2, Owlcat's Pathfinders & W40K Rogue Trader, Larian's Divinity 1, 2 & BG3, Bioware's BG1 & BG2, etc…
These are a blast. I went through a phase in highschool where I exclusively played 90's CRPGs. There are some real gems that find a unique playstyle with tons of freedom due to how low fidelity the games are, while still being visually engaging and beautiful. Definitely check out fallout 2 if you haven't tried it yet, it's one of my favorites!
I always meant to go back to Wizardry 7 I think it is. (Or 5, I forget)
I was convinced that a party of all Ninjas and Samurai would be unstoppable, but I never could make it work. I recall leveling up to a point where a high enough character would get 3 attacks per turn, and then when hit counterattack twice. Multiply this by the whole party.
But realistically, at some point this flurry of attacks every round just fell over because you need better magic users for enemies with certain weaknesses. My memory is fuzzy, but it also may have related to the increasingly large hordes of enemies which would dilute the effects of so many attacks.
Nice to see people discovering these games. I wouldn't really say it was niche until BG3 though, there were plenty of highly acclaimed games long before that.
You might like this blog, the author plays through CRPGs in chronological order. Currently they're at the mid 90s. https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/
Get a microscope and help me explore the role of structured water in rouleaux formation.
Rouleaux formations are clumps of red blood cells, and they're bad because 90% of our circulatory system is < 1 cell wide, so clumps cannot pass. Hematological literature of past 50 years is a bit of a mess regarding mechanisms, seemingly has not considered structured water because it's recent and looks a little fringe. Structured water is known to be disrupted by WiFi, so if a clearer connection can be made between structured water and rouleaux, it could offer the simplest and most encompassing explanation for biological harm from EMF; would also make the benefits of sauna, red light therapy, grounding/earthing, and other practices more legible.
> it could offer the simplest and most encompassing explanation for biological harm from EMF
Frankly this is a bit of a red flag for me in terms of scientific rigour. It sounds like you want the conclusion to be true, or you already believe it to be true, that EMFs are harmful, and you are searching for ways to justify it. Careful with confirmation bias.
> would also make the benefits of sauna, red light therapy, grounding/earthing, and other practices more legible
This is also a bit suspect. These treatments don't seem to have much in common and it's unclear how they may affect the phenomenon you are discussing. Coincidentally they also tend to be some of the go-to treatments for a myriad unscientific wellness practices.
And I'm not sure how you plan to observe the molecular structure of water with a basic microscope. I suppose that trying to induce Rouleaux formations by exposing red blood cells to WiFi is worth a try of course, but it would be very strange if such a basic thing hadn't been observed already by the scientific community.
>It sounds like you want the conclusion to be true, or you already believe it to be true, that EMFs are harmful, and
Wouldn't it be more accurate to hypothesize for a start, that man-made EMFs are likely to be harmful than safe. We co-existed with nature for eons and our bodies will be tuned to deal with the 'natural' EMFs, magnetic fields etc. Anything that is not 'natural' has to be viewed with more suspicion than something natural. Note that I'm not claiming that everything natural is good and everything 'artificial' is bad. Also the distinction between natural/artificial can be blurred.
Yeah okay... Surprised to see this as the top comment.
> Hexagonal water, also known as gel water, structured water, cluster water,[1] H3O2 or H3O2 is a term used in a marketing scam[2][3] that claims the ability to create a certain configuration of water that is better for the body.[4]
> The concept of hexagonal water clashes with several established scientific ideas. Although water clusters have been observed experimentally, they have a very short lifetime: the hydrogen bonds are continually breaking and reforming at timescales shorter than 200 femtoseconds.[7] This contradicts the hexagonal water model's claim that the particular structure of water consumed is the same structure used by the body.
Though funnily enough, you can make real 'structured water' at home in your freezer. Making your ice crystals hexagonal is theoretically possible, but it's really, really hard to grow monocrystaline water ice. That might be a really interesting niche hobby, though.
I've been doing photography for a long time but over the last few years had phases where I got bored of it and tried something new.
I had a long time when I was bored and carried the camera in my pack but never took any pictures, then one day I looked out at the sports center out my window and decided to start shooting sports.
Posting photos to socials I found flower photographs were popular so I take a lot of them and find ways to not get bored. (Maybe I will start focus stacking one of these days)
Since the beginning of the year I have been "going out" as a character who is a bit like a Disney cast member who gets photos like
which spread virally around a university campus, particularly among Chinese students who recognize the huli jing and all the time I have experiences "that could only happen in a manga" when, for instance, somebody who's heard the rumors is waiting at the bus stop for me. Laugh but all my marketing KPIs have an extra zero on the right!
Same, but not the same. I've also been doing photography for a long time and when I had kids I added some gear & skills to shoot them playing sports. After a few years of this I realized since I was already there I might as well shoot the whole team, or both/all teams, since everyone's families would value the photos.
When I was laid off at the end of last year I decided to formalize this and now have a side gig (real, insured business) where I shoot local youth & high school sports for free, but make a few bucks (to cover my equipment costs plus spending money) doing portraits, headshots and team media days. It's proven fulfilling, mostly because since I do the events for free I tend to receive a lot of goodwill and word-of-mouth referrals. Far more than I can handle given my day job.
That gig is something I tried to do w/ my daughter's sports for the past 5-ish years. I loved shooting her games and distributing the photos both teams. It was so much fun.
I had a nasty altercation with a parent last fall and now I can't pick up the camera w/o getting PTSD-like symptoms. I'd love to know how "pros" handle dealing with that kind of thing. I had a similar situation years ago w/ a guy who got in my face for shooting on the street at a festival. My solution there was to just stop doing it.
Make up an official-looking "Event Photographer" vest, hat, lanyard with "Photographer Pass" on it, etc?
People generally ignore or even help workers with a bright vest, carrying a ladder, etc. So I imagine you would get a lot less suspicious looks doing something like that versus looking like an Average Joe.
Maybe with a polo shirt and embroidered made-up photography company logo and name on it.
It depends on the type of experience that altercation was. If it was you being confronted about photographing their kid without a model release, that's one thing, but if it was a more general unease of a photographer being present at the event, that's different.
For the latter, make sure you don't need a media credential (you probably don't) and get one if you do.
For the former, if your kid is competing, the odds are good that you already are acquainted with their teammates' parents so you can just ask directly, especially if you intend to share your album with them afterward.
My experience is that, with littler kids, if a photographer is not in the parent sideline/area, parents may wonder who they are. With older (high school) kids, they expect some media coverage so that part isn't a big deal. What they do care about is being able to reshare your shots to their socials or use them for other personal reasons. Depending on the high school or club, you may or may not need a media credential. If not, it's usually up to the coach (for high school) to decide whether you're allowed on/next-to the field/track/court. It's helpful to build a rapport with the coaches. It's also helpful to be able to show that you're a legitimate business and not just some rando.
In my case, I do events for free and provide full-res post-processed albums via Google Photos. This is a labor of love because I know athletes and their families (not to mention yearbook staff!) appreciate it. Maxpreps, SBLive and others contract with local photogs to cover events, too, and those sites aggregate and host the albums... but downloads average ~$20/image. It's not hard for a decent local photographer to favorably compete against those freelancers. Then it's also easier for me to upsell on portraits and media days. Media Days for school teams I typically charge ~$35/kid. For club teams it's usually $50/kid. For that they get a guaranteed 3 poses each plus leftover time for fun poses. Unlike a lot of commercial photogs, I charge this flat rate per athlete instead of a booking fee + per-image download or print packages. My experience is that they really just want digitals most of the time anyway, and even if I net less I don't really care because this is just a labor of love where I can cover my expenses and earn some spending money (~$10k/yr is acceptable given the time I'm putting into it).
It's common that they don't even let you into the venue if you have a interchangable lens camera. I wouldn't even try going into a pro game with a camera if I didn't have a credential.
At my Uni I usually go right in without any trouble, the only case I got hassled was a woman's hockey game and that time I kept repeating "I've never had trouble getting into a game before" (true) until they gave up and let me in. (Which doesn't leave me inclined to try again, but I'd already bought a ticket and didn't want to back and stash my gear in my office) I hear in hockey they are really worried about wildcat video streams.
Some of the sports at Cornell are exceptionally laid back. We are one of a few schools that plays sprint football which is 100% the same as regular football except players have to weigh less than 178 lbs [1], I know the head coach, I know people in the parent's association, they leave the gate unlocked and i go right down to the sidelines.
In Munich in 1999 I almost got my ass kicked by some guy at a rave for taking a picture of his girlfriend with a frickin' Game Boy Camera. (Got GBC shots featured in Nintendo Power!)
My current style is centered around getting posed group portraits at events and is low risk. My act seems to disrupt people's patterns and drag them along with my script, I suspect a lot of people who might want to mess with a foxographer might think twice about messing with a huli jing (rabies, fleas, ticks, cantrips, curses, ...) and if they aren't afraid of a dangerous beast they might be afraid of a dangerous and delusional therian. I think I run a tiny risk of the sort of violence you might be targeted for if you go out in drag but so what...
I do get harassed by some people online who keep asking if I have consent for my photos and it bothers me more than it should and for now I reply like "notice that they posed for me" or "that person was carrying that protest sign on a busy road with thousands of cars going by". It's a matter of time before they lecture me again that it boggles their mind that I'd take pictures at a No Kings protest and I am plotting how to bait them so that they embarrass themselves enough that they give up.
Insect macro photography is an interesting and challenging niche within photography. Trying to find insects and then get a sharp photo, when you have less than 1mm depth of field, is quite a challenge! It also opens up a whole world that you wouldn't normally see.
I've seen photos by people who use the native focus stacking in Olympus Micro 4/3 cameras to get awesome shots of insects. I am firmly in the Sony camp but I have been thinking of getting an Olympus body and a lens or two for birds (lens+body is much less than the Sony lens and it can be hand-held) and macro work... Like once I saw focus stacked flower pictures I couldn't be 100% happy w/ the ones I take)
A sub-niche of this I'm currently into is film photography. It's a bit more cost over time and much more "work" for objectively inferior results. But for personal and family photos, I feel more connected to the photos I take with film.
As an example, we've just came back from a holiday trip, and if I had taken a digital camera I would've taken a photo of a beautiful scene, looked at the screen and feel dissatisfied with it, and try to take another, and another, eventually heading back to the hotel dissatisfied and thinking I could've done better. But with a film camera, I end up taking one or two photos and then continue enjoying the place. Two weeks later at home I either get surprised or disappointed.
I don't share it on social media. I don't even share it with friends and family anymore. It's just for me, and every now and then I share it with a small online community who are also into film photography.
I'd love to get into darkroom printing next but financials and physical space is limited at the moment.
I build weird experimental instruments and then play them at the local electronic music open mic nights.
My main instrument is the electroduochord, a stereo two-stringed instrument played with a drone motor rotary magnetic bow.
https://youtu.be/G1ftvw-Y6pk
I've also hooked up audio jacks to small solar panels to convert vibrations in light into sound.
https://youtu.be/ZF2Rn5YfBC8
Yup, I've seen some of their stuff. They mostly make conventional music with unconventional instruments which is cute but doesn't quite interest me. I prefer music that is a bit more experimental and works with the texture of the sound more than melodic structure.
FDM 3d printing is still a wild-west and there are plenty of avenues to explore. Not sure what else to say about that other than as someone with daily and close personal proximity to the 'industry' that cropped up I am well aware that there is plenty of work to be done by enthusiasts and niche-people.
Engineering and machinery is still a place full of exploration if you have the chops. If you don't have them yet then there is plenty of topics within that domain to explore; you'll never run out of things to learn there.
My 0.02c : learn to disregard the crowds and focus on your own work. Just because people are doing something you used to do doesn't mean they have anywhere near the depth of understanding and 'freedom of movement' as you do as a 'resident expert'.
also : the fact that no one is doing something may be a signal; crowds form for a reason. Very few hobbyist bomb-squad folk and rabid-racoon-caregivers, get what I mean?
the GPT3 models didn't keep you from learning about ML. The industry didn't push you from keyboard and printers. You did these things.
If you're trying to lead an entirely one-off human life with total uniqueness from other people then all I could suggest is hallucinogens , but personally I think that the goal of just being unique for the sake of being unique is ludicrous.
Just find enjoyment, that's the goal for me at least.
I knew a guy who found an interesting 3d printing niche: 2 way radios for professionals (mainly SAR crews) are always getting fetched up on clothing, and you're often finding the radio turned off because the knobs got moved. Dumb problem, should have been solved by fundamental engineering years ago - but whatever. He built a 3d printed shroud for a variety of popular radios, and now makes a living selling these.
He's a tech guy, but no engineer. He saw the need (he works on a SAR team), saw the solution and made it happen. Inspiring, really.
I do a bit of 3d printing stuff myself. Personally, I'm attracted that it's getting more professional. I can use it as the impetus to learn real engineering/CAD, etc. Not in an "I'm an engineer" way, but still using real principles to make better things. You don't have to be intimidated if you keep your identity small and let it inspire you instead.
I melt milk jugs and other HDPE plastics into musical claves and drum sticks as an answer to "recycling plastic is kind of bs". It melts at 350 degrees and can be done in a toaster oven in the garage or even the kitchen with proper ventilation. The smell isn't that bad, nothing like if you dropped plastic in a fire.
I've also made some sticks from braiding plastic grocery bags which are also often made of HDPE (#2) type plastic.
Started a volunteer run, drop-in, bicycle workshop a few years ago. Its still going strong- something about the vibe, the practicality, and bike maintenance being just the right level of hard. I don't run it any more, but I drop in from time to time, and it always makes me feel better.
My hobby involves some of the oldest technology we've been able to find evidence of.
It started as spinning with a hand spindle using prepared (combed/carded) wool, and has evolved into looking for interesting fleeces directly from the shepherds (plenty given away or sold cheaply around here), figuring out how best to wash and process (hand comb? drum carder? spin directly from the slightly-opened locks?), working on which settings on my spinnng wheel will produce the twist I'm looking for, and most recently, dyeing using Easter egg dye and vinegar, which is surprisingly effective.
Oh, and of course, knitting and crocheting with the results.
I still use hand spindles to spin while walking, watching my kid on the playground, or on transit.
Hnefatafl, a simple board game that was played by the vikings and others who had frequent contact with them. Or rather, what we play today is an approximation of what they played back then as we don't really know the exact rules they used. It's interesting in that unlike chess and others, it is asymmetrical, and there are a number of different variants each with their own challenges and different balances between attacker and defender.
amateur liquid bi-prop rocket engines for the High Power Rocketry hobby are gaining momentum. There's lot of opportunity there for performance profiling and even more if you have access to a machine tools like CNC lathes. There's also interest in active stabilization of amateur rockets using engine gimbaling which would put so much more performance in reach.
The hobby is geography constrained though, you need access to large open spaces. Even small engines are spectacularly loud and igniting one in your garage would scare the crap out of your neighbors.
Edit: if you're in/near LA this club is pretty much ground zero. Tom Mueller of SpaceX's Merlin engine series fame was discovered here iirc.
https://rrs.org
Model rockets are classified as 'high power' above a certain impulse. In places like the UK and US you are expected to gradually work your way up from low impulse motors (A,B,C) to high impulse motors (J,K,L+).
Solid rocket motors are conceptually simpler, but much more dangerous and in many jurisdictions legally dubious to make yourself compared to hobbyist bi-liquid or hybrid designs.
Off the shelf, solid fuel motors are almost impossible to start accidentally. I don't see how they are more dangerous than dealing with tanks of pressurised gases.
Making solid fuel motors yourself is dangerous (and illegal without a licence in the UK).
Local urbex and exploration of 'haikyo' areas. Easy for me since I am in Tokyo and it's super walkable. I have taken to just getting on the train and getting off at random stations and walking in a random direction for a couple of kilometers. Every now and then I run into interesting abandoned buildings or neat shrines. Also makes for good exercise.
Not sure if you were looking only for indoor hobbies, but I picked up Kiteboarding recently, and it is the most outrageously fun thing I've ever done.
It's like being a kid and jumping off the house with a bedsheet, except it works. Most mistakes are laughed off by splashing in the water. I'm 3 years in and I can jump 7-10m then fly like a bird for 5-10 seconds without consequences.
Even as a beginner, sailing around or just feeling a kite pull you around is such a blast. Keep in mind it's really difficult and pretty much requires 10-20 hours of private lessons.
Jumping takes real skill. I went like 60 times and can barely jump 7m in perfect conditions by trying very hard.
That happens very rarely like recently in Israel where they went out on a storm, and there was a very rare very-big gust. But extremely rare comibation of things that can go wrong.
Yes you need to monitor the wind. I'm kiting today for example.
How do you combine it with work? Where I live in NL, there are few days where I’m able to go kiteboarding and I probably won’t know until the day off if it’s possible or not.
I work remotely, and my schedule is flexible. I live in Squamish BC all summer which is great for wind. In the winter we are in UT but my friends take lots of kiting destination vacations.
I’m fairly late in my career though (44yo), so I’ve opted for a lower salary, low stress and flexible job.
I don't know if it's niche, but I like making granola for my friends and family. I give them a big jar and tell them free refills are included ("just bring me the empty jar"). I get pretty good nuts and tend to make largish batches (around 2 kg), and, because of the refills, I get a good sense of who appreciates it — always happy to make more for them. My recipe is here: https://alejo.ch/365
2 years ago I wanted an easy way to listen to commodore 64 sid tunes on my computer without the need of powering on my c64 everytime but with the benefits of having real sid chips. After doing some research I concluded that the available uab hardware sid boards were either unavailable or outdated. This started my journey to create my own usb board, USBSID-Pico. Currently at version 1.3 of the pcb with an improved version and pro version in development.
The board is supported in various commodore 64 emulators, sid trackers and web players. It also supports midi (still in active development) and even has an onboard embedded emulator.
As far as I know there are now approximately 300+ boards in the hands of enthusiasts. Ranging from users, chiptunes lovers, demo creators
to musicians. The board and it's firmware are open source, and the board is available at PCBWay and via my Tindie.
Just yesterday I shipped 11 new boards to new owners across the globe.
From personal need to niche hobby supplying fun to other enthusiasts in just 2 years
Jogging isn’t niche, but after being sedentary for ten years I had to start doing something. When I was young I could run a 7 minute mile which was nothing to brag about. Now at 50+ that seems like an impossibility. I’ve been doing walk/jog intervals for almost a year and I’m getting better, and focusing on not blowing out my knees.
A group of us in our community broadcast many of the local high school sports. Our original setup had a scoreboard that was really clunky to manage and was hard to learn, so I built a web-based version that pretty much any 12 year old with an iPad could use.
I have worked with the logs extensively over time to convert the simple data inputs from the scoreboard controls into charts & graphs that update in real time on the screen to “tell the story” of the game, and generate “talking points” from the data. It allows us to plug in students as commentators and they can talk about the game much more confidently because they can visually see the game's storyline that is based on actual data. “The Trojans are on a 14-4 streak starting late in the 3rd quarter, and that has flipped the lead in their favor” is a lot more fun than “the Trojans are doing well the last little bit”.
It’s been fun (and challenging) to develop the right UI to display the game’s story in a way that is rich yet easy to read at a glance. And it has been cool to see the students increase in how professional they sound on the live broadcast.
Would love to see this in action. Anything you can share? Also, what gear is used for this? Having recently been in charge of a scoreboard made by Daktronics for high school games, I was intimidated by the UX.
All features are included in the free version, just some usage limits. If you decide to use it, send a message using the “Contact Us” from with the account and I’ll send you the details on the analytics / charts as they are at unpublished URLs.
Fishing. But not just regular fishing, life listing. I catalogue and detail ever fish I catch; the conditions, the type of lure or bait, the rod etc. From there you can get into microfishing with tanago rods, surf fishing etc. It's can get quite deep and a good additional hobby for people who love to travel.
I also take notes when I fish. It's less about recording a life list, and more about trying to collate what is otherwise very thing spotty data enough to get better at fishing.
As someone who has learned a lot of skills and hobbies online and likes sharing info, fishing has been a really interesting different world. Because anglers are effectively competing for a scarce resource, specific information about good fishing spots is understandably not shared widely.
So you have to put in the time yourself to try spots and see what produces. But in order to catch fish, you need to be at the right place, at the right time of year, at the right time of day, with the right lure, and the right technique. Get any one of those wrong and the only signal you get is "no bites". That makes it really tough to learn and improve.
I've found that taking detailed notes helps me see patterns in what works that would otherwise be hard to see.
I fish for salmon. In my part of the UK it has become very niche due to the scarcity. I joined clubs and never went, but now I'm in a syndicate where I fish one Saturday per month for the season, and never miss it. I'm years in and still never got one into the net! Fishing for migratory fish that don't feed once they are in the river is mad. On my fishing days I don't think of anything else
I make holiday light shows with an open source program called XLights[0]. I'm sure you've seen the videos[1] of what people[2] can do. Usually the top comment is "man that is cool but I wouldn't want to be their neighbor!" followed by "my neighbors love my light shows".
Creating the sequences is time consuming, and lot of people end up buying them or sharing them, but those are rarely as good as the ones you make for yourself.
Some folks have dabbled with using AI to create the sequences. I think the biggest issues are lack of training data and it's a very visual art, so there needs to be a better feedback between the text representation and the visual manifestation.
So if you're into using AI to make physical world things better, that would be a good place to look!
I wonder if you can break down the sequences into segments (parts) and then the AI doesn't have to know how to control LEDs directly, but can instead put sequences together in accordance with the music.
When we do it as humans, that's basically how we do it. We may have an overall idea for a theme across the song, but usually you're zoomed into a few seconds of music and adding light effects to it.
I had not, thanks! Interestingly, using FFT for this has been around for a long time, but combining it with transformers could have interesting new results.
It's interesting to me that you can have something like this that is "hard to build" but "easy to verify" - humans are really good at telling if something is "off" about the visualization.
Guess this doesn't count as a hobby since I switched careers, but I left software recently to attend violin making school. I'm happier than I've been in a long time.
I'd encourage all "mental work" folks to engage with something physical in the 3D realm (art, cooking, gardening, etc.). I really believe humans have a special affinity for creating refined objects, and I don't think software "scratches that itch".
Really cool! I split my time between cello and software so I'm decently familiar with this line of work. What inspired you to switch careers? I imagine it's not easy to get a foothold as a luthier either. Do you feel like you're taking a big risk?
I switched careers because the software and tech world has changed drastically since I first started, and not in ways that I enjoy or that play to my strengths.
Fundamentally I enjoy being a craftsperson. That is, someone who through training and experience gets really good at something, and then uses that expertise to create new things. Software wasn't always like that, but more often than not I enjoyed it, so I count myself as really lucky. I think the business of software engineering has changed in ways that make it much less amenable to the "craftsperson ethos".
It's not really that hard to start as a luthier - there are 3 violin making schools in the US and you don't really need previous experience, they teach you everything (shout out to The Violin Making School of America - violin making as a newbie can be difficult and frustrating at times but I look forward to school every single day). Since I was a software engineer for 25 years with rather inexpensive tastes generally and no children, and a working spouse, I had saved up enough to not really worry about finances (I certainly needed to downshift some of my expenses, but again, it wasn't that hard for me and in many ways I felt it was liberating - I cook a lot more now, I walk to school instead of rot in traffic, I sold my house which I always hated the maintenance, upkeep and expense of, etc.) I certainly don't have "FU money" but I'm fine being in school for a few years and then making much less than I did as a software engineer.
Bellringing, specifically change ringing. It’s a type of church bell ringing that is rather algorithmic in nature. Tends to attract mathy types. Religion not required or expected!
If you have English-style tower bells near you, it's worth checking out, even if only to listen.
Hahaha, good observation :) I ran out of my childhood books (in Spanish) to fix, then I ran out of my GFs childhood books (in Latvian), so at that point I offered my services to anyone in the Google Zürich office. I got books in all kinds of languages I couldn't read, and a few chocolates and bottles of wine for my troubles :)
Some of the most interesting books were especially challenging. One in old German that was missing a couple of pages. It was a popular fairytale so I found the missing content online and a closely matching font, and reconstructed the pages. Another was in an Asian script I not only couldn't read, I didn't know how to sort or even properly rotate some loose pages, so I had to ask the owner. In a few cases when bits of the cover were missing, I found photos online, and printed a patch. Fun times!
There's a lot of legacy / retro coding out there that despite the output being used by anywhere from hundreds, to thousands to even millions of end-users, it still involves small tight night communities per project, sometimes they overlap somewhat. I've mentioned it before, if you follow people reverse engineering Shockwave, you will note that they are all on the same communities to capture as much wisdom from others as possible. In niche reverse engineering communities, the smallest thing can be a life changer.
Flying sailplanes/gliders. Once you get good at it, you can fly hundreds of miles (or more) by understanding the weather and figuring out where the air is going up. Lots of opportunities to nerd out. Aerodynamics, weather forecasting, remote sensing, in-flight user interfaces, strategy, communications, and also just satisfying to figure out how to coax the atmosphere to get you somewhere for free.
I did a few flights in college but never got my license because there wasn’t an instructor light enough to meet weight requirements with me lol. Do you have yours? If so, how long did it take you?
I did it back in college too. We had a great club that really catered to students. It was $ 14 for a 2000 ft tow, and $99/yr for a membership, that included all glider rental for the lower performance ships (Schweizers). The instructors were volunteers, but you had to wait. There was a signup sheet, and the first one to get to the field got the first flight.
Weight wise I was skinny back then and it wasn’t a problem. I soloed my first full year and got my license the next year.
Get your Part 107 federal drone license and volunteer for your local fire department or search and rescue. When the FD responds to structure fires they sometimes have to go up on the roof to cut an air hole. This allows oxygen into the building which helps prevent backdrafts. A FLIR equipped drone can help direct the hole cutter around hotspots on the roof. If your local fire department has a drone, it might not have the staff to be able to use it on calls.
You'd need to schedule and take an exam. There are lots of resources online to help you study. I recommend the Youtube video from Tony and Chelsea Northrup.
I'm not sure how saturated it would be. My advice would be to contact the closest FD (or PD if you wanted to go the SAR route) and ask. If they say they're covered, ask if they know any other stations that could use a hand. There's bound to be a department that needs volunteers.
The FD should have an enterprise level DJI (or equivalent) with color and IR cameras but it will probably depend on how well funded the department is. SAR may be a different story as far as equipment but I don't know since that's not the route I pursued.
I don’t know how niche they are, but a few I’ve done in the past
- 3D printed musical instruments. Print other designs or contribute your own
- lock picking. When you really get into it, you modify locks to make them more of a challenge and mail them to people
- Ham radio is hundreds of sub-hobbies in a trench coat. I’m currently mainly interested in linearizing switch-mode amplifiers, but was doing fox hunting for a bit (radio direction finding), and periodically do POTA (transmitting from parks)
HAM radio is whole range of things that were not possible when I was getting into it - first of all it's super cheap to start now, and you can probably bounce RF signals off the moon for less than $100 nowadays.
Shortwave radio has always allowed signals to go around the world (by bouncing off the stratosphere). Most likely the new digital + AI capabilities means that a few well positioned relays could make for a very independent, low bandwidth Internet.
Solar powered BTS or APs all kinds of experiments are possible...
Lock picking is great! Many security conferences will have a "lockpick village" where there are just a bunch of locks, lockpicks, and volunteers teaching people how to do it.
1. Lacto fermented food, you can spend plenty of time making unique food not available anywhere. Good niche to start is lacto fermented hot sauce. You can go very mild or crazy hot depending on your preference.
2. Sourdough is pretty understood, but there is hardly anything about gluten free sourdough. Basic principles are the same, you make a starter from flour and water, but you need to make it across different gluten free flour and combine them at the end. Endless possibilities with playing with ratios, toppings, etc.
3. Building meshcore / meshtastic nodes for your local area. There are kits / ready make nodes online or you can build your own.
4. Building a cyberdeck. You can start small with ready made parts, while you work towards designing your own PCB, handling battery with BMS, CADing everything, 3d printing, etc. You can specialise by only doing themed cyberdecks like only wearable or only fallout inspired.
5. Self host at home, but only rootless, distroless podman containers.
6. Automate all you can at home and integrate into home assistant. Install wleds, sync them to the music or use them as visual notification for things you care about
I would appreciate more data on the gluten-free sourdough. I have a family member who has a wheat/gluten allergy and spends a tonne of money on special diet bread.
Do you have any good starting points or resources to share?
I admit I haven't gotten around to search very deeply for them yet as I just started thinking about this again yesterday but previous attempts have not given me any good information just one off recipes rather than creating a new bubbly family member to store in your fridge ;)
I'm big into anti tech/work related activities. It reminds me that no matter how much I know, or think I know, that I have so much more to learn.
I got into scuba diving while living in NC, and it just happens that there's a lot of it off the coast! The other problem is that it's deep. Diving down to 130 feet sounds cool until you experience hours on a boat only to get a few minutes at the bottom. Eventually I got bothered to learn more about diving.
I headed down to northern Florida to dive with GUE. My instructor was a person who regularly got hit up to dive to exotic places all over the world. Missions like collecting/deploying samples, archaeology, recovery. Here were people meaningfully impacting the environment, science, and keeping technical know-how alive.
I don't know how to convey a the wonder I feel in text. Check it out maybe.
GUE Fundies is on my bucket list. I don't think I'd be interested in cave diving or deep stuff where I need helium, but the level of skill that tech divers show is something I want to be able to do.
I have been spending an inordinate amount of time trying to find the owners of the old Digital Research "Concurrent DOS" operating system. There's a lot of interesting turns in the search and it's been fun to document.
I've written a blog post about it [1] though there have been a few updates since I've written that.
I honestly think it might be a fun thing for me to keep doing, whether or not I'm successful with my search. I think there is a lot of old software that is just sitting on old hard drives that is waiting to be preserved.
I have been looking into the Concurrent DOS 286 and FlexOS lineage. Since there is still some level of commercial usage of it, it seems like people are a big more reluctant to talk about it in any capacity.
My hobbies are not niche in themselves; however, they are giving me the chance to distract myself from IT and to do something that inspires me and gives me some skills.
My philosophy around hobbies is that every learned skill can be reused in different areas.
So, I'm trying to:
- taking photos. I have photography equipment and some experience in nature/portrait photography;
- learning languages. Not only mainstream languages like English (I'm not a native English speaker), but languages like Latin or Interslavic;
- biking and running. Just get a good health habit to clear your mind and improve your overall state after a long working day;
- playing musical instruments. I have a ukulele, guitar, and keyboard so I'm trying to make my own music;
- collecting antique items. For that, on every trip I'm trying to visit flea markets, where sometimes I find interesting items.
- vinyl music. That hobby is connected with the previous one;
- playing Go. I found this game much more interesting than Chess;
- bartending. Not only classical cocktails but some random mixes;
Sailing, archery are some I'm looking into at this moment.
I’ve recently started making bread, at the moment still with fresh or bakers yeast and planning to grow my own sourdough.
It’s not very niche, but as a hobby it’s pretty fulfilling. It allows for a lot of play, and you end with something tasty. Also, makes for a great small gift for friends and family.
I make most of my bread with sourdough. It is really easy, it takes a bit longer, but there are less steps - just mix some more flour/water (sometimes salt, but I've not had a problem when I forget though others say it helps the taste to add salt - YMMV) into your starter and wait. Yeast is faster by a lot, but it is a lot more complex and so I don't find it worth it.
> I'm looking for something novel and interesting, that isn't absolutely crowded that I could meaningfully contribute to.
I would say that a hobby is a bit like a fetish in that it is derived from our interior psychology. My father’s hobby was repairing old scientific instruments, which was perfectly suited to his disposition for quantifying everything in his life, including his family (bless you dad).
I don't think it's a niche hobby, but I really enjoy cooking. Trying out new techniques and receipts, cooking dinner for friends and family or just preparing a delicious meal in advance.
Taught myself to use a sewing machine. Then I made my own EDC wallet thing. Basically a zipper pouch that can fit a lot of things while keep them as spread out in my front pocket.
I've got a version of this now in my front pocket for like 9 months: https://share.zight.com/wbu487ew Yes, it's big, but it's the most comfortable from of a big wallet.
It's funny though. I can't help feel the pull to try and make the hobby a business. But then it probably becomes unfun. But my brain just can't not think that way.
Did the same two years ago, it's such an underrated skill. There's a good amount of complexity that goes into making an item without just following a pattern.
I recommend going through the basics (Tock Custom has a nice energy [0]), then picking up a fairly complex pattern for a common piece of clothing. Of course there's also r/myog.
Yeah, it's funny how many times I basically made the same damn thing just fine tuning a half inch wider, or seam allowance.
I also can't believe how tedious cutting fabric is. Even for a tiny project like this it was such a pain in the ass. Even with nice circular cutters and mats and rulers. I'm now tempted to get a cricut 4 to make the cutting easier.
I believe we all have three major parts: emotional, intellectual, and physical.
I have been very intellectually oriented, meaning I used my intellectual part even when it was not so useful for the thing I was doing. For example, thinking about emotions or how to do something when it is better than just feel or do.
My aim has been to become more balanced human being, meaning choosing pursuits that activate those other parts as well.
What has stayed with me over the years has been couples' dancing, which fits nicely with physical/emotional side. You just need to find a teacher whose apporach is not intellectual, i.e. based on steps and sequences! I am still doing it 2-5 times per week.
I am also doing regularly:
- yin yoga
- tai chi
- winterswimming
I have had several other niche hobbies throughout the years, like:
- fencing
- improv theatre
- leather works -- I ended up on a very demanding leather shoe course and made my own dancing shoes
- wood crafting -- wooden spoons
- traditional survival skills -- various kinds of traditional fire making skills, making traditional traps, making emergency tents, making emergency drafts, learning about plants, learning to skin/handle game etc.
Something I wanted to try but did not yet:
- flint knapping
I design treasure hunts and then hide them in books. Well, I've just started to. Was obsessed by the book Masquerade, by Kit Williams as a kid. Finally decided that I could probably do that as well. So have started. Very much enjoying it.
I'm into innovation in HCI as a hobby, but it does get expensive so I would like to bring in some additional financial support for my unusual builds.
I didn't really plan to build HCI as a hobby, but I have a strong interest in hardware engineering and eventually I wanted to switch back to building things that anyone can physically see.
Years ago I built a hemisphere keyboard and now I've built an LED globe with a viewing portal. I started building visible things again because I had a vision and it's very satisfying to use the result. I spend more time using it now than I did originally building it, although it is definitely a work in progress. I want to build it again for a 2.0 version.
I’ve been learning Gregg Shorthand (Anniversary) since the start of the year. It’s a fun challenge even if it feels fantastically obsolete at this point with transcription models getting better and better every day. I’ve always liked paper-and-pen notes, so the idea of basically learning analog Vim was appealing :)
Not sure if this is an established hobby or something I've just come up with myself, but I've been "dashboarding." Essentially I have a Blazor webapp that integrates lots of data sources (some manual, some automatic) from areas of my life and I use that to visualize and analyze goals and habits. The main page consists of rolling-weekly stats that deliver "integration scores." Each score contributes to an overall score that gives me a general idea of how I'm doing on all my habits and goals.
So for instance, I use YNAB for our family budgeting, and I have it setup so that if I go a whole week without performing reconciliations, I get dinged -1. Otherwise this sits at 1.0. Then I have a score for journaling - my goal is to journal 4-5 times per week, so each time I journal it resets the score to 1, and then slowly ticks down to 0 over time. Then I have a number of Apple health scores that get imported automatically via REST API. This part compiles all the data on calories, relevant macronutrients (I mostly track protein and fiber currently), steps, workouts, etc. and builds a nice visualization. I consider a total integration score of 0.8 to be pretty good - keeping at that level is actually better than seeking for a perfect 1.0 all the time as my theory is that it will prevent burnout and allow for some forgiveness, because I can't be perfect.
It's been a fun project, and one that I generally try to avoid any AI use. Fun to just build and because the stakes are so low I just chip away at one feature at a time, carving out 15 minutes here or there.
Do you have more details on this project anywhere? I've been working on habit-building and tracking in my journal for the past year and a half or so, but I'm looking to amp it up a bit more. Your project appeals to my software developer and hobby collector mindset and would love to learn more about it.
In all honesty, under the hood it's a bit of a mess. I may have eschewed some of the software engineering best practices in lieu of building something quickly that I wanted. I'll get around to going back through and retrofitting the app with some cleaner code, but for now I couldn't even open-source it without a self-perceived hit to my portfolio.
The project largely started out as something else. I initially wanted a combined TO-DO list and journal. Rather than checking things off I would run the journal content through a local LLM and have it check things off for me based on what I wrote each day. That's yet to be implemented. Then I moved on to an "ordering" system - I was inspired by the way that medical practitioners put in orders once they determined a course of treatment, and thought that might be a useful model to help motivate me to get things on my list done more effectively. I built this, but have utilized it less than I thought. Since then it's mostly been focus on the integrations and scoring system. The whole thing is highly modular, so for each integration I grab a template for the visualization I want to build and then need to reason out how to get the data into the system, which usually involves an API integration, scraping from some online data source, and/or data engineering. It's very fun, because each integration module has its own challenges.
I built the app using a standard stack of .NET core, Blazor server, and the data is stored in SQL server and data operations are handled with EF core. I use the Radzen component library, which I like a lot from a developer perspective but it's challenging to retheme and I'm largely unhappy with the look/feel of the app. This is something I plan on getting to eventually.
Happy to answer any/all questions. It's such a personal, homebrewed app that I can't imagine anyone else would get as much use out of, but it's very powerful and I think the hobby aspect of it could translate to pretty much any other developer.
I've been conlanging since I was about 8yo or so. This hobby also has me randomly learning natural human languages too. I've always just enjoyed it. I could make up reasons for enjoying it, but I am not certain that any of those would be true.
Some fantastic hobbies involve learning a new skill that'll serve you in the long run outside of tech, or teach you something interesting that will last after you drop the hobby. I personally love making things, especially food-related things and so I've been a hobbyist baker for about a decade. The Bread Code on GitHub was a fantastic introduction and taught me the basics to branch out and discover better baking techniques. That's the main one I've stuck with.
I've also dabbled in home wine making, cheese making, preserving and pickling, and they've all given me a deeper understanding of fermentation even if I've not stuck with them as much as I did with bread. However, if I go for a wine-tasting or a beer brewery I now know what they're talking about when they go into the process of it, which is a good conversation starter if nothing else.
There's also gardening, but that's mostly something my partner stuck with instead.
Sailing. Good to focus your eyes on something not glowing, the cold and wet makes you feel really alive. There's a bottomless pit of cheap old boats and maintenance to learn about- or if you like buying toys, the sky is the limit.
I like racing dingies, adds a social aspect, but ymmv.
I like your stuff! I’ve been coveting a plotter for a while, but I’m pretty sure it won’t get used enough to justify the expense. :/
I do find the term “printmaking” hilarious because there’s just sooo many ways to make prints. I tried to get into linocut fairly recently, but the battleship grey linoleum I had wasn’t very good. It cracked and crumbled pretty easily. I did get some of pink Speedball “blocks,” but it gets expensive pretty quickly. I guess more to the point is the feeling that I lack much to say. But, that’s an excuse. :)
Thanks for the compliment. Linocuts and monotypes have been considered printmaking for hundreds of years. Those pen plots are also collaged and modified by hand, so not only mechanical. I see all that as traditional printmaking. As for having nothing to saw, there can be a lot of fulfillment in exploring basic themes, like geometric shapes or silhouettes of animals.
There’s no doubt that stuff is print making. My point is that there are multiple ways of doing (within each of these): relief, Intaglio, lithography, screen printing, offset.
So if you say, “I’m a print maker,” it describes basically nothing. :)
This is just a general statement, not directed at you. Sorry it felt that way.
Hydrophonic farming at home. You can play with sensors (acidity, humidity etc), LED lighting (frequencies, intensity, etc), vision processing (maybe throw in some AI buzzword here) to keep track of your plants and do some decision making.
The increased speed hydroponic plants grow at compared to plants in soil is what really makes it exciting for me. A plant in my basic countertop "indoor garden" unit is growing 10x as fast as a cutting of the same plant sitting in my windowsill.
Maybe not that niche for this group, but I love pen plotting. I use code to create drawings and then pen plot them on paper [0]. The ability to bring something digital into the physical world is really fulfilling for me and makes the process much more tangible. I have an Axidraw A3, and it might be the best purchase I ever made.
In the last few months I haven't done much as I'm currently obsessed by gamedev. But now when you reminded me, I want to plot a few pieces I started last year and never finished.
Naval once said his best engineers all do some form of art. So I am playing with AI art, and making tools for making the iteration fast and closed-loop.
Somebody already mentioned "Modular Synths". There's incredible resources for building your own synth modules for everything from circuit design to simple kits. Check out LMNC on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCTLeNxge54
I started learning how to make croissants. I bought a Japanese hand crank sheeter, and tried different butters and convection ovens. Definitely put me through a rabbit hole.
Hang gliding. It's good if you are in an area with some hills and consistent winds. There are maybe a dozen well-established launch sites around the U.S. Sadly, I broke down my glider around 2001 -- and did a post-mortem on it to discover it had a minor dent in it.
Recommendation -- don't stall the glider at heights between 10 and 25 feet from the ground. Also, avoid barbed wire fences.
> Training using VR equipment is picking up steam, as typically you need a sizeable amount of real estate to practice when the weather is bad.
I always wondered, how does that work?
Over in bullseye rifle we live and breathe dryfire (no ammo), but I understand the equivalent (no arrow) with a bow is a recipe for breaking the bow.
Like my brain just cannot comprehend how to get enough reps to get good enough at a thing without being able to do dryfire at the volume we do for rifle.
Answer is that it's the human body that's the weakest link here, as muscles get sore and tendons might get damaged if you overdo it.
Prepping for tournaments is a field in and of itself as you need to time your trainings right to achieve peak form at the event itself.
My sister, who's been doing this competitively for a decade now, showed me an excel sheet her team has - there's an optimisation problem you have to solve to get every member to their best shape within the specified timeframe.
Also there are so-called "trads" - people doing traditional archery with period-correct technology, where the stakes are understandably lower.
Also they ingest, ahem, aiming fluid each meeting, so it's way more casual than what modern competitive archers practice.
Over here it's a combination of having a tradition of historical reconstruction and fairly strict gun laws, that don't extend to other weapons.
Case in point: you can open-carry a sword, unless you're displaying violent intent. Concealed carry of any obviously dangerous blade is prohibited, which spurred speculation on what to do with, e.g. a bread knife.
Consensus in the community is that you need to hold a loaf of bread in the other hand.
Just kidding. Honestly, the best ideas out there are low-tech. Anything where as you put it is "crowded" with tech people don't want, but is also of good build.
Or if you must add an LLM and a touch screen to everything, do it in a way that respects user consent and boundaries.
One thing I wanted to get into but can't due to time is sub-150ms responsive LLM for use with drones and bots. Faster response time than a human brain. Multiple LLMs running on dedicated hardware to preempt and predict response for various stimuli.
A drone you can't shoot-down with an arrow, and a robot you can't beat at dodgeball.
Now imagine the implications of that!? But the first problem I'd like to solve is remotely piloted work. if that LLM and response-time combo works, you would be able to safely work alongside a remotely piloted robot in a hazardous construction site better than you would with a human (it could even improve safety for humans). At all times it is getting audio/sonar, lidar, infrared and visual (image processing) input and several of these really fast LLMs (not just, LLMs aren't great at certain tasks, so naturally other types of ML and predefined routines would also be running) will be preparing if/else decision trees in case a potential condition is met. Sees a ladder just leaning there? what if it randomly slips, how would it react? plan is in place under 150ms while other plans are being formulated for other things as well.
Echoing others, Chess engines certainly aren't a solved problem! In fact there are a lot of niches that are absolutely starving for effort. Ones I'm interested in are related to Chess variants and puzzles.
Fairy-Stockfish is a fork used by LiChess for the variants on the site, but it can now play a multitude of games from Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) to Shogi (Japanese Chess) to a crazy modern variants. There's a variety of tools to train new neural nets for these variants, generate opening books, puzzles, etc. You can play some of them on PyChess (pychess.org). These are projects basically run by a couple people with huge backlogs of bugs and feature requests. An enthusiastic developer can easily get involved! Or just enjoy playing different variants and getting involved with the player community.
Ohh about fairy stockfish, I had actually looked into it for something like spell-chess (which is an completely unsolved problem!)
I was playing chess with one of my friends and we played spell-chess which is an clash royale/clash of clans x chess thing where you get two spells of freeze and jump
Freeze allows you to select a tile and have a 3x3 square radius which freezes those pieces
Jump allows you to select any piece (opponent or yours) and it will effectively allow you to jump over that.
When me and my friends were playing, I kept trying to do something wonky to find the most optimal play. I had thoughts for a day or two to find/make fairy stockfish or atleast had the idea to do so but not the experience to do so but I certainly wished even from the end point perspective as to what/if the game was solved. I don't know but these things make me feel as if perhaps, just maybe, the game can be played a certain way where even in the best game, its not draw but rather a particular side wins (effectively solving it),
I felt like these spells were too overpowered so there was an possibility about it, you just made me remember a lot of things about these things that I had thought. It was these thoughts which randomly led me to discover fairy stockfish which is an really interesting project!
I'm playing backgammon. Not just online, but live tournaments as well.
What I like about it: it's one of those games that are easy to learn but difficult to master. Modern analyzing tools can detect your errors and weaknesses, providing you with eternal possibilities to improve.
But also, I like the excitement of the live tournaments, which like poker, have money prizes and an entry fee. They are all over the world and I especially like visiting tournaments in places which I otherwise wouldn't visit. Plus after a while you'll make friends in the tournament circuit, so it becomes a social thing as well.
Antkeeping, rockhounding, and flint knapping are things I've gotten into recently. Antkeeping and rockhounding in particular have a ton of room for citizen science. Lots of undiscovered stuff out there.
Ham radio, can be either really technical designing transmit protocols, antennas, SDRs or really just talking to random people as far away as you can reach without being bound to the internet.
I spent many months redesigning, improving and rebuilding a prusa clone, not because I couldn't afford anything else, but precisely because I could afford to "waste" time and money learning and having fun.
Once I felt like the printer was in a useful state, I spent some more time getting it to a point where it could print nice ABS parts for a Voron Trident. Of course I couldn't just build a Trident. That would be too easy. Before I had even finished assembling it, it already had a number of bespoke modifications that I had designed.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Have you ever _looked_ at the klipper source code? It's like a fractal of weirdness. I mean it works, and clearly the person behind it is very knowledgeable about many things. But it makes for such an enormous and fun playground for improvements and redesigns. I've redesigned the entire build system for the firmware component. I've made the host component an actual (almost) normal python package. I changed a bunch of core aspects so that it could be packages for a linux distro. I am working on making the native helper a normal python native extension library too. And I am also writing some proper test rig for it.
And while I was at it, I started writing my own display software which doesn't use Wayland or X. It is going quite well actually. (Writing it in Rust)
This hobby (and, really, any hobby) has as much depth and obscurity as you are willing to look for.
My point was, if you enjoyed it when it was tinkering heavy, nothing stops you from continuing to enjoy that even if there are now plenty of printers that don't require it.
Vermiculture - breeding worms and harvesting their casting.
Outside of software development I enjoy gardening, farming/breeding worms and collecting their compost for the garden was a fun hobby I could dive into. It is a great amendment to my garden's soil and just a unique thing I can do on my own. I would like to start a small side business selling the castings, extracts, and worms one day.
I do gundog training. When I started with our first dog I did not expect to enjoy it that much. It’s hard to express how much it takes mentally and physically, and the bond you build with your dog is crazy.
Best of all, you don’t actually have to hunt. You can stick to dummies.
In terms of contributing in a meaningful way, your local trainer will always be happy with helpers. If you need to setup multiple 200m retrieves for multiple dogs, it helps if you have someone out in the field doing the work. And lots of stuff to organise and help out with.
Muay thai is my favorite hobby. Two kids later, it’s hard to find time, but I had a time where I went boxing everyday. I can really recommend material arts for those with proper work/life balance.
No activity brings you more endorphines than being brutalized under controlled conditions.
Wrestling is my favorite. I'd like to start boxing, muay thai, or BJJ, but it's just a cost issue honestly. I feel like MMA (by extension, kickboxing and BJJ classes) has become a sort of trend, especially among teenagers/young adults, which is probably one of the reasons why classes cost so much lately. I know lots of people at my wrestling gym who do several martial arts at a time and it's got to be pretty hard on their free time.
Outside of drilling and live wrestling, it's really rewarding when I get to teach beginners little movements like relaxing their arms in their stance or different ways to fake shots.
If chess is a solved problem, think about skating to where the puck is going to be, an interest area a bit further away from relatively easier verifiability such as coding, math, and hard sciences.
Do you have any interest in digital humanities? Knowledge work where verification is still important but not as black-and-white as does the math check out, does the code run.
Do you have any interest in family history or genealogy?
Since you mentioned biohacking but are wary of "wetware" risks, consider Personal Bioinformatics via 30x Whole Genome Sequencing. Now that sequencing costs have dropped significantly, you can use AI to take a deep dive into the latest research surrounding your own genomic data.
While severall open medical databases and open-source tools exist, they are often fragmented or built for academia. There is significant room to contribute by hacking together better toolsets, localized databases, or AI-driven interfaces to make this data truly accessible.
It's lots of fun, with folding allowing you to go offline for a while. The community is very friendly, both online and with IRL meetings such as yearly conventions in many countries.
Still a kind of niche within origami, so there's lots of room for novelty and explorations. And there are strong ties to mathematical and computational origami if you're into this kind of thing.
Just a suggestion as this isn't my hobby, but look into gem cutting. There are some tools for designing new cuts, but I think I lot more is possible than is commonly accomplished. And every gem material is different so that adds to things. Plus, the more precise the cut the better the result. And it's very math and loop driven.
I think lapidary and faceting often have guilds or clubs that let you use shared equipment. I think in terms of materials gem rough material is cheap for some gemstones and expensive for others. Obviously synthetic and quartz are cheaper than natural sapphire, but there's a whole range. In terms of equipment I think the faceting machines come in different kinds with different features and are maybe circa okayish laptop prices for a used one but get much more expensive for new ones or specialty ones. I know there are at least two kinds - traditional faceting and concave. I don't know that much about how designing new cuts works, but it's definitely its own niche thing and if you look into groups that do it they'll talk about facet designs and who designed them. I think there are some books and software that folks use, but I don't know a whole lot about it.
We got into scuba diving about 3 years ago. Have something like 200 dives now logged across Southern California, Hawaii and the Caribbean. Planning on adding Indonesia to the list later this year. That wow factor you experience the first time you dive hasn't gone away after 200 dives and I don't think it'll go away after 2000. Probably the most life-affirming thing I've ever gotten into and can't recommend it enough.
I started hand carving and painting fishing lures a few years back, mostly from gathered or gleaned materials.
It started as something to keep my hands busy in the Minnesota winter evenings, but there is actually quite a lot of depth to the materials/buoyancy/fluid dynamics that dictate how the lure moves in different water conditions. Each one is also a little work of art which is nice.
Try playing Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder (or any number of other systems.) Pathfinder is super deep and complex.
There's also an entire community of people who play Table Top Role-Playing Games (TTRPGs) solo and use the outcomes of their play reports to blog or write fiction.
Also, the tooling around these games is very interesting if you want to build an app: Crafting calculator? Generative hexcrawl maps? Random tables? Statistics tools for dice rolls?
I've designed jewellery for my wife's last few birthdays. Nothing fancy, geometries, square kufic and such.
Very crude approach: I've been doing it in Blender, if you've 3D skills should be easy. I've got a friend who does the printing and casting, so there's more I could explore there later.
I also do dioramas, which grew out of 40K. Got bored with hench guys with guns and moved to 6mm, it's been great fun focusing on buildings.
I've been using Codex to build a repo that pulls down astronomical datasets and runs simulation to try to find explanation for the hubble tension. Having an agent to do the tedious bits and also having an LLM to bounce ideas has tough me so much about astronomy. I don't have serious hopes of finding anything new and novel but it's still a lot of fun.
With focus on unique years rather than number of buildings. Still quite a few to find (and visit) but I consider this to be an almost perfect collection.
I'm very much into niche hobbies: they usually have nice tight & friendly communities.
Below are some of my favorite I'd love to share:
- FPV drone flying: once you've spent 5-10 hours to get initial reflexes for the controls in the simulator, the first flight on a real machine outside feels magical.
- Electric unicycles: the "mind-controlled" PEV, and arguably the best way to get around in San Francisco.
- Foiling: the closest feeling to riding a hoverboard. You can kite-foil, pump-foil, sup-foil etc, but wing foiling is the easiest to get started.
- Knots: tying laces properly just makes life easier, and tying tucker's / voodoo hitches for the first few times feels like a magic trick.
- Cardistry: learning to do a proper riffle shuffle and a few artistic cuts adds some fun to the most boring part of any card game.
- Any FPV controller that connects to laptop. 2 solid choices are TBS Tango 2 or DJI FPV Remote Controller [3]
I spent ~20 hours in the sim before advancing to real drones; a few of my friends followed this path and successfully passed an improvised exam on real drone after just ~10 hours in the sim.
As for the drone itself, the easiest setup is probably DJI Avata [4], but it's less of the proper "FPV feel". I personally fly Flywoo Explorer [5] with DJI system: it's a small & nibmle long range drone, easy to travel with, and powerful enough to chase kiteboarders even in a strong wind.
P.S. Don't be discouraged with sim flying: it's actually very fun, feels similar to TrackMania Nations.
That's the fun part: most of the stuff currently on the market is quite good. The quads, the gear — if a few people recommend it on Reddit, it's likely totally fine for a beginner and it will fly well.
A few pointers:
The guy we all watch on YouTube is called Joshua Bardwell.
Regarding radio, the protocol you're looking for is ELRS. Everything has converged on ELRS, it's open source and crazy good. ELRS at 250mW will survive more than your video feed, and many ELRS transmitters go to 1W.
Transmitter (the controller): There are options, but you can't go wrong with anything from RadioMaster. FPV quads don't need many inputs, so honestly a RadioMaster Pocket is completely fine. I have both the Pocket and the TX16S (their flagship transmitter, I also fly fixed wings), and it makes zero difference for quads. This is completely up to your budget, just get something with ELRS.
The video situation is a bit more interesting, but generally: analog is alive and kicking with brutal power and range, but shitty video. In digital, DJI is king, although a bit expensive. They sell entire drones, even some (very meh) FPV, but they also sell cameras, video transmitters and goggles for "proper" FPV builds, and these kick ass. If you don't like DJI, there are alternatives (WalkSnail, HDZero), but nothing as open and as compatible as analog.
First you spend some time on a sim. They're all good nowadays, I personally fly Uncrashed the most, but I also have Liftoff and Tryp FPV, it's all good fun. The flight models feel slightly different, but so do real-life quads, so unless you're trying to match your real-life quad down to the last atom, you won't notice any issues.
You either build a quad from scratch (not hard at all, but it takes time and there's some soldering) or you buy a finished one (we call these BNF — bind and fly), or you get something in between and add your own parts (e.g. a camera + VTX (video transmitter) to match your goggles).
You choose the size and type of the quad according to where and how you want to fly. A "tiny whoop" for your apartment, a "cinewhoop" for high-quality video indoors and outdoors, a 3inch freestyle quad for a big garden or a park, a 5inch (the golden standard) for racing and seriously whipping it around, a 7inch for huge environments and longer cruising, and anything bigger for serious long-range missions.
I wouldn't go larger than 5 inches for a first quad, you'll likely crash it a few [dozens of] times and larger quads are both more fragile and more expensive to fix if you do break something.
Crashing a quad is a completely normal thing and they're built to withstand it. Usually you'll just ding or bend a prop, you bend it back and replace it (<1€/$) when it's really bad.
The standard advice is always to buy a transmitter and get started with the simulator. Then buy / build your custom racing drone that suits your flying style and area. Anything from 20 gram whoops that fly indoors to 5" racing quads that need a lot of open space.
But with dji neo 2 / avata you get a fairly beginner friendly set up. Once you're used to it, you can upgrade to a good racing drone by building one yourself.
You should try getting _extremely_ good at Trading Card Games. Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Magic The Gathering all have extremely active current player bases and loads of places to play across the Americas, Europe, and (mostly east) Asia. Getting deep into card advantage, deck construction, and hypergeometric theory has been an absolute blast. Plus, the online simulators are free for Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon are free and pretty current with the paper game. Making new friendships with people not in my usual circles has been so rewarding, I can't recommend it enough. Not to mention the most meaningful contribution of all - winning events moves the needle on the way the rest of the playerbase plays the game. I could go on and on about this.
I play vintage baseball. It's baseball using rules and equipment from the 19th century. There's nothing else in my life that connects me to my eight-year old self, but the feeling I get running out onto the field or going up to bat is exactly what it was back in Little League. It's also a really fun community of passionate baseball nerds, and a good motivation to stay fit.
Making watches. You can start simple ("modding") which is essentially assembling a movement, case, hands, dial, etc. You can keep going deeper: try to fix or build a movement gears.
If you like music and technology - there's a massive world of possibilities out there (e.g., software based music production, tone.js, music programming with Strudel).
If you have more money - 1) DJing/mixing on vinyl + record digging, 2) Modular synthesis (your wallet will hate you your soul will love you)
I got into riding, building and customizing motorcycles. The chopper scene could always use the creativity and skills of tech savy folks. Besides the mechanical skills you learn in moments which are as satisfying as they are frustrating, there's ways to utilize programming skills too...think performance/usage monitoring, trip cataloging software, social tools to connect bikers, camping planners, who knows.
I'd suggest you try out something completely offline. My next candidate is flintknapping, but there are lots of really interesting historical crafts that are in need of preservation and are extremely interesting to learn and gain expertise at.
Woodworking, oil painting, pottery, analog synthesizers, animal husbandry, spinning and yarnmaking, knitting and weaving, sewing, pattern making, metalwork, welding, endurance running, rock climbing, beekeeping, brewing and distilling, the list goes on and on. Contrary to popular opinion they are all extremely technical and demanding fields, and getting to reconnect with the physical world and the people in it, as well as history, is extremely rewarding.
All primitive skills are great fun to learn. A logical followup to flint knapping is arrow making and bowery. There is something magical in making lethal ranged weapons with sticks, rocks, and string.
I've been pretty obsessed with FSRS in general (tldr: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/awesome-fsrs/wiki/...) It's a fantastic new-ish scheduler for spaced repetition - basically a machine learning model which adapts to you, and schedules flash (or anything, really, it's an algorithm) cards according to how well you are personally performing - surfacing data like retention, stability, recall, etc. It's a massive jump over previous "learning algorithms" like
For the past 60d I've been using Anki (a flash card program) and it's FSRS setting to learn my French deck (5000 most common French words) and I'm absolutely zooming. I can already follow a fair chunk of conversational French.
I've also been using the same system to learn Chess more deeply (endgames, tactics, openings) through Chessable and a few other websites that offer FSRS. It's levelled up my chess game a lot
Basically - the thing that hooked me was the data. Being able to see how many cards I've reviewed, how many cards are at 90/80% retention, the stability of every piece of that knowledge, the decay rate, etc... It's really cool.
FSRS is really cool. I'm trying to use it and a modified flashcard system to learn more abstract computer science and higher math. I hadn't considered it as a way of learning Chess - that's really interesting. I'm thinking about expanding my system to cover ear-training, birdsong recognition, a few other things like that.
My listening comprehension for Piano has always been lacking. A deck of piano sounds that map to actual notes (or even chords) might do wonders for it...
My current decks are as follows - I spend about an hour in total reviewing/learning them all, daily:
Two things, but mostly revolves around sports. As my job in software engineering is very sedentary, I try to remain active in my hobbies.
First is gym - I go every morning before work, do a 2-mile run or 5k, depending on my mood, and then power lifting.
On weekends I hike or climb. I find it very liberating when visiting places without any kind of network and it's me, nature and socialising. I've recently also started an outdoor agency (it's local to my place) - for when AI takes over my job completely: https://boa.ba/
I guess I'm a dabbler - I have too many hobbies, none of which I take very seriously. Brewing, dry stone walls, math puzzles, etc.
That said, if you're looking for something meaningful, consider doing something with kids. Technical or not, it doesn't matter. Could be anything from volunteering at a local sports club to teaching part-time at a trade school.
I build ukuleles and guitars from scratch. That's not as niche as what a lot of people do -- it's just woodworking -- but I do software for a living and enjoy making durable, physical things in my free time.
In my views, you don't need an unsolved filed- you need an unexplored angle. Most "crowded" hobbies still have some gaps who build tools, document deeply, or connect ideas across domains. The average isn't in the hobby itself, but it how you approach it.
Juggling! I used to juggle when i was a teenager, managed to juggle 5 balls and clubs. Then after decades of neglecting it, i picked it up again and i found the joy in this hobby again! I can highly recommend.
I haven't really had a hobby until last summer, when I took up collecting banknotes. Growing up in the USSR, I had a few imperial notes as a kid and wanted to expand my "collection", but didn't actually start in earnest until decades later. Got a few late 19th / early 20th century pre-revolution notes, and then found myself in the abyss of Russian Civil War, where every city and local municipality were printing their own money. Anyways, it's a journey without an end, and I saw an interviewee describing this hobby as a "sickness, do not start", which sort of resonated.
As a history lover with appreciation for tactile aspects of history (love 100+ year old books), this scratches this itch better than anything else, while leaving me wanting more. I research and write up every banknote I acquire, and the sense of history I get from browsing my album is like nothing else.
For anyone interested, here are the photos of my collection circa end of last year: https://imgur.com/a/zmCXd8l
I always assumed that newer banknotes are always going to be easier to obtain than older ones. But the hyperinflation of late imperial, early Soviet times means a ton of paper money was printed and is still available at cheap prices. On the other hand, Soviet money from between 1922 and before 1961 can be quite rare and sometimes very very expensive.
Visiting and educating/programming for the elderly (in nursing homes or just community members) or the imprisoned is both socially beneficial and mentally and spiritually rewarding.
Likewise for volunteering at hospices, food banks, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters.
I'm getting into old maps, books, and ephemera - mostly travel and tourism related stuff. I'm also currently researching old printing methods like lithography and letterpress. I recently purchased my first rubber brayer, some cotton-rag paper, some ink, and a 1930's letterpress plate. I hope to have my first pulls this weekend if time allows.
I got into tech by liking data visualization, information design, and aesthetics in frontend. It turns out transit maps and wayfinding is one of the earliest modern attempts at information design that is standardized and legible. And it’s fun to revisit because there’s no objective truth about what kind of map is best.
I set up trail cameras in remote areas to watch bears, mountain lions and other critters. Getting there is very hard so it keeps me in shape and I am always fascinated when I can watch new footage.
once I have more time I will try classifying and trimming the videos with AI so there is a tech component too. And maybe in the long run do my own cameras that have better detection than the usual PIR sensors that trigger a lot for moving branches or leaves.
The cameras are sealed and a set of batteries last around 3 months. There are cameras with cell connection but that gets pretty expensive and doesn’t work in remote areas.
I'm tinkering with some electronic gadgets like esp32 to build my own things, such as auto feeder for my aquarium or an auto wattering system for my balcony garden. It's kinda hard and takes time because I'm not an electrican, but I'm really enjoy it and taking it slowly.
I view hobbies as something that I derive value or pleasure from. I do not approach them from the perspective of “meaningfully contributing”. IMO, that sounds more like compensation for career dissatisfaction. I’m not being critical. I just recommend choosing hobbies that you derive value and meaning from, regardless of what the world may think of it. For example, a friend of mine, with high pressure tech management job, quilts in the evening. He says it helps him relax. Doesn’t matter if anyone likes what he does or wants to buy it. As for myself, now that I’m retired I delve into a number of areas, just for me, and absolutely have no interest in sharing them or being recognized for what I do. Good luck on your quest.
Artisan pizzas!
Local food bank
Clothing give—a-way for homeless (organized)
Toastmaster public speaking
Organized a youth chess club (great)
Lock picking
Teaching calculus, physics
Exercise at the gym
Helping a homeless guy get organized
Nature hikes in groups
Dancing
Spanish lessons
Chess puzzles
Chess lessons
Cooking
Making past
Home improvement
Detail your messy car
Take an auto class
You might look into applying RL in the domain of low cost robotics and drones. That would draw on some of your past experience but applied to a domain (robotics) which I perceive is seeing renewed interest.
Someone needs to solve barbecue. The entire industry is based on feel and experience. Why can't a beginner replicate Franklin's brisket by following a recipe online?
It's probably because the main measuring instrument (a probe thermometer) doesn't provide any feedback about fat rendering, moisture, etc. Plus, every brisket cut has different fat ratios and thickness, which means a recipe can't guarantee identical inputs like bread baking. I'd love for someone to throw some over the top engineering & experimentation at this.
The hobbyist cannot replicate Franklin’s brisket because Franklin’s knowledge, ingredients, tools, and their corresponding interactions are largely not attainable to the hobbyist. Franklin has better smokers than the hobbyist and knows how to use them better. Franklin also has dibs on the premier runs of Creekstone Farms briskets that the hobbyist can hardly come by.
The hobbyist can approximate that brisket to a reasonable degree. However, that involves smoking a, hopefully not literal, ton of brisket. Given the cost of beef, time to smoke, and effort it takes to meal-plan brisket throughout the week, attaining Franklin-level quality consistently is a tough row to hoe.
One of my hobbies is organizing events. I, like to think, I am pretty good at it. Main point is to create good initial conditions, then people take care of the rest.
Design whistle sequences to get dolphins to respond in ways that will help you figure out their meaning. A few multi-million $ projects could use that, such as Google, Baidu, and SDRP.
I’ve been building quantum photonics experiments. Repeating the Bell inequality tests that won the 2022 Nobel, quantum erasers, etc.
Probably the coolest part has been automating the optomechanical equipment and optimizing physical experiments with Bayesian optimization. Similar to hyperparameter tuning in ML, but with lasers.
I'm sure there are field that should be absolutely crowded but where you can do something meaningful.
If I had free time, I would write an app to learn foreign languages I'm interested in. I'm pretty sure that there are good apps, but I tried a few ones, and none really fit my needs.
There are also software that I use a lot, like transcribe! which works well, but that I could see how to improve.
So as others mentioned, do something that you would be interested in.
I ended up giving up on it because my right shoulder is damaged from rheumatoid arthritis. Go where I could not, anon291. May your reeds be clean and your bellows free of mildew.
I found out something that was shocking to me about two years ago, which is that plenty of people learn to play ice hockey, of all sports, as an adult. I don’t know about you folks, but I always assumed it was one of those where if you didn’t play as a kid, you missed the boat. I didn’t even know how to skate, I learned on the fly. And this is in North Carolina! 10/10 recommend. I’m actually typing this lying on the couch after playing in a tournament in the Carolina Hurricanes arena :-)
If you want something niche, perhaps make some portal-2 mods or make more efficient versions of using GlaDOS TTS within browser etc. (this is just something that I want to be honest, but I feel like it can be a niche hobby in its regards seeing your interests)
Let me know if you want more ideas and have fun and have a nice day man!
I do boxing as a form of cardio so I'm not weightlifting all the time.
So I've just invited a friend for a 1v1 and he accepted, time to start training both properly I guess.
I do want something related to computers because that's where I'm skilled the most, but it being mixed with something else is fine (i.e., biohacking).
But computers generally are becoming stale, considering how much money has been poured into everything digital, it's going to be hard to find something novel.
Maybe the next frontier is becoming an electrician?
> But computers generally are becoming stale, considering how much money has been poured into everything digital, it's going to be hard to find something novel
I feel like it depends, there are many sorts of projects which are still low hanging fruits. you might not get appreciated to do things anymore because of the amount of competition but you can feel proud of yourself.
Breaking NATs without root permissions (try searching dropbear without root and building it and running it with something like pinggy to then make a minecraft server beneath a nat work), making a free crypto chain have data embedded within a loop of transactions to embed data on crypto for free, recently using single-file to somehow archive archive.is pages on archive.org* anonymously using piping-server.
I have used AI/LLM assistance in most of these but I feel like aside from being frustrated at the code aspects, I had some good ideas and even with everyone else having AI, I didn't see anyone else doing these things (the reason I say this is because if they did, I would've just used their services :] )
Not sure if a lot of these things sound novel, programmatically not, but idea-wise I think* they might-be novel.
A lot of my novel ideas come out of proving things. Can I prove that I can run minecraft on a free intel server that me and my friends can play on? Can I prove that I can save archive.is pages on archive.org anonymously-ish since the issue with archive.is
So my point is, out of personal experience, there are so many novel-ideas within things which seem obvious but nobody has really implemented them and to be honest, everyone is just creating yet another chatgpt wrapper with AI. Much of these experiments are prototyping/proving these ideas and I believe that there are some low hanging fruits in such sense of these ideas which can be interesting to think about.
So I don't suppose that you have to go bio-hacking to find things which pique your interest, there are some practical things too in my opinion which can pique your interest.
Not sure if this might be the answer you are looking for, but I hope this helps within the context you asked it. Sometimes two normal things combined together can be the novel thing to do.
My opinion is that people with money chase money oriented things, the people with passion/hobby-tinkering will do things that chase passion and so sometimes you have nothing to worry about :-)
So are there any things that you feel is similar to this for you, perhaps?
What you're doing is interesting but those are side-projects.
I have plenty of random side-projects, just now after reading Gibson's Burning Chrome, I'm making an OpenBSD server where you can only log in using SSH keys in my implant, and logging in makes you a completely new but very restricted user with 1GB of free storage. Kinda like Johnny Mnemonic.
But I feel very disorganized when most of my attention is on distinct one-off side projects, I want to work on something novel and big.
But thanks for your suggestions.
It is true that most industries begin when passion oriented people finally meet money oriented people, but most time they are separate.
I've been growing bonsai trees for about 13 years. It doesn't have anything to do with computers, so it's a nice counterbalance to my software job. I don't really even take pictures or videos of my trees, I want to keep the subject as analog and simple as I can.
Read manuals to learn niche software, right now I’m reading about LyX and TeXmacs (their manuals are very well written). Lots of these more niche software can always use more love and users.
Got started as a "temp" for my sons mini-team (back when he was 5). Temporary turns into UEFA certified youth trainer/coach real fast. It's no longer just about the kids (sorry guys), but a really awesome hobby with lots of personal development paths.
A while back, at a company I used to work at, we did intros of new hires. This was one of the questions. One person shared that they do composting and worm farming. That was memorable. Sharing here since it's about as interesting and niche as I can imagine.
Building autonomous security systems as a 17-year-old.
Turns out confidence-gated AI execution is a fascinating
design problem when the stakes are real infrastructure.
My wife started reselling vintage furniture as a hobby, but now it has become her full-time job and she earns money from it. We live in the UK and went to France for shopping for the first time last weekend. Happy to answer any questions
I used to play Pokémon cards competitively. It was fun going to local tournaments and flying with friends for Regional tournaments. I stopped to focus on night school, and I want to pick it back up with the card legality change happening Friday.
Pokémon Champions just came out, so I might give up cards for the video game. We'll see.
I recently started looking into hydroponics gardening. You can start very easily with a Kratky system and some herbs, and then take it a step at the time.
I’m quite at the beginning myself, but I like it so far! It’s a nice mix of science and craft.
Yep! I have a small setup with just some used food grade pickle buckets, and have been growing greens and things for a bit over a year. Going to get some more and expand them this year. It literally uses no power as pumps are not used, and water usage is very minimal. I live in the desert so low water usage is very important.
It's an interesting hobby, as you have to adapt it to the area you live, and where you grow the plants.
I do wrestling and BJJ, helps me cope with my stressful job and besides my joints hurting (especially fingers) from time to time, it was great for both my mental and physical health
I do some synthetic biology as a hobby - genetically engineered a baker’s yeast to produce grape aroma and then baked bread with it, and gave it to like 100 people at an event I was at.
Also do a few others - learned Esperanto (exclusively through listening and speaking with people), beekeeping, woodworking, etc.
sailing.
you will learn how to be self resilient, to be an electric, plumber, painter, weather and experience (sometimes under your nose if near water) most beautiful places
there's a print shop nearby that does workshops, i took a short class there and i'll soon be back with some design files, hope to make a few copies of a zine about publishing a website on the internet
Qubes OS is a niche security-oriented operating system that runs everything in VMs with about 70k users [0]. Even less users contribute with amazing things like running in RAM [1] or using very minimal VMs with Debian and Fedora [3] to minimize the attack surface and bloat.
Baking bread, albeit with a (Panasonic) bread making machine. Might not be niche, however, traditions of giving bread to guests runs deep and people are always delighted if you give them a loaf of extremely fresh bread.
There are different directions that bread making can go. During the pandemic there was a rash of people making rock hard sourdough, and sourdough is still the magic word for 'higher status' bread, even though almost every commercially available sourdough loaf is faked with enzymes added to a regular 'Chorleywood' loaf.
I gave sourdough a go but I prefer my bread making machines creations that are definitely not sourdough. I like to fortify my bread in two different ways, either with fruits and nuts to make a 'fruit loaf' of sorts, or with seeds and wholemeal flour to have bread that covers many a niche nutrient.
Commercial bread in the UK comes with government issued fortifications of folates, B vitamins and whatnot. This might be fine for pregnant mums that can't cook, but I am not one of them! So the challenge is to do a better job of the fortifications, mostly with seeds and choice of flour.
Commercial bread is also not very real, with lots of additives that I don't seem to need in my own creations. Emulsifiers, preservatives and everything else are needed for commercial bread, if it is to have shelf life and appeal, but my intestines are not crying out for these sorts of additives and I seem to still be alive without them, with improved digestive tract functionality.
Although we have more interesting things to eat than bread, our history in the West is the history of bread, we would not be here without it. Once you start baking your own, albeit with a machine, history becomes so much more interesting.
The other optimisation I try is cost. It is easy to produce a decent loaf with very expensive ingredients, however, on a budget it gets to have a different challenge to it.
I introduced my uncle to the hobby and he is a meticulous record keeper, so I wrote a simple app for him to record his bakes and ratings. This enables him to make fine adjustments to quantities so as to improve on his creations.
I did look for an app before I wrote my own, and the app was called 'Microsoft Excel'. I am sure that could be customised with recipes and whatnot, but I wanted to reinvent the wheel, hence my own app, just for myself and my uncle.
With some hobbies that is all you do and an obsession. Bread making is not like that, you can have plenty of more strings to your bow. As mentioned, people are always impressed if you give them a loaf, or if they learn that your sandwiches are made with your own bread. You can insist that it took three minutes with the machine, to downplay everything, however people stay impressed.
I am trying to build microphone capsules in my garage. Trying to go below 14dB (Primo EM272 level), under 1". It is difficult but rewarding. I do not expect any financial benefits from it, even if I make it under 10mm, because it is very time-consuming. Big players already have massive factories doing 10,000x of what I am doing.
This is the most niche tech-related hobby I have currently.
I am trying to dial down K67. I am thinking about gold plating myself for the diaphragm in the future, but I am not ready for the expense. It is the hardest part of the project because the sound quality mostly depends on the diaphragm quality, and the rest of the capsule is literally a container.
I started the hobby a while back when I tried to create an ESP32 field recorder, but the sound quality was terrible with the MEMS style micropones. I ordered the Japanese Primo mics (14db for 10mm is crazy), and said if Japanese dudes can do it, I can do it too.
I was trying to create a visualizer tool for my steps in the backyard with ESP32 microphones, which sync perfectly and analyze the sound locations with Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) methods. I got close, but mic sensitivity, even at 14db is not 100% unless I place the mics 30-40 inches apart. I am still working on that project, but that also got expensive because $28 for ESP32-S3 POE and $25 primo mic per node got very expensive quickly as I wanted to cover more areas. I hope to share it soon with HN.
I’ve wanted to make a ribbon mic but haven’t gotten around to it. I’ve seen where people use Mylar emergency blankets as the membrane for condenser mics. The closest I’ve gotten is accidentally having a capacitor in a radio act as a microphone where it shouldn’t :)
Women's pro soccer. If you're in the US, we have access to some of the world's greatest athletes with World Cup champions and Olympic gold medalists in nearly every match. Even if you're not in the US, yeah you probably do too.
I never feel more connected to my community than when I'm at a game. Supporters groups are welcoming and politically/socially engaged and regularly sponsor community service events. The league is still young and fanbases are small, but it's a really critical point in history to support pro women's sports.
It's definitely worth throwing some of that tech salary at. Bonus: it has none of the drama of the men's game!
I had a route around San Francisco that I would visit, and all the places on the route were where there were good blackberry bushes. I’d take a bucket. Around Golden Gate Park and the Inner Sunset mostly, heading down into the Forest Hills area as well. I did that for a few years. Would pick up some plums along the way as well.
Now on the other side of the Bay I have a couple spots, not as dense a network. About an hour away there are masses.
I like to target a very specific species (Lake Trout) using vertical jigging techniques. You can do it on a small kayak with a simple fishfinder (histogram "graph") or a large boat with livescope (active sonar).
Because of the bait available for the lakers differs from what they eat in different lakes inland and other surrounding states, they are SUPER aggressive when the fishing is good.
The game is cruising around until you find marks at the depths and/or structure you are looking for. Once you find them, you drop heavy lures down on them (1-4oz) and they will rocket up sometimes 3/4 of the water column +(70ft / 21m) and absolutely crush your lure.
This tactic also requires you to properly reel your lure to match the intensity of the fish. Too fast or slow and they will swim off. Sometimes you have to leave your bait motionless and wait for them to approach and then "fleeing" at the right time to trigger their agression and chase.
I've had fish mess with me for 5+mins and still not bite. This tactic works in both ice fishing as well as open water fishing.
I discovered this technique trying to adapt what I learned on a boat to kayak fishing. Necessity is the mother of invention, and if you want to catch fish that aren't near shore you gotta float somehow.
Part of the kayak adaptation was going from 1/8, 1/4 or 1/2oz lures up to 1, 2, 3 or 4oz. You are often dealing with not only wind that pushes your boat, but also current that pulls your lure in a different direction making it difficult to see your lure on the fishfinder.
There are a couple other ways to do the jigging thing but all of this has resulted in a new lure design i've been trying to figure out how to turn into a viable business. I'm also trying to figure out how to do some kind of kayak fishing guiding because there are much higher restrictions / licensing reqs on taking people out on boats
I've been making a seabed simulation of the seabed for interacting with polymetallic nodules. The idea is these nodules contain a lot of cobalt, but due to their location on the seafloor they're had to access, making mining difficult.
It took me a while but I finally got my hands on some polymetallic nodules (basically the rocks you find on the seabed that contain cobalt) which I'm scanning and will hopefully have uploaded soon. Tragically the nodules were damaged through shipping but it's all I have, especially since the first shipment was stolen off my porch lol. It's build with Project Chrono using C++ https://github.com/thansen0/seabed-sim-chrono
Invasive species removal, bird identification, trail running, mountain biking, audiobook listening while walking. All are best done out of doors. :P Most are teh opposite of the posture and brain patterns that intensive computer usage encourages.
Hardware synthesizers, audio engineering, DSP programming, a whole lot of problems to solve in that domain as big manufacturers sell half baked devices for a quick buck that can barely stay in sync, or gear that is inferior to the same kind of gear from 20 years ago... it's not niche though, synth popularity is exploding, it's just that manufacturers aren't making the synthesizers as powerful as they could be, despite the increase in CPU power...
NULF - we support the proliferation of utraquist ideals in all congregations. Our goal is to expand access to the eucharist for the laity. been round about 500 years or so but we're having a come back.
Looks like nobody has claimed this yet so I'll add: heavy equipment (excavators, loaders, chippers bigger than they had in "Fargo"...). Began as a solution to the "can't find a contractor to dig that hole" problem but like most things turned into an interesting rabbit hole and money pit. Interesting social side in terms of learning how to deal with mechanics, parts suppliers, welding, hydraulics, getting to know your way around a gravel pit.
So this thing would require you years, if not more before you can contribute meaningfully; and you have to build a community basically from scratch for it -- and before that you not only can't contribute, but you can't even participate. But hear me out.
WhatWhenWhere (спортивное Что Где Когда in Russian. Note the "sport" part -- it's an entirely different, much more interesting game than a regular one). Doesn't ring a bell, I know, but mostly because it is almost exclusively post-USSR deal, but wouldn't it be cool if the movement becomes worldwide? You can help!
The idea is simple. It's a quiz game. Think pub quiz, but formalized. You have a team of 6, you have 36 questions, and you have a minute to give an answer to each one. Sounds boring? It isn't, believe me, otherwise we wouldn't have people who have been doing it for decades -- myself included, I played my first game at about 13, and I'm over 30 now. Obviously I was doing it on and off for a while, but for last seven or so years it was pretty consistent. Last year I participated in 83 games, so about 1.5 a week.
So what's the deal, and what's the appeal? How is it different from a regular pub quiz? First, almost no just trivia questions. Yeah, you can get a question about recent Oscars or Italian brainrot here or there, but rarely and still packaged properlt. Second, and most important, as I mentioned, it is more formalized. There are rules, committees, leagues, nationals, ratings and so on. But the best part -- there is a way to write questions right. There are tools to help you lead players in the right direction, help them determine what possible solutions aren't correct -- all that without revealing anything that would spoil the right answer. Number of letters in the answer, the etymology of the word -- is it Greek, is it Arab, is it French?; grammar pointers, toponyms and personal names. You can make a host read you question in a certain way as a part of the question. You can print out (a lot of games are still played offline) something and turn that into question. You can ask a question that is one word long! You can ask a question without a single word if you set it up right -- recently played one like that. There is metagame to it -- you can set something up in a question 3, to have it come into play in the question 9. There's drama -- captain of one of my teams seduced a wife of opposing team's captain. There's dickmeasuring with global leaderboards. But most importantly, there's a constant race between authors and players to outwit each other. We have a publicly available database of questions played previously -- aptly named gotquestions.online with 6+ thousand of "packets" -- a set of questions, played in one game, usually 36, but since we have 24-hour marathons, some of them are over 600 questions long. And you can see the way questions evolved over the years. It was completely normal to ask something like "What's the name of the painting of the guy with an apple for a face" in the one of the most prestigious tournaments in the late 90s. Now this wouldn't fly even in a school tournament -- because it's not a proper WWW question, it's just a question. A WWW question makes you first unravel the thought process of an author, find a direction of the answer and then try to remember the name of the guy who dug up Troy. So yeah, it would require you to have some general and sometimes pretty deep knowledge of a lot of things, but most of the time it would be just logic, communication -- there are six people solving the same problem in your team, and ability to read hidden hints.
Interesting note: in my experience about half of players on any game would be tech guys and gals; almost all the rest would be split between lawyers of some description, and education professionals. Teams I currently play with consist of about 10 IT professionals (one of which also a professor of compsci), a lawyer, a psychologist, a private school headmaster, a professor of law in university (combo) and a logistics manager. So it also a great hobby for networking.
To finish my ramblings, I'll translate a question from recent school tournament and walk you through the solution. It doesn't require any intricate knowledge of an original language (a lot of hints built using that) or some deep specialized knowledge from any field, just general one.
On the days of the game near the Stadio Pier Luigi Penzo you can find unusual traffic jams. Where does this stadium located?
Solving this will take you just a couple of steps. First, make note of the stadium name. Obviously named after someone, but most likely not from English-speaking country. Sounds Italian if anything, and the guy isn't some world-famous athlete to have a stadium named after him elsewhere but the Italy. Keep that in mind -- it's probably in Italy. Next step: unusual traffic jams. What can be so unusual about the traffic jam? Long? Mundane. Colorful? No one buys colorful cars anymore. Not cars? That might work, but what if not cars? Mopeds? Too close to cars and gives us nothing. Bikes? Not Netherlands, and still leaves too many options for a city on the table. Boats? That might work, that's unusual. Are there any Italian cities full of water? Venice would be one.
And what do you know, that's the right answer.
So yeah, wouldn't this be a great pastime? Join us, play the game, write your own questions, build a community and be remembered as a Person Who Brought The Game to the Anglosphere.
I got myself involved with a nonprofit local group preserving local pioneer era apple trees. They've been DNA testing and cataloging the trees, and had all the info stashed away in google drive and onedrive folders. The founder was looking to step back so they asked me if I wanted to step up as project lead, which I did.
I took the info and organized it into a nice wiki-style site with maps and descriptions so everyone in the community can learn about the old orchards.
https://heritageapplecorps.org/index.php/Main_Page
I've also learned how to prune and graft hundred year old apple trees and now have a couple dozen young grafted trees growing in my garage, all clones of local hundred year old trees, some of which genetically tested unique and are of currently unknown varieties.
Thats awesome! I'm doing apple stuff on the other side of the Cascades (Eugene), starting a cidery and trying to find rare varieties to graft. And doing little software projects like https://pomological.art/. Would love to get in touch if you want people to propagate these varieties you're finding and would potentially be interested in sharing some scion wood!
Oh cool! I've used pomological.art! Great site!
I'm in the middle of building out a similar big project that takes a different tack: looking through every period pomological text (e.g. Apple of New York, Fruits and Fruit Trees of America) and pulling the images, descriptions, etc for every heritage apple variety. Includes the watercolors too. I also pull in every scanned catalog from nurseries selling fruit trees in the PNW from the late 1800s.
The goal is a tool we can use to identify apples, and also have comprehensive info on every variety, using public domain period content.
It's not fully done yet, there are bugs/issues right now but you can take a look here: https://heritageapplecorps.org/varieties/
I think we grafted ~90 scions this year. A lot of them we haven't actually DNA tested yet so no idea what they are. So many of these trees are on their last legs, so our priority is cloning them first, and then once the clones grow, DNA test those as funds are available.
I make my own cider too (though as a hobby). If we ever find ourselves in the same city I'd love to meet up and we can swap scions/cider/etc.
I love that idea, actually started something similar awhile back but didn't get far and ran out of time/energy. If you need any help/contributions I'd love to pitch in. And sounds great! I'll shoot you an email with my contact info
You’re in Eugene!? Me too. I’d love to meet up some time to talk about your software over coffee.
Nice! Sounds good, shoot me an email: haupt.andrew@protonmail.com
There are tens of us!
Small world! I’m doing it on the mid/south Oregon coast! Started with a late neighbors trees and went from there!
My work and operation is small, limited to residential yards/gardens and particularly focused on dwarf and columnar varieties.
Used your site quite a bit! Thanks for making it.
Good stuff! I honestly didn't know anyone used it so I'm happy to hear that
I have done similar grafting experiments, although at present I am navigating a change in motivation. I got into apples through cider, but gave up alcohol this year. (As an aside, this was a long time coming and absolutely worth some small sacrifices!)
While I’m interested in heritage apples, I think it’s probably more important to find and cultivate wild apples showing attributes that can keep them hardy in 21st century climate. An apple that thrived over a century ago depended on conditions that are different today and are continuing to change.
Some cool people active in this space include:
- https://gnarlypippins.com/6th-pomological-exhibition-high-hi...
- https://www.mofga.org/trainings/annual-events/seed-swap-and-...
> I think it’s probably more important to find and cultivate wild apples showing attributes that can keep them hardy in 21st century climate.
The neat thing is that these tend to be self-selecting! These older orchards drop a lot of fruit and can self-propagate new seedlings. The ones that manage to survive are the ones well adapted to current local conditions.
Chuck Wendig's 2023 novel Black River Orchard has an apple historian as one of the protagonists. Lots of talk of scion wood and girdling and colonial era apple varieties. You may find this interesting.
Anyway to petition Washington State to RELEASE the Cosmic Crisps?
WSU faculty here. The Cosmic Crisp is under license to Washington state growers for ten years, starting in about 2019, so it will be a few years yet.
A friend in Palouse has found several heritage apple trees and has spent at least a decade grafting and working with them. It’s an interesting hobby to watch him experiment with.
I have to ask, how often is tissue culture used? I'm not sure of it's exact usecases like respawning old tree samples but it does seem very related.
It isn't, really, at least not by us.
Apple trees are pretty easy to propagate if they're alive. Snip off a twig, graft it onto another tree, and away it goes.
Some poor-condition trees can certainly present a challenge in terms of finding ideal graftable wood, but even a poor-quality scion is a lot easier to propagate via grafting than trying to culture in a petri dish.
That sounds really cool, how did they do the DNA testing out of interest?
We work with Dr Cameron Peace's lab at WSU. They send us test tubes, we send the tubes back with leaves in them, they run the DNA tests and compare against an apple ID database they've built. We pay ~$50 per test, which is what most of the groups budget goes towards.
I started designing my own clothes. The insight was that I spend 80% money on suits that I wear 2 times a year, and the rest was low quality clothing I actually wore.
I flipped it, and made suits and pants that I could wear everyday.
The fast fashion stores were crap quality, my body is not a template size and I care about fabric and comfort.
The process was to learn how to sketch, to determine fabrics, colors and fit. I made pants that stay comfortable even after I eat food, I made suits that I can wear casually.
I don’t stitch myself, for that I worked with multiple workshops, until I found one that works for me.
Took me about 3 years to reach a point where all my wardrobe is designed by and for me.
There were multiple side effects on my confidence, my life, and the opportunities coming my way.
That's pretty neat, and we should talk. In my household we are currently producing about 75% of our clothing, mostly out of a desire to avoid using fabrics that generate a lot of microplastic waste + observing that newer clothes/fabrics wear out quickly.
Would love to talk. My goals are not anchored around sustainability, but I optimise against synthetic fibres.
My website is shivekkhurana.com. My email is on my github.
OK, fairly specific question - how did You get to that pants silouhete? It seems from the pics You went for something like a straight leg plus some extra room and fairly fitted waist / butt. Is that a response to a trend (oversized work clothes seem to be the thing these past few years), or is there some practical reason too (mainly for the extra room in the leg shape)?
How did you start out? Was it through local classes?
No classes. I was probably hyper aware of how my body reacts to clothing.
For example, the waist of almost every pant became uncomfortable when I sat down after eating food.
The area below arm pits and close to thighs was always tight. The length of pants was always long for the waist.
- To determine my taste, I looked at various styles of women clothing (on Pinterest).
Then for the models I found most attractive, I imagined what would the clothes they have put on look like if they were men. That led me to the realisation that I like formal aesthetic, reserved and subtle colors.
Everything else was experimental
I would love to talk to you if you're willing, email in my profile, I'm in SL right now and was thinking of trying something like this but it sounds like you've gone through this journey and are a lot more experienced than me
Would love to get your perspective
Hello fellow Clojurist, I sent you an email.
Pinged!
Hey, I looked you up online and ... you dress real well! Congratulations!
I want to hear more
Fast fashion forces you to dress for the masses. Loose shirts, baggy pants and shallow pockets is not fashion, its cost optimisation for brands.
I didn't want to dress up like a boy. Me and my friend were in Paris when we got inspired by the floor(fashion_sense). I was already working on my clothing, but that day we promised each other that we will not be underdressed anymore.
He opted for off-the-shelf formal clothing: high quality shirts, and pants. I went all in.
First I found markets that sell cheap fabrics, so I can experiment. I travel a lot, so my clothing had to be designed for all weathers. I'm Indian (Bharat), but look racially ambiguous, so I also wanted my clothing to reflect my roots and culture, yet be modern enough for any room in the world.
I run a company, and write code, so comfort was paramount. But I also had meetings or presentations so I wanted to be presentable.
Started with pants, because I thought pants are easy to optimise, and I just need a black, gray and dark blue one. Over 5 iterations, I reached a design with elastic straps on the side (because when I eat food, my tummy bloats a little and its uncomfortable to sit down), and loose on the thighs. Imagine pyjamas, that look like pants.
Then next step was to experiment with jackets and shirts. I played with fabric, patterns, and finish (zippers, titch buttons, different cuff lengths and styles, different collars).
My friends started noticing, and I also consulted some clients. Then I gave a talk about it. This is one of my skills that I discovered by first principles. The best part is that I met my girlfriend because she noticed my aesthetics, and she told me that she makes her own clothes too.
Alternatively, one can create bespoke patterns. There is a lovely little open source community of pattern designers at https://seamly.io I got myself a pattern drafting book and started working on shirts and pants. The neat thing is one can design the draft pieces to be completely parametric, so adapting the pattern to different persons is as simple as entering new measurements.
Was the talk recorded? I'd love to see it. No pressure if it isn't public.
No. I expected 5 people to show up, but there were almost 50.
I took care of the stage but couldn’t manage operations.
+1 also very interested
Put it on Etsy and see what others are willing to pay! :))
I do make clothes for close friends and family, but I don’t intend to make money of it. Playing this game for the game sake.
As someone who has monetized hobbies before, I think it's smart to keep doing things the way you are currently.
When you have to start optimising things for efficiency, it generally stops being relaxing and fun.
they are customized for his body. if he started catering to a mass audience he'd be creating the exact thing he is avoiding
Have you shared any photos online? Id love to see
https://shivekkhurana.com/about. 3/4 photos are my custom made clothes.
Incredible, thanks for sharing!
this is super cool, well done
My hobby is organizing in-person meetups for random people to get together, chat and make friends. Barely structured, if at all. I've found this rewarding and ended up making friends this way.
You have to accept that 5-15% of the people who would show up to something like this are genuine weirdos you probably don't want to be around. And another 10% at any given meetup are autistic or neuro-divergent but well-meaning, kind and full of interesting insights and hobbies, although perhaps difficult to socialize with, at least until they get to know you're well-meaning too.
These challenges come with the territory. You end up talking to people you'd otherwise never meet in the normal course of your life, and it's neutral at worst and wonderful at best.
I'm on the other side of this, in that I attend a lot of these.
I made a big effort about 12 years ago to go to a bunch of these (like three meetups a week and trying out a variety of different meetups), but now I mostly stick to a couple of them as I don't have as much time or energy for it anymore. But I've met most of my current friends through those meetups.
Find one you like and keep showing up until you're a regular, and get to know people slowly, and if they like you they start inviting you to things outside of the meetup, and then eventually you end up being friends.
I've done this with three different groups over the years and despite naturally being shy and an introvert I've ended up making friends at each one.
At the height of me doing this (like ten years ago), it got to the point where I'd go about my daily life and about once every other month I'd run into random people I've met at meetups also out and about. Like go out to dinner and spot someone I knew from a meetup also showing up to the same place, or run into them shopping at a Best Buy or something.
Meetups where you do a shared activity seems to be the best, like hikes or movies (+ dinner afterwards) or board games, since you can always focus on the activity if you don't feel like being social, and you have that activity you can always talk about as a subject.
Between the genuine weirdos, the autistic and/or the neuro-divergent, is there anyone left, really? Do the "normies" genuinely exist? Happy-go-lucky, knows a bit about everything but doesn't nerd out on anything, picks up every conversation subject and listens and holds their own in a manner that is just right? I am genuinely curious about the existence of these "superhumans".
There are many many of these socially-skilled normies. But, by virtue of being socially skilled, most have already pretty much filled up their social capacity and don't tend to show up at the kind of venues dedicated to helping under-socialized people meet up.
> Between the genuine weirdos, the autistic and/or the neuro-divergent, is there anyone left, really?
Heh this has a total “nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded” vibe.
The "normie" doesn't really exist. Everyone is kind of weird in some aspect, which might not be obvious on a surface level.
But having gone to a bunch of programming meetups, the majority of people are perfectly pleasant and good to socialise with. The weirdos are usually non tech people who have an app or crypto idea they want help with. Or just total crazy people who just showed up to the first event they could find regardless of topic.
that describes me but i would never say i'm a "superhuman". I feel like i'm a boring glue guy.
The OGs in the group tend to be well adjusted normal people. ie the people that started the group
People new to cities look for community.
While there is often a "normal" (bell-curve fitting) distribution for individual factors, putting them together can be counter-intuitive.
> Even when considering just three dimensions, fewer than 5% of pilots were “average” in all. [1]
I would guess many/most people probably think they fall into either (1) the normal bucket or (変) the weird/fringe bucket. Either "I am pretty normal" or "I am an outsider". How many think "We're all fairly different once you cluster in any 3 interesting dimensions!"?
But people feel that dichotomy, which makes me think it is largely about perception relative to a dominant culture: the in-group versus out-group feeling. For example, atheists might feel like outsiders in many parts of the U.S., but less so in big cities and in other countries. In dense urban walkable cities (like NYC), people see diversity more directly and more often. Seeing a bunch of people is different than seeing a bunch of cars.
[1]: From "Curse of Dimensionality: Lessons from the U.S. Air Force Cockpit Design" by Maciej Nasinski (2025): https://polkas.github.io/posts/cursedim/
Curious how that character 変 made it in there. Is that a typo for 2?
it's a Japanese word for "weird". I'm guessing that OP is a bit of an Otaku (aka "obsessed with Japan") -- which is either ironic or completely appropriate.
I thought it would be weird to replace (b) with something, so I decided to search for characters from other languages.
I thought it was an aposite joke. A, "you're local weirdo, or you, might count in a foreign language".
My first thought was that they were an LLM, but then checking their profile it seems they've been around since 2012 and have a comment expressing that they seem to get accused of being an LLM a lot, and suggesting people don't do that.
Any sufficiently interesting person eventually gets accused of being an AI. Quite soon these accusations will nearly always be accurate.
> Quite soon these accusations will nearly always be accurate.
/headscratching They don't have to be, do they? It is possible that some people will build identity systems with norms that e.g. humans type with their own hands. These could become popular, at least conceivably, in certain areas. Hard to enforce for sure. And getting harder and harder to distinguish reliably.
Sounds like a really cool idea. How do you organize the meetup and promote it to people if it ends up being random people? Do you set it up on meetup.com and have a theme at the minimum?
I've been to a lot of meetups and it's definitely hit or miss and obviously depends on the sociability of the people that show up. The better ones I've attended are generally ones where people aren't trying to network for work purposes and are there literally to just socialize. The networking ones I find very dull as it's people just talking shop and career and if you've nothing to offer them on the career front, they move on quickly.
> ones where people aren't trying to network
I have literally never been to any kind of organized gathering where this wasn't the objective of most of the people there. Family and children's events excluded (sometimes).
That’s crazy, you’ve never been to a party?
Sure. Most people are there with an agenda. ABC.
Do you mean most people go to parties to close deals?
Commonly - though the deal to close is marriage (or sometimes a one night stand).
actually its true, I guess:
I have been in partying in my teens and twens, 3 years somehow "heavily". When I turned 40, I found out the only reason I went to parties and clubs for me was to meet girls.
> Do you mean most people go to parties to close deals?
It sounds like the concept of social/civic organizations caught you by surprise.
Idk I just don’t see it like that I guess. Never really closed a deal at a party :/ I just get drunk and enjoy the music
In one way or another, yes.
> My hobby is organizing in-person meetups for random people to get together, chat and make friends. Barely structured, if at all.
My hobby is also going to the pub.
This reminds me of [0], basically just inviting the most interesting people I know (also transitively the most interesting people they know), and just getting to meet people. I would really like to do this, but half the most interesting people I know are PhD professors I rant with because I'm next to them in a lab. Maybe once my network gets bigger. But I would still like to know more about how you do this, as other people doing this accidentally made me some good friendships, and I'd like to repay this favor to others
[0] https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/this-might-be-oversharing
How I do it is context-specific. I used to live in a place where it's undoable and I was very lonely there. I moved to a place where people are much more open to it culturally and there's enough population to +/- bring in a constant flow of 4:1 regulars to newbies.
I advertise on local meetup platforms and in local social media. And I go to so many meetups myself that when people ask me what my hobbies are and I tell them, they get curious and self-invite.
Easy two-part process: First part is putting our "feelers", ask/tell a bunch of people "You know, I'm thinking of maybe hosting a dinner party/barbecue/beach day" and see what reaction you get from people. If sufficient people (sometimes just 2) give somewhat interested vibes, ask again what dates people could do it at, then you send out an invite.
You'd get a bunch of people who say yes but then don't show, this is normal and don't take it personally. Secondly, maybe the first 2-3 times it'd be hard to get people to commit, but once you do it more regularly, people will find it easier to commit to something they know you're already committed to.
Similarly, I did group therapy for a few years, and found it highly and profoundly rewarding.
It's much more structured, with a facilitator to help reduce the possibility of dangerous behaviours. It forced me to confront aspects of myself I otherwise might never have. It also (I think) gave me greater insight into what might be behind people's public faces.
I use Blood on the Clocktower to do this, it's a social deduction game (that's just not randomly accusing each other) so it gets everyone talking easily
It has been my experience that social deduction games are very attractive to folks who have problems socializing in day-to-day life. You can see them almost come alive when they are given the permission.
I think a lot of people need prompting for something to talk about. They have no confidence that topics they bring up will be interesting to anyone else. So any kind of gathering that takes that pressure off will be attractive.
I've been trying to come up with some interesting prompts after observing just asking someone "What's been happening" yields nothing but "Oh not much, work". So far the old classics of just probing in to what they do for work, what they did last weekend, etc and then finding any bit of info to drill down in to more interesting topics works best.
Also very important to recognize most conversation starters are someone serving the ball to you, you need to hit it back with a continuation. If you're giving one word dead end answers you've just caught the ball and dropped it.
Tangential, but I've been following your comments for years now and I have to say whatever you've discovered seems to be serving you well.
You're seriously 1000x more likeable than even just a couple of years ago.
I was a bit surprised to read this. I didn't think I'd stand out in the sea of comments here. But to this, since a couple of years ago I had a break up, moved city, quit all social media and went outside to real events. HN is the only place I still comment on.
Yes and the reverse is also true. I don’t like to play social games at my meetups because that’s a framework that seems to stifle genuine conversation. I do sometimes provide hypothetical questions as a bit of scaffolding.
> You can receive $1 million immediately for every 1 year of your life you are willing to give up (taken off the end of your life). How many years, if any, do you sell?
> You get to ask a "Cosmic Google" one single question about any mystery in history (e.g., "Who was Jack the Ripper?" or "Are we alone in the universe?") and get the absolute truth. What are you asking?
> If everyone in the world had a floating stat above their head (like "lies told" or "pizzas eaten"), which stat would you want to be able to see?
Same. I don't like to yuck other people's yums, but I don't get a lot from those kinds of games. Talking to strangers is not a problem for me.
I have been spending a bit of time at the local board game shops and the crowd sounds quite similar to the crowd you are attracting. On a very basic level I just try to model being a social adult and hope it rubs off.
the one and only meetup i ever went to (that wasn't something vaguely work-related) was a Werewolf meetup (the game). It actually wasn't very social, but it was a bunch of people who were really into Werewolf. Which, really, was what it was meant to be (and it was fun, because i love to play Werewolf)
Although I've had some fun with deduction games, I'm usually extremely averse to them. Forced to sit down and try to lie while listen to my voice suspiciously, then having the group turn against me and all my friends and randos interrogating and accusing me... it's like a special hell-dream come to life.
Indeed, and if you're especially good at it and win the game, then everybody knows from then on that you can't be trusted because you can't be easily read.
Yeah either you're in some Kafka-esque trial or you learn your friends can lie to your face while smiling!
> You have to accept that 5-15% of the people who would show up to something like this are genuine weirdos you probably don't want to be around.
How have you handled this in past meetups?
Be courteous, kind, don't accept invites, tell them you're not interested if they're making unwanted advances, and treat them as humans. If they seem receptive and able to handle constructive feedback, tell them what sticks out to you, otherwise just ignore it and move on.
Basically the same way you handle the exact same situation outside of organizing meetups, but maybe a bit extra on the friendly-and-try-to-not-traumatize-people-who-might-be-trying side of things.
`embedding-shape` answered it better than I could have, but I will add: I "ban" people from meetups who are overall bad for the group.
E.g. people who register to take up a (free) spot and then don't show up after multiple reminders, people who are especially rude to somebody fragile, even people who are unconstructively / loudly negative (picture the equivalent of walking into an auditorium of 800+ people, picking up the microphone on stage to yell "this meetup sucks!" then walking out).
This policy is controversial and I'm always trying to find the balance between being as welcoming as possible to people who aren't neurotypical or are going through a hard time and need the social interaction (e.g. me, multiple times in my life)... and people who just come off as jerks and are a net negative to the group.
I'm in multiple groups myself and I always measure myself by whether my showing up that day was a net positive, neutral or a net negative. If the latter, I don't belong there... at least not until I fix whatever was wrong.
> You have to accept that 5-15% of the people who would show up to something like this are genuine weirdos
Thanks for unlocking a new anxiety for me.
This is just par for the course of human existence. Lump it under all the other "human situation" stuff, somewhere between "stubbed toe" and "cancer."
Huh? I have zero stubbed toe anxiety. If it happens it happens.
But knowing that I'm being classified by event organizers (and that there's a 10% chance I will be labeled "complete weirdo")? That will keep me from participating in events.
Which is too bad because I already have enough reasons not to participate in events without adding neuroses on top of them.
For what it's worth I'm classifying you right now (in the "neurodiverse odd fellow" category, not the complete weirdo one).
You can't win man.
Oh well. At least I didn't stub my toe.
You have now been reclassified as someone very funny.
I'm pretty sure the OP didn't mean they literally put a note in an excel document next to your name. So to explore the issue, is your anxiety around the fact that some people will think some aspects of your personality or behavior or weird? Because I could drop you into the middle of Vietnam (or whatever, pick some country you've never been to) and like 90% of people would think you're a bit weird. It's not really a bad thing, is it?
Anyway in my experience what the OP is referring to is less "nuerodivergent weirdness" and more "Will this person do violence" weirdness. Or, like, people that are just coming to events to try to fuck, and being obnoxious about it.
It's not necessary to literally put an asterisk in an Excel doc: we all know off-hand who the weirdos of concern are.
"Do violence" from a meetup event is rarely a concern in most countries, but never 0.
Mainly the people I'm concerned about are the ones who make others want to leave and never come back.
E.g. by asking uncomfortable and/or sexual questions (which is mostly fine) but not having the EQ after a few iterations to let the person politely weasel out of answering and change the subject. If they really press people, or monopolize the conversation to the point the person wonders why they would show up just to be lectured at, then that's a no-go.
We can all tolerate people who mean well and are mostly easy-going but not good at hangouts. Whereas the ones who are actively repelling newbies from being able to join and enjoy the event are the main challenge.
For example, at other meetups I go to, we've got a fellow who can't take feedback. He knows he made a newbie uncomfortable to the point of standing up and going home, but he makes a joke out of it when he's told what happened and why. Every time... and so the pattern repeats.
I imagined everyone at these events independently classifying everyone else and just sort of nodding knowingly at each other about who the weirdos are.
And so the fact that I don't do that must mean that I'm one of the weirdos. And sure, it doesn't really matter other than it's a reason to avoid events.
> And sure, it doesn't really matter other than it's a reason to avoid events.
I guess it's this part I'm not really understanding - what harm are you avoiding?
I organise events as well and I'm wondering if you ever charged for them. I used to do them for free but so many people signed up and didn't attend later that it was hard to put numbers to book a venue to meet. How did you solve this?
i would do free venues only. usually restaurants are free because you consume food. if that is not an option, it depends on the cost. i have seen events where people were asked to contribute something when they arrive. you can usually announce the cost of the venue and ask everyone to contribute appropriately. if you fall short then next time ask people to contribute more. or keep a running tally during the event until the venue cost is met. from my personal feeling, if it costs more than $1-2 per person the venue is too expensive. find a cheaper one.
Have you done any write ups about how best to go about doing something like this?
I'd love to organize something like this in my local community but somehow am not sure where or how to start really.
If you had to guess how I'd suggest you start, what would you think I'd say? My advice is probably just that or something no better that what you'd guess.
You start by starting. The first meetup will have a couple people and you let it be awkward and not quite right. Then you do a second, and a third...
In German speaking areas there's an app called Spontacts where one can advertise any sorts of events and people can sign up. Like MeetUp but free and it actually works. Lots of people offer board games, walks, brunch. I got into it recently advertising spontaneous ping pong get togethers. Met some really cool people so far.
Context dependant. I do similar to the OP. Sometimes my events have one other person, sometimes 40.
First, you have to do whatever it takes to make you able to just do things alone, frequently, and then go ahead and do things alone, frequently. Picnics, cafe co-working, reading in a lounge/cafe/bar, walks, bike rides, hikes, photo walks, star gazing, whatever. Literally anything.
You'll probably meet people while doing this. Get their contact info. Eventually, mention "oh hey I play basketball a couple times a month, want me to text you next time I'm planning?" Repeat, you have a crew or five. A couple group chats.
Then start planning bigger events. Book 8 person tables at a restaurant, then drop a note in your chat like this:
``` Reservation for 8 at UR Meat on Tuesday April whatever, 7pm, the new kbbq place near zhongxiao fuxing station.
1. komali2
2.
3.
4...
```
People will copy/paste adding their name so you can see how many seats are filled. I've tried 10 other booking platforms, apps, whatever, nothing beats the group text thing. The group chat is where shit happens.
For more casual events like picnics, just drop a maps link and a time, remind people a couple days before, day before, and day of send a pic with where you are in the park or whatever (the "final push" for people are hesitant but see that it's really real and thus come).
Repeat, scale as desired. The consistent thread is that you have to Just Do Stuff, and people have to know that you'll Just Do Stuff regardless if people come or not, so they come see you as a dependable and fun person, a great person to tag along with.
Great idea - a lot of the problems in the world are from social isolation, and people finding silos online
I think the 10% neuro-divergent is a positive as it being ND can be very isolating for people
Makes me think a focus around ND alone would be a great idea
What are the meetup themes? What brings the interesting people in?
What locations do you recommend to emulate this? Coffee shops / libraries / your home?
How do you do this? And do you find people within tech industry or just random-people, I am sort of curious to know!
Just random people, but because of where I post my events I tend to get about 30% ~ 50% tech-adjacent people
I can confirm that this is a great hobby. I did a weekly meet up, man, nearly 20 years ago, which was at the same time and place every week, and we (me and the core clique which consolidated within a month) advertised it on Twitter, which was niche enough at the time that you’d get a bunch of interesting weirdos showing up.
It’s how I met my wife, how I met a whole bunch of people who still feature in my life decades on, how businesses got started, and so much came out of it for everyone involved. It probably helped that we did it over beer and burgers, as one was a social lubricant and the other robbed people of an excuse to leave early. Plus afterwards it transformed into poker back at my place, which was how I really got to know people fast.
Talking to strangers is fun - as is figuring out which strangers will like which other weirdos you’ve got to know and buddy them up.
> You have to accept that 5-15% of the people who would show up to something like this are genuine weirdos you probably don't want to be around.
Yep, thats me.
We all find different people weird. You just need to find the weirdos you vibe with.
Exactly. I actually find normies quite unbearable.
My comment was not very serious. I can easily pull off a normie affect, but the most disappointing thing to me is most people's inability to cope with even a little strangeness.
Write explicit rules about dogs. Many "weirdos" just like their boundaries and basic hygiene. It is hard to socialize, over barking contest and rar dog humpimg your leg.
It will save both sides a lot of time.
Almost everything you can do on your own is a "solved problem". Why go into woodworking if you can buy an Ikea stool? The point of hobbies isn't to solve problems - that's called a job - but to learn and have fun.
Find a niche where you can resist the temptation to constantly compare yourself to eight billion other people on the internet. Something where success isn't measured in Github stars, Youtube likes, or Reddit upvotes. Once you get in that mindset, almost anything goes. I know people who collect RPN calculators and are having a blast. All kinds of hands-on crafts are great too. I like making electronic music and I'm pretty bad at it.
I like Kurt Vonnegut's take on this:
“When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.
And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”
And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”
And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.”
Thank you for sharing that. I am going to save this one. Does that work for you? Could you shift from winning at things to just doing them?
I can attest to this, in my own way. I had a headstart since nobody ever pushed me, parents werent competitive fuckups and thus their child wasnt.
I do climbing, hiking, skiing, skitouring, diving, weightlifting, used to do paragliding, now trying to pick up wind surfing. None of those sports on high level, just keeping it cca the same.
Climbing is a good example since every climbing route is exactly graded for overall difficulty. Over years I even went down a bit from levels I used to do. I just go to the gym or rock, enjoy even the simplest routes that some consider for beginners, despite doing sport for 15 years. Many folks around keep pushing themselves hard to progress, I just dont have that bug.
Exactly same could be said for weightlifting, found my set of free weights values and just keep doing them. If I feel extra strong I may do few extra reps but thats it. I was even mocked here for saying this but who cares, I do it for myself and not to impress or do stupid empty status games with others. Its very sustainable that way too.
That sounds awesome! I basically do all the same sports, but I always need to win or to get better at them. I am trying to move in your direction though.
That’s a dour outlook. I don’t cook to be the best at it, I cook to feed my friends. I don’t sing to be the best at it, I do it so I can have fun at karaoke. I don’t boulder to climb mountains, I do it because it makes me feel healthy. I don’t bike to win races, I bike because it’s the fastest way to get around my temperate city. I’m a worse cross-stitcher than my sister but I like that she teaches me. I go to music festivals because it’s the only place you can easily dance for 8 hours straight. I’ve never taken a dance lesson but regularly am asked to join in because I’m having fun!
The comparison is the problem, not the skill.
I totally agree with what you've written - "comparison is the thief of joy" is one of my favorite mantras.
That said, hobbies can be remarkably useful because they allow you to create or engage in something that is uniquely tailored to your own personal interests, and the modern economy often doesn't provide that level of personalization, or if it does it's extremely expensive. E.g. the other commenter that decided to design his own clothes because mass produced clothing is really just tailored to "average".
> Almost everything you can do on your own is a "solved problem".
Not everything. Take cooking, one of the most basic hobbies. It's easy to come up with recipes that you enjoy that you cannot order anywhere.
Or the comment here about designing your own clothes, same idea.
OP's post features he wants "that isn't absolutely crowded that I could meaningfully contribute to."
I could read that as: wanting to do something interesting that others would benefit from.
Though, I don't really think that's a good reason to filter out things to be enthusiastic about.
I agree with the point but it's worth noting there are plenty of things you can build from wood that you can't buy from IKEA.
What defines hobbies is not what or why you do it, but when you do it. The phenomenon of hobbies has been mulled over quite a bit - activities that engage many disciplines of an actual job, activities that for other people actually are jobs. The key difference in the nature of a hobby is that we do the activities on our own schedule - we are in no way compelled to do them but have complete ownership over the execution.
Put it down over winter but just picking it back up.
Bat detection/identification with ultrasonic recordings. It's been fun building the data pipeline to manage the ~30GB+ of WAV files generated every night, run through some identification processes (currently using https://github.com/rdz-oss/BattyBirdNET-Analyzer) and build a UI (mostly vibe coded lol) to help with replay, cataloging, etc.
I'm using an AudioMoth currently (https://www.openacousticdevices.info/audiomoth), am thinking about extending it to do some of the preprocessing in the field to scale things up a bit.
Oh, I didn't know about the BattyBirdNET - thanks. I'll have to slap my bat-mode AudioMoth back on the balcony.
(I've already got a BirdNET pipeline for my non-bat AudioMoths which should make the bat path easy to add.)
I’m working on a friendlier version of BirdNET-Pi with support of the latest BirdNET 3.0 model, also planning to add the BattyBirdNET later. https://github.com/Suncuss/BirdNET-PiPy
Sorry if this is not the place to do it. I live in a city that has bat at nights, so if you live above 6th floor and you leave your windows open, there are chances some confused bats go into your apartment.
Even worse, they can go into the blind box of your rollover. After two traumatic events where I had bats going into my apartment (and it took me 5 days/nights where I didnt sleep at all to take them out alive), I put something in the opening of the blind box to avoid them getting into it.
However, I don't feel safe. I wake up in the middle of the night with any sound thinking they are trying to get into.
All this introduction is to ask if there is something that detracts bats going near my window. Maybe some kind of ultrasound (that I could play with some kind of speaker), or odor? I don't know, but I'd like to try something that could make me sleep more relaxed.
Mosquito sound repellents are useless for insects, but solved my bat problem.
A bat loved to defecate in my son's bathroom. The most internal room of the house. I've put a sound repellent in the bathroom and it stopped happening
Just probably don't want to put those outside, that would probably count as noise pollution for them.
That's funny because bats would eat the mosquitos so by driving away bats you're actually making the mosquito problem worse.
Can’t you do some kind of mesh? For bats, it doesn’t even have to be very fine.
I asked about this to people who put meshes but they said the mesh goes into the window (it's mostly for mosquitoes), and the open would be outside the mesh, so it wouldn't cover it. I would be OK but I can't find anyone who would be willing to put the mesh on the outside of the window.
really cool, data pipeline alone sounds like fun challenge
Yeah there's quite a bit of opportunity to reduce processing time along the way.
Couple cool things I've learned about bats.
- They are *extremely* loud in the ultrasound range, 130db echolocation calls from something the size of a mouse.
- On an average recording, the ultrasonic range is almost exclusively filled with sound from wildlife (bugs, birds, etc). I'd expected to see lots of harmonics and whatnot from human-generated sounds but there just aren't that many. It's quiet up there.
- You can leverage these two in combination for sampling by just strapping the recording device to the roof of your car and driving around. The wind and road noise is basically absent and the echolocation calls come through loud and clear. The AudioMoth can be fitted with a GPS receiver to correlate the calls to location (and time ofc)
- There are three primary types of echolocation calls: Search - Semiregular calls just to see what's out there. Approach - Faster rate of calls once prey has been identified. Terminal - Aka feeding buzz, very high rate (200hz) of echolocation calls in the last meter or so of approach. Most of the recordings of bat calls you see on YouTube are slowed down 10x to bring the audio into listening range, but this also slows the call tempo by just as much. They make lots of calls.
- Most bat calls use frequency sweeps rather than continuous tones to pick up both distance and relative velocity of the target (akin to FMCW radar).
- There are more bats around than I realized. I started off by looking for 'good spots', but now I just set the device out on a porch. Many times you'll hear me walking up to the recording device at the end of a recording and there will be 2-3 bats overhead that I was perfectly unaware of.
- Some moths have developed jamming calls that confuse the standard echolocation calls of most bats - https://www.illinoisbats.org/echolocation-jamming-moths/ Some species of bats have developed countermeasures to that.
Thanks jcims for sharing this amazing info! However, I wonder how these very loud bats, all in close proximity, don't get confused by each others' calls? Is the answer their frequency sweeping? Or does each have something analogous to a unique "voice"?
Good question! Yes they definitely have unique voices and call signatures. A single string of calls from a single bat will have variation between calls as well (especially in search phase).
It'd imagine there's a lot of neurophysical adaptation involved as well, just like listening to a single conversation in a crowded room.
That said, hunting in an area filled with bats is probably not as effective as being in a quiet place.
any particular microphones you can recommend?
or did you buy one and it was "good enough" ever since?
Microphone selection is super important and can get extremely spendy very quickly. The AudioMoth device I use comes with a simple mems ultrasonic mic and it's perfectly adequate for what I'm using it for, but loud signals can cause artifacts that wouldn't be present on more expensive ones.
I believe my version is using a Knowles mic:
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/syntiant/SPU0410L...
I've been working on trying to help fill out the MeshCore network in our area for off-grid communications. Some of us are setting up solar powered, battery backed MeshCore nodes, they have no connection to power or Internet. You can use a small device (like a credit card or a small walkie-talkie) with a phone, or a blackberry-like device, to send/receive encrypted messages, chat on channels, or communicate on BBS-like "room servers".
It's interesting for if there were some sort of disaster impacting the cell network, or for use in the back woods where you have no cell contact. But it's extremely unreliable. My coworker who is into it, he lives 2-3 miles away but we can rarely communicate because he lives in a bit of a bowl that we don't have reachability into. Meanwhile I'm regularly getting messages from 30-70 miles away no problem.
It reminds me a lot of HAM radio, where there are other better ways to communicate, but if those ways broke it would be nice to have an alternative.
https://meshcore.co.uk/
Part of why I'm doing it is my office has a nice, unused tower on top of it. The office itself is ultimately not that high, but the 20ft tower on top of the 3 story building helps a lot. I can JUST reach the 8ft TV antenna mast at my house, depending on tree vegetation (we'll see how much worse it gets as the trees leaf out this spring). It operates in the 900 MHz ISM band, so it can "punch through" more than WiFi can.
Oh this is sooo cool. I want to try and do this in the summer too. This might be of interest to you: https://youtu.be/XTnYVh7K6xQ
I had watched the first half of it a couple weeks ago and it does indeed sound pretty interesting. WiFi HaLow is a long distance capable variant of WiFi and Reticulum is a mesh network protocol.
If I had more people buying into MeshCore, I might push it to doing something like this, but at the moment I think this sort of setup is beyond anything more than just some simple testing in my case.
What does the battery setup on these things look like? Definitely could set one up but don’t want to change batteries weekly
The ones I built I used the Austin Mesh guidelines, and they use a USB battery setup they've found that is reliable.
I wanted to set up some of the 1 watt radios for the repeaters (more powerful output plus better input stages) have a known problem where if the battery power drops down to 3.3v it goes into a "deep sleep" mode that it won't recover from once the battery pack comes back up to voltage, without physically resetting it. This USB pack is known to provide 5v power as long as it can, and then shut off until it's been charged to the point it can provide 5v again.
Then I plug a solar panel into it. There are also the "SenseCap Solar Nodes" that are a total solution (enclosure, solar panel, radio, batteries) ready to deploy.
I have one of mine on a 20ft tower on the roof at work, I'm not messing with that weekly. I will need to do firmware updates periodically, which can be done via bluetooth.
edit: Forgot to mention that other units can just use little LIon battery packs that plug right into the board and can be charged by a charge controller on the board to a less expensive solution, that's more what the SenseCap uses. Also I think my board has some firmware patches to fix the problem. I just wanted something that was known to not require much messing around with.
https://www.austinmesh.org/devices/ https://www.seeedstudio.com/SenseCAP-Solar-Node-P1-Pro-for-M...
Is this similar to meshtastic? I've heard about it for a while.
They are very similar in function, as another reply said. MeshCore relies more on dedicated repeater infrastructure, and it's design seems to make it more reliable for longer range communications. Most people with solid mesh networks seem to be moving from Meshtastic to MeshCore and having improved experiences with it.
Same, with different routing :)
I just started trying to get into this, and so far it's been kinda disappointing. I got a couple of heltec v3s, set them up with meshtastic and found zero other nodes in range. I did a range test by carrying 1 node around with me while I walked my dog, and the other one at home. It maxed out at about a block. I know there are other nodes in the area but I can't reach them unless I turn on MQTT, but at that point you're just using the Internet with extra layers. I'm looking into more powerful antennas, etc, but it looks like a big money sink.
Came here to mention this. I've had a lot of fun putting up stealth repeaters in trees to build out the Meshcore network. One or two nodes in critical places can light up dozens of square miles for the mesh.
Find your local Discord and get rolling. In the Bay Area it's baymc.org.
I've been thinking about this for Meshtastic - How do you power them? Little solar panels?
Yes, little solar panels. The ones I put on my solar nodes are USB-C connected and just plug into the USB battery pack I have in my repeater.
I build Tiki Tube Amps - hifi stereos inside carved tiki heads. The tikis are carved from solid logs and hollowed out before I wire up all the circuitry inside. It's all analog vacuum-tube-driven circuits soldered point-to-point.
They're really difficult to make but super fun to listen to. When I'm carving I have to plan out how the circuit will be laid out, ensure there's enough space inside for the transformers, consider grounding schemes, etc. Plus mounting components and soldering inside a cramped log is not easy. But when they're done they have such personality. No other stereo listens to music _with_ you.
I love them because they combine many of my disparate interests - woodworking, tiki, electronics, soldering, music, vacuum tubes, metalworking. They're also an excuse to have friends over and throw parties.
edit: here's a video where I build one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xo-TGkFvOg
Looks like there are examples here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIRDOcSQGe8
Hell yeah this is weird af! I love it <3
If you like to work with your hands and have space, build something physical: big and complex, and actually finish it. I built a single engine two seat kit airplane in my garage, did all the flight testing, and now have an interesting way to travel/commute as a result. The "finish it" part is the most important bit. Computer people spend too much time working on projects that don't have a "done" state. Change that up.
I would start smaller though. There are a lot of half finished airplanes (where the last 20% takes 80% of the time...) and the maker is dead.
I've been working on a ukulele for over a year now and it isn't close to done yet, and this is a much smaller project. (Or maybe I should say I've been working on raising kids for a decade and there is another left?).
Oh, yeah. I’ve been meaning to build an electric ukulele. I’ve built some handmade electric guitars, slide guitars and similar. Mine are rudimentary, more akin to a cigar box guitar (if not less complex).
Examples: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPmHtIa9vAm8wNPeTXP4MoZ...
Great looking instruments.
I've built half a dozen similar box guitars, it's such a fun little thing to build.
Do I see a piezo disk under the bridge in the 3rd instrument? Do you use some kind of preamp with it?
I have been recently experimenting with different kinds of piezo pickups [0] and preamp electronics for them. I've figured out a pretty nice JFET based circuit for the preamp and ordered tiny 13x13mm PCBs with tiny SMT components assembled and it works pretty well (but needs a second revision). They mount directly on the volume potentiometer and fit in a small space.
The one thing I haven't figured out yet is grounding the electronics. In a typical electric guitar you ground the electronics by touching the (grounded) strings, but that doesn't work very well (at all) with slide guitar when your left hand has got a bottle neck slide on it (made of glass or ceramic which is an insulator).
Drop a message below if you want to geek out more about home made guitars and/or related electronics. Depending on your location I could also send some preamp PCBs your way.
[0] https://hazeguitars.com/blog/piezo-pickups-evolve (not my site)
How scary was the test flight? where did you land?
I was as confident as I could be. Had multiple tech counselors and A&Ps give it a good look over beforehand. Also had an emergency plan for every 100 feet of altitude post-takeoff. Did the first couple of flight tests in the vicinity of a minor (class D) Bay Area airport and then did the rest of them (including the riskier ones) over the central valley.
did you bring a parachute?
In most failure cases, it becomes a glider. I think if it was gonna fall apart around the pilot, it would be obvious long before they got it in the air.
Nope. Given the canopy style of the kit (RV-7A tip-up) and a few build decisions I made (modifications to the original design), actually egressing in-flight would have been infeasible anyway.
How long did it take you to complete this project. How did you maintain motivation?
6.5 years. What helped most was doing a little bit every day. Taking time off the project would probably have slowed my motivation. Also, at some point, you have spent a lot of money on a project like this, to the point where you kind of have to finish it or you've lost a lot of sunk cost.
Traditional archery.
I started a few years back and have been doing it off and on since. It's challenging but a lot of fun.
I shoot a lot of older style "recurve" bows, but the main style I shoot are horsebows, that is, bows that were historically shot from horseback.
They're very lightweight and you can shoot much more rapidly than you can with a more modern/mechanical recurve or compound. Right now I shoot around 20-25 arrows a minute. Not amazing compared to experienced archers, but a lot of fun.
I have a number of bows, but here are my favorites:
Assyrian: https://www.bogararchery.sk/image/cache/catalog/product/boga... Buryat: (No longer available)
I also shoot an English longbow from time to time.
The horsebows use a technique called "thumb draw" which is very different from the way most bows are shot in the west.
Here's a great YouTube channel if you want to explore getting into it: https://www.youtube.com/@ArminHirmer
Interesting, how does the draw weight compare? I have to give up shooting bigger compounds because my shoulder couldn't take it anymore unfortunately.
I sometimes shoot a couple of bows I made myself.
It's a fairly easy woodworking project, and you can get a beautiful result.
Try instinctive aerial shooting with spiral flu-flus.
Yeah, too easy.
I highly recommend getting into loudspeakers or audio reproduction in general! Without a doubt the most enjoyable, satisfying, and enriching hobby I've had so far.
A couple years ago I decided to build a pair of synergy horns (look them up!) which included all kinds of interesting stuff! For example, I had to learn CAD, the principles of CNC and how to create toolpaths, what a waveguide is, general woodworking, and lots more. There's also lots of interesting "subhobbies" one may dwelve into such as psychoacoustics, signal processing, LEM/BEM simulations, the optimization of horn geometries (look up AKABAK or Ath4 and their respective DiyAudio threads), analog crossovers, or acoustically treating a room to reduce reverb.
Building speakers and experimenting with bracing and lining/damping have been rewarding for me as determining wether I prefer A or B really requires me to _listen_ in a different way from say, listening to a conversation (or even to music!). It feels very grounding and meditative in a way, and at least in my case, indirectly trains one to notice and appreciate more sounds in everyday life.
A big bonus is that it becomes really easy to throw outdoor parties out in the woods when one doesn't have to rent gear. Loudspeakers and bringing people together is a damn good and rewarding combo.
Could you suggest any books, resources.
I was into woodworking, then I got into building fly fishing rods from bamboo.
Fly fishing has been around for a long time. They used to build rods by hand out of bamboo - a specific species of bamboo native to southern China - before factories started making them out of graphite, fiberglass, etc. for cheap.
Modern fly rods are a few hundred bucks. If you try to buy a bamboo rod in a store, they run $2K-$5K. They take a lot of time and meticulous work to build, and the result is a functional work of art.
Woodworking is a ton of fun, and challenging. Bamboo rod making is a niche within a niche, and there are not a whole lot of people who still do it ... mostly retired guys with a lot of time. It's a great tradition, and it's about as far away from computers and technology as I can get.
I didn't even know how to fly fish until I built my first bamboo rod.
Here's a great video showing the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfTvRxcTuV0
> If you try to buy a bamboo rod in a store, they run $2K-$5K.
I got a bunch of cane[0] rods off eBay for relatively cheap[2] (but that was ~2010.) Sadly my fishing activities were strongly curtailed around 2012[1] (due to a family divorce) but I'm hoping to get back to it one day.
When I did get a chance to use them, they were much nicer (to me) than my companion's fancy new rods (even if the bend when fighting a fish was absolutely terrifying.)
[0] I'm not sure if there's any bamboo ones - it's been a while since I've seen them due to [1]
[2] Inspired, as many people are, by Chris Yates.
I love how every hobby has its inner nested hobbies and you can seemingly go infinitely deep.
I got back into making electronic music a while ago, and you can dig in deeper by getting into hardware synthesizers. And go deeper by getting into hardware modular synths. And go deeper by building modules from kits. And go deeper by learning electronics and designing your own modules.
It's like a big branching tech tree or tech graph.
With fishing, you can get into fly fishing. And when that's too easy, you start tying flies, or maybe tenkara, or, I guess in your case, making fly rods.
I love it.
That's a wonderful video, thanks for sharing
This is very cool. Thank you. ...and that video is a pill-quality destressor. thanks again.
I come back to the video every once in a while and it is total zen.
I got into fig (and since then, more broadly, fruit) cultivation. Figs have a rich history, lots of variety, and there are very active online (and in-person) communities where you can buy or exchange plants and cuttings, advice, and fruit. This grew out of an initial interest in gardening, and the long-term goal is to create a food/fruit forest around our house where me, family, friends, and neighbors can walk around, spend time, and eat the absolute best fruit possible.
So far I've got about 40 fig trees in containers (~30 varieties), am focusing a bit more on blackberries this year (4 varieties that were planted last year), and we also have strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, as well as a more standard annual garden with tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, etc as well as some wild edibles: mulberries, wineberries, and black raspberries.
There's a lot of interesting angles to this hobby: fruit selection, cultivation, harvesting, pest management (annoying but still interesting), landscape design, etc. Planning cycles are months at a minimum, and but more often you have to keep in mind what you want the landscape and experience to be like years from now.
It makes it more enjoyable to spend time outside doing physical things when the weather is warm, and I mostly take a break from it (or switch to planning) during the winters here.
You've probably already discovered this, but in case you haven't: watch out for the black raspberries if they're in the ground. They spread at an astronomical rate and are practically unkillable after they're established.
OTOH, they are delicious.
For sure! We ended up learning this the hard way.
We moved into this house partly bc it had an extra ~acre of space beyond the main "yard" which was starting to turn into a forest. We cleared it of woody stuff but left some black raspberries, maybe 10 plants?
2 years later, it turned into an impenetrable ~1/4 acre thicket of mostly black raspberries with some wild blackberries and wineberries among them. We paid to have it mostly cleared again, and now we are occasionally mowing whatever is not intentionally planted or mulched.
If you're in the right zone, give Pawpaws a chance! North America's largest native fruit! I've got about seven in and around my other trees (they're a forest understory tree) but haven't gotten fruit yet. Any year now...
I started cultivating dewberries and chokecherries because they're dying out near me. The chokecherries are good for like 2 weeks, otherwise they taste like soap.
Dewberries are a real bitch to get started and don't produce a ton of fruit, but are EASILY the best berries you'll ever eat in your life. The native variety are very tart compared to bred plants, but they're legitimately the best things that you can grow. If you have a spot where grass doesn't grow well, plant these!!
I'll check them out - thanks for the recommendation!
I have a volunteer fig tree growing in a container on my patio in the middle of a bunch of onions. I have always heard of people transplanting them from cuttings, presumably because they are difficult to grow from seed. I have no idea how it got there, but I feel fortunate to have been chosen.
Awesome! Curious to hear if it ripens good fruit for you.
In case it's interesting: people normally grow them from cuttings to make sure that the trees will 1. be female (males have figs, but they're not really edible), 2. hold/ripen fruit without pollination, 3. be true to type, and 4. bear fruit sooner (cuttings can bear fruit the first year under the right circumstances).
Perfumery.
It's something I got into a few years ago and has been a real eye-opener into the world of perfumery and our wonderful olfactory senses. Strangely, though I suspect is the case with many other hobbies, there is crossover with programming albeit somewhat abstractly.
Often it's about building abstractions and reusable components. For example let's say you wish to create an apple note (typically referred to as an accord). You're not tasked with creating the scent of an actual apple but rather the illusion of apple. This is done by mixing ingredients (usually referred to as raw materials) which are generally split into two categories, synthetic and natural, where a synthetic material if often just an isolated molecule and a natural material may be an oil extracted from nature or a tincture, among other kinds. Once you have mixed the raw materials and are happy with the result, you've essentially created a formula which is a reusable component that can then be used in one or many of your creations.
Aside from the creative process of making the actual perfume, you've then got a ton of applications in which to use it such as a fine fragrance, a candle, room spray, shower gel, shampoo, laundry detergent to name just a few.
With new raw materials becoming available all the time there are just endless possibilities as to what you can create and it, for me, has been a lot of fun both learning the craft and creating actual perfumes that I myself now wear.
I got into HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) fencing last year through a club in my little town. Olympic/sport fencing is fun, but imagine (safely) swinging a 4lbs. steel longsword with two hands at your opponent instead. It's a ton of fun, a great workout (I burn ~1500 calories per class), and competitive so it keeps my interest.
Then there's the whole nerd layer of reading all the original sources from the 15th century, attempting to retain the historical character of the techniques while engaging in real combat, etc. It's both intellectually and physically stimulating.
+1 for martial arts in general. Depending on the art it might not be niche (I'm sure karate and taekwondo are too big for that). But things like HEMA, iaido, eskrima, all kinds of archery, ... are great fun and typically come with smallish & fun communities.
Edit: before you think these arts are immune to tech, I once had a student who built a (truly awful) sword fighting "robot" to help train deflecting strikes. Not quite up to par with Dune's robot swordmasters.
Seconding or thirding martial arts (MA). I do Kung Fu, but I'd bet all the internet cookies there's at least one Brazilian Jujutsu practitioner on HN.
On the point of tech in MA, I recall seeing a documentary where some people got a Xing Yi Quan master to perform a form in mocap gear so they could analyse his movements. I think there's still a lot that kinesiology could learn from the way different people move (especially from Inclusive Karate practitioners).
HEMA looks much more interesting than olympic style fencing.
Olympic style fencing is pretty interesting too, to be fair. Physical Chess
Also it's less... scary? At least you'll get less scary-looking bruises (though probably more total number of bruises)
>Olympic style fencing is pretty interesting too, to be fair.
It just seems incredibly divorced from it's martial origins. To each their own.
Oh for sure it is very gamified. It's still very interesting in its own right though.
Just don't go into it if you are looking for realism.
Agreed, HEMA is incredibly fun!
Using crooked knives [0] for woodcarving.
They're essentially a combination of a plane, spoke-shave, draw-knife and gouge but all in a one handed tool. They were primarily used by Native Americans to build things like canoes, snowshoes, baskets etc. I first found about them from reading John McPhee's Survival of the Bark Canoe [1] but there are lots of uses of them on video on the website below (which I created).
If you want to get into woodworking but want only a few tools and/or a very portable tool, highly recommend.
e.g. in theory you could build an entire canoe with an axe, crooked knife and 3 or 4 sided awl (and a lot of time, patience and materials)
0 - https://crookedknives.com/
1 - https://amzn.to/3NSj4T3
That's pretty niche!
Almost a literal "niche" hobby. Canoe - something that resembles a recess in a wall.
I try to give the people what they ask for.
also an amazon affiliate?
aphackernews-20
My wife & I are Scottish Country dancers. It's a social dance form (it's traditional to swap partners for every dance so nobody has to bring a partner, though not required). Pretty good cardio, there are groups all over the world, so it's often not that difficult to find a class.
Other similar social dance forms from the UK are Contra dancing, English Country dancing, and Ceilidh dancing. Square dancing in the US developed out of these forms. Many other cultures have their own social dance forms, with varying levels of formalization.
Meaningful contribution is easy: these groups always benefit from more participants. Scottish Country dance has a formalized teaching certificate program, roughly equivalent to a Master's degree worth of work (and if you're a UK resident it qualifies to teach PE in UK schools).
> Meaningful contribution is easy: these groups always benefit from more participants.
Same for probably all small dance communities! While it seems like a different kind of 'contribution' than the OP is looking for, it's very meaningful personally to share music and creativity with people. (Personally, I dance lots of Balboa -- a swing dance with a local scene of probably less than 100 active participants.)
The Gay Gordons have entered the chat..
... taken Allemande hold, walked forward, turned around, and walked out of the room.
Not sure if you're into 40s music, but there's a little known instrument called a theatre organ. It was conceived when silent films were taking off, and theaters needed some form of background music. Paying an organist was much cheaper than hiring a whole orchestra, so a lot of theaters opted to get an organ as a cost saving measure (imagine, lol). Anyways, a few have survived, and I learned the basics of playing one. It's an absolutely incredible instrument, in terms of the sheer amount of sounds you can make with it. Someone played the star wars overture for example[1]. It also has one of the most flexible interfaces, with the tabs, second touch, and sustenuno pedal on the volume foot controls. It's inspired a lot of my own tinkering with custom sound synthesis too.
[1] https://youtu.be/I2S72eajLzw
Holy cow what a workout!! Thanks for sharing this.
I got into designing my own knitting patterns. I enjoy that I can customize everything — the yarn material, color (including marling, helix knitting, double knitting), yarn weight, needle size (e.g., resulting in "airy" vs "packed" textures), knit textures (e.g., stockinette, linen, miss, etc.), construction process (e.g., can I figure out a way to knit in the round vs flat?), cables, gradual increases/decreases, selvedge/cord, desired ease, etc..
I wrote software to generate patterns given configurations and keep track of which row I'm on. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40307089
I am sharing some of my patterns here: https://alejo.ch/2s0
I'm currently working on my second ruana.
Wonderful. Knitting and weaving gets me nerd sniped. Not the act of actually doing them by hand but the geometric puzzle solving part.
These topics hit the HN first page quite often.
A few years ago I helped the wife write her own Haskell software to help her generate her knitting patterns in LaTeX. Fun times.
Should be much easier these days with all the AI help available.
Please consider writing a blog about this. Would love to know more.
The demoscene, while not unknown, is still quite niche amongst technologists and digital artists in the most of the world. It has a pretty thriving scene with dozens of get togethers worldwide (mostly in Europe) each year, is creative, communal, artistic, competitive, multidisciplinary, highly influential, and has a near infinite number of ways to engage with it. It has a long running internal culture, but is welcoming of outsiders willing to learn, and is kind of a "third way" to think about software and technology that can often radically change how you think about computing.
It's also a recognized UNESCO recognized intangible cultural heritage in at least half a dozen countries.
https://www.demoparty.net/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
Railway preservation (full size, not model). It looks crowded when a steam train is running and the moths gather around. The reality, when the trains are not running, is typically quite different, with a small dedicated group. If a place looks too crowded, pick a smaller museum.
Think of all the jobs that have to be done to run a railway and you will be able to find a museum that does it: heavy maintenance, boiler work, fitting and turning, blacksmithing, woodwork, upholstering, painting, catering, engine driving, fireman, signalling, customer service, ...
It's a great way to meet people, learn new skills and work with physical things.
Only problem is this really depends on where you live. There is a nice museum 45 minutes from me - far enough that it is hard to get there for a quick evening after work...
Consider mathematics. If you already know enough math to derive the quadratic equation, you might make a small change, like adding X^3 or X^4. See where your own techniques take you before looking up the answer. With just a few pen strokes, you will be playing with an equation for which there is no general solution, or no known solution. In mathematics it will take you very little time to start playing at the boundaries of human knowledge, and it's relatively easy to memorize a few starting points that many hours of passenger travel fly by.
It might be interesting to try your idea, to see for yourself where the difficulty lies, but be warned that finding general solution formulas for degree 3 and 4 equations is kind of brutally difficult. I'd link to the historical developments but it would spoil it for those that nevertheless want to give it a shot. Degree 5 requires some serious far out of the box ideas, if you want to understand what's going on.
But in general the idea of making small changes to solved problems and seeing if you can tackle them is an excellent approach to recreational mathematics! I think I'd start somewhere other than higher degree equations though, that would be a rough start.
I like this. I like crossword puzzles but don't like I'm just solving pre-made puzzles rather than exploring new territory. Math seems the best candidate but are there other fields with similar challenges?
Since I was a kid I was fascinated by computer math, such as a projectile in Scorched Earth (wind, angle, velocity, gravity). I turned 50 this week and I STILL haven’t dug into how even the basics work.
Can still remember the sound of the Funky Bomb firing in Scorched Earth. Thanks fot reminding me of that.
If you're interested in this sort of stuff, the book Nature Of Code is great for exploring this topic by creating simulations. There's a Javascript version and Java based version (using the Processing framework). It isn't actually all that difficult, and I found it very satisfying to work through.
There is a lot of less popular math problems in spatial and high dimentional geometry, packing, topology.
Nice example of something many of us could try: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45694856
My niche hobbies is carving wooden spoons and I think it balance very well with any work behind a computer.
It’s surprisingly deep for something that looks so simple. You can start with almost nothing: a small axe to split the wood and a knife to shape it. That’s enough to make your first spoon. From there, it can become as technical or as artistic as you want, depending on how far you go.
There’s also a whole international community around it. People organize small gatherings and larger meetups where they carve together, share techniques, compare tools, and pass down very specific bits of knowledge. There is a whole series of videos about this on youtube on a channel named "zed outdoors". This hobby also had me look around for wood everywhere, when walking or driving and you can do it almost everywhere as long as you have a small knife with you.
Also, using a spoon you made yourself is genuinely satisfying in a way that’s hard to explain. It changes the relationship you have with a very ordinary object.
It looks like a quiet craft, but you can go very far with it.
That actually sounds like a lot of fun. I have lots of various kinds of trees ranging from very soft to extremely hard and dense (juniper!) woods. I think I'll try that sometime.
Not sure if it is niche, but focused on one South Asian music genre -- been working on this personal project to compile, and collect resources from reliable sources along with mapping lineages of people. Also, I archive a lot of music for this genre from different sources before it vanishes from internet!
https://www.qavvali.com/
EDIT: I have one more page but that is not in navigation yet for people not familiar with the genre. The site is still work in progress -- if you have any feedback, please do leave it here, on the website if you can. The content curation is the most tedious part! https://www.qavvali.com/tradition/
Qawali is some of the best music in the world, but I think it’s a little hard for a western audience to digest, especially without someone providing a running translation and context behind a lot of the things being said.
That being said, your website is wonderful! Nice work.
Thank you, and absolutely! I have been trying to get more people to try — my friend and i host a Zoom listening session every 3 months or so where he curates a playlist to introduce new artists.
I would love a link if you’re willing to publicly share it!
sure thing —- feel free to share with anyone else interested. It starts at 1PM EST, and goes on for roughly 8 hours so drop by/tune in anytime you want: https://luma.com/823kzuci?tk=IiDKu2
Synthesizers! I like it because it's tactile and immediate, and you're not glued to a screen, but can create fun-sounding beats.
Nowadays there are nice, cheapish groove boxes that are perfect for noodling on the couch. I started with the Novation Circuit Tracks, and also really enjoy the Teenage Engineering EP-133. Not to say that I am any good at this, but it's an enjoyable hobby! Bonus if you are friends who are also into it and you can jam together :)
> Bonus if you are friends who are also into it and you can jam together :)
How does one find these people? Asking for a friend! :D
I've also gone down the synthesizer rabbit hole: prophet-6, full modular setup (rip bank account), subsequent 37. It's great fun!
Go to modular meets, music instrument expos like Superbooth, dj sets and live concerts. I met all my best friends this way, everybody is a record collector, beat maker or techno producer. Record conventions are also fun, after couple of occasions you will realize how small the scene is.
Deep in the Eurorack rabbit hole myself. Trying to avoid anything that has a screen and anything that requires a computer to interact with. Patching cables and twiddling knobs is great fun. Sometimes it even sounds good xD
Same here. I love it, I have lots of “normal” equipment as well but it’s not quite as fulfilling as modular.
The only slight downside is I often do it on my own away from the family.
another eurorack rabbit hole is patch.init() - prototyping module. I have 4 and have built:
- an amazing crazy chorus module based on one I built for vcvrack
- a pad synth using the PADSynth algorithm
- a pulsar module
- a fun pitch shifting heavy reverb
endless hours of fun!
My niche hobby is exploring patterns in Islamic Geometry and trying to re create them. It is an art of creating pleasing and aesthetic geometric patterns (from intersecting circles mostly). The art form is very popular in decorating Mosques and other Islamic monuments as human/animal representation is forbidden.
[Edit] The thing that I find the most fascinating is that all the complex design you see, are done with only using a pair of compass and rulers.
This is something I wanted to get into after vising Alhambra, which really is the "mirror of paradise" that it purported to be. You say that the complex designs are done by hand, but given how mathematical they are it left me wondering if there is a thriving scene of computer-generated patterns?
The floral designs (arabesque) are done by hand and the geometric tiling is ruler/compass based. I focus mostly on the geometric part of it, since I dont have the dexterity to do the arabesque by hand.
To your point of Computer generated Imagery, I think it would be too easy, but that would definitely take the fun away
Ah symmetry. I am still besotted with spirographs.
Happy to meet you.
Want to visit Isfahan someday. Now is not the time I guess. The standard recommendation is Alhambra of course.
Yes, Isfahan is on my bucket list too. In the news for the wrong reasons these days unfortunately.
Yeah. So disheartening. Wish you are able to one day and wish none of those have sustained any damage. Many have, in Tehran.
By the way you might like making kaleidoscopes.
I have found using compass and ruler only methods much more accurate because I don't have a drafting board or anything. The usual school supply rulers are not finely graduated enough to rely on them. In fact they aren't long enough for my purposes (although I can get a longer one if I want. The fun of deducing compass constructions is its own reward).
Even simple things such as drawing a parallel can become insufficiently accurate. With compass and ruler, much better. Ideally one should have drafting board and T square.
are you muslim yourself or did the artistry itself pique your interest? just curious about it, hope that's not a weird question.
I am. My interest developed after visiting a number of Mosques/Monuments and seeing the intricate designs.
stunning buildings and patterns. not religious myself but i have to admit that lots of old, religious sites are absolutely beautiful. i just looked at images of some old mosques (not really a thing where i am), and they look gorgeous :) i get why they inspire you artistically.
That’s neat - I always find the sheer depth of expression that’s managed with a handful of primitives extremely impressive.
Have you ever come across Penrose tilings? If not, they might be something you’d also find interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_tiling
What I rarely read about as hobby but I really enjoy is touch! Taking massage/therapy classes, like lomi-lomi, craniosacral, acupressure, shiatsu, etc. -- plenty of great courses available. They're typically aimed at professionals since it is "under-explored" as a hobby, but well worth it as self experience. Not only the receiving but also the giving during the training(s), plus all the chances to give nice touch experiences to your friends and family! How many bodies have you deeply touched in your life?
Another niche hobby of mine is constellations groups: you meet with others to simulate and explore a problem somebody within the group is facing; a bit like impro theatre but real-life issues. Very interesting and doesn't require any skills, you just "do". I often just go and participate as a viewer: Better than cinema!
I also like NVC (non-violent communication) classes and trainings. It's a hobby but a bit more effort, you spend time with other likeminded people, learn something about the inner functioning of others, plus it improves my communication and conflict skills, both in personal and business areas.
I hadn't even considered massage as a potential hobby. I love getting massages, but they're not cheap. Taking a course might be a good hack to get cheap massages..
Good massage classes cost quite a bit of money. I still find it well worth it on a lot of levels, even if you're just interested in the receiving (for now)! I would compare it more to other hobbies, which often do cost substantial amounts of money (material, travel, equipment, club fees, etc -- none of which you need for this).
In multi-session trainings, it is often suggested or sometimes even required to meet with other participants to exercise between the official trainings. Even in cases where that's not officially part of the trainings, I want to encourage you to speak up and announce you're willing to provide your body to others for their training (who may be there for a professional career) -- in fact it's not like you're "asking for a free massage", you are offering a very valuable contribution, since you can give them feedback based on what you both learned in class, which is something other people they know will not be able to do. Also, it takes a bit of courage to ask friends, especially at the beginning, and hesitancy to touch friends in new ways; there's something about being in class together that makes it easier to accept touching the other; it's a 'professional' relationship.
Social dancer here -- without hyperbole this was a lifechanging hobby for the better, and while I haven't been able to "meaningfully contribute to" as a criteria, I am a much better person for it.
I'm primarily a salsa dancer (~18 years), but spent a few years doing a buncha other dances to get an understanding of the music and movement so I'm pretty much beginner-intermediate in a buncha other dances (equiv of 1-2 year level dancer) -- Bachata, West Coast Swing, Fusion, and a splash of a ton of other dances.
The best I can explain to most people is that dance is a conversation to a topic (music) through the language of motion instead of sound, and that just like rewarding conversations we can have through verbal language and text, some of the most resonant conversations can be had through connection and touch.
For the subset of folks who happen to be gamers here, this is a massively multiplayer co-op music game with a very high skill curve.
I started dancing due to taking a popular social dance series at college by Richard Powers, and that was the gateway for my lifelong dance practice. It allowed me to indulge in another side of collaborative music, gave me a good relationship with interpersonal connection and physical touch, and provided me with a fairly active and healthy hobby for my life.
Can't say enough good things about it, just that the skill curve for beginners is high -- the first year is known as beginner's hell, but once you establish a basic vocabulary in the dance it becomes so much more artistic and creative.
I want to put extra emphasis on how technically demanding salsa is and how appealing it can be to autists (and how many of them you'll find at the average social/class). Your body, the music, and the people are all puzzles you could spend lifetimes learning to solve. I think about salsa almost as much as I think about software. How to make a lead work, how to improve my alignment, how to interpret instruments.
Highly recommend.
Id like to recommend that even a bit more, maybe from a different perspective. I took a salsa course back in university because a girl asked me, her boyfriend wasnt interested. That lead to dancing a bit more, bachata was just part of the course especially. But also not just one course: It turned out there were tons of opportunities later to join these dance evenings organized in bars. So doing that one first step enabled so many more.
I never got good, but: It is still a useful skill to even just know a little bit. To have the option to join instead of having to stay put at the table when your group decides to go dance. I wound up meeting people from latin america later, so that was way more often than was reasonable to expect. Im pretty sure having some basic ability helped me win someone over - to be able to show interest in that hobby -, and even just feeling better when showing my child now how to dance is nice.
Especially when you otherwise are mainly interested in technical stuff it is a good counter point.
Just curious, after so much salsa, what is your opinion about Argentinian tango? I love it, but it does not seem to be very popular and I wonder why.
Love tango as a dance form... but the scene is limited and not very accessible, which limits its popularity.
As an ex-organizer of the salsa scene, IMHO a scene is defined by its ecosystem of newbies converting into regulars, the regulars improving the dance quality over time, and the oldies aging out due to life, family, and what not. The best enduring dance scenes have good feeder intro classes, a dance that doesn't get stale, and a way to handle dancer attrition. IMHO tango just doesn't quite have the feeders into the regular scene, which may be a lack of intro instructors or a lack of accessibility for new learners of the dance.
(For people picking up dance in 2026, even Salsa's not that accessible now... Bachata and Country Swing are the new gateway dances, though I have plenty of reservations for both which is its own nerdy conversation.)
Part of what settled me into salsa vs other dances where I preferred the connection OR the musicality more was that it had critical mass in terms of dancers of all levels and ages -- which meant that it had dancers I hang out with socially for non-dancing things.
The vast majority of latin dance events are social gatherings first, dance events second. Tango doesn't have that draw.
Animal tracking. I picked it up in college and it has been a real source of joy and a true challenge. It's also something you can do almost anywhere: urban, suburban, rural, out in "the wild."
A lot of people think of it as looking for paw/hoof marks in the mud, but tracking can actually be quite involved, requiring you to understand the environment and ecology as a whole.
For example, tracking birds is outrageously difficult and when I first started out I didn't think it was possible. But the more I learned about birds, their habits (per species), their environment, I started to see signs everywhere. It really got my eyes open and I started seeing the same old places in completely new ways!
And in terms of contributing something, there are all sorts of apps/organization that can help you identify different species and in turn you give them data in the form of pictures, location, etc. I use iNaturalist myself, but there are others.
You might really enjoy this book, I really did: https://www.amazon.com/Walkers-Guide-Outdoor-Clues-Signs-ebo...
Sounds fun! Do you have resources to get started?
I do gundog work, it would be fun to do the tracking together with the dog. (I don’t hunt, it would just be to make some walks more interesting)
This is a great book regarding animal tracking and other interesting clues in the outdoors. It’s very British-centric sadly though. https://www.amazon.com/Walkers-Guide-Outdoor-Clues-Signs-ebo...
My strange hobby was going on what I called "leak walks".
I lived in a town where on any sunny day I could go for a walk and be almost guaranteed to spot a water mains leak I hadn't seen before, which I'd then report and see how long it would be before it was fixed.
The record was over a year for one of them.
( Yes, it was a Thames Water area. )
If it is a Thames Water area, you are lucky if the leak is only water...
There was one I thought was maybe a waste-water leak from the smell, but generally wastewater leaks are much harder to spot, and it's generally CSOs (Combined Sewer Overflows) that are the main problem there, which happen in heavy rainfall and not so much in residential areas.
Mains-water leaks however are easy to spot, because they're damp patches (or flowing/trickling water) in otherwise good weather.
I’m a paraglider pilot and powered paraglider recently. Totally recommended, you get to connect with nature in a meaningful way. Also people who practice this kind of sports are nice. From a tech perspective there are a lot of data generated on each flight you can create your own way to capture that data or use already existing apps.
Tom Scott covered paragliding recently and darn if he doesn't make it look attractive, even to someone who has a private pilot's license.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKx1VJsLsfk
I also want to get into hot air balloons, there's some near me ...
I got to do this a couple of years ago. It's super cool! Very much recommend it.
But I'll note that it's super...weird? in the sense that it's like halfway between being both relaxing and excitative, nature and machine. I went in expecting a thrill ride and it wasn't quite that, but it wasn't quite relaxing either (though I'd imagine the more you do it the more it feels like the letter!).
The best part is when you can combine your love of engineering and flying and work on your own electric paramotor. Highly recommend paragliding as an affordable and safe way to experience flight
I’m curious, are you working on your own electric paramotor?
i've always been interested in para-motoring. how safe or unsafe is paragliding? do you think about that aspect before going out for a flight?
I’ve been flying since 2012 and I always think about safety. Safety is relative but if you do the things the right way you will be ok. A good common sense is super important, and then keep on your progression, there’s no need to skip steps. Knowing the air is a lifetime journey so there is no rush. Also I feel paramotor is kind of safer because you get to fly with light wind or not wind at all, mostly early in the morning or near sunset. In my personal experience this sport change my life.
I've known 3 people that were into paragliding. 2 of them had near misses from chute collapses and the other flew into a stationery car (he was saved from more serious injury by wearing a full face helmet). So definitely not risk free, based on that sample.
I did it once with an experienced pilot, tandem. An awesome experience. He explained the most dangerous time is when you get slightly confident. That's when most accidents occur, at the intermediate stage. He said you have to be religiously careful at all times, and stay paranoid.
That is good advice for any potentially dangerous hobby.
Me too! I love the view up there.
Totally worth it
A few days ago I donated all my powered paragliding equipment that I did not use for years. Too many accidents in my circle of friends, I still used to fly planes but not soft wings. If safety would not be a concern, paragliding is indeed very nice, more connected than a glider, fun, not too expensive, but I don't remember any paraglider pilot that I personally know that did not have at least a serious accident.
Create custom software for non profits is pretty rewarding. They cant afford anything and have process flow needs that are completely unmet.
The software wont be sexy, but will help the non profits and the people they serve
That could actually lead to a profitable business in the longer run: You will have great insights and lots of working code that may end up in a commercial product that someone is seeking? Esp since you mentioned unmet requirements, thats actually a good indicator
I do this now! It is wonderful. So many unique projects being worked on that you'd never come across in your daily life. It's always fun to experience a world that is so far removed from tech, and see how clever people are at solving problems without SaaS, apps, or spreadsheets. Not every problem has a tech solution.
And it has turned into a decent chunk of business over the long run.
Oh damn, I love this one. I’ve been vibe coding a ‘public benefit’ app on the side that has a few hundred users but never thought of doing something for an actual non-profit.
Care to elaborate on your process? Curious how you approach them and come up with the best path forward with limited time (assuming you have a full time job as well on the side). Thanks!
I would recommend finding a local non-profit you're interested in helping, and start volunteering. Don't go in guns blazing "I'm here from Hackernews to save you" but get to know the people and what they do, and then how to help will become apparent.
By local I would recommend truly local and not a "division" of a national non-profit; those are an entirely different beast.
I’d love to get involved with this. How to do you organizations that need help?
I would suggest looking for local charities whose mission you are care about. Then just finding out what issues they have. I ended up building a simple system based on Airtable for a local charity. Although pretty unsophisticated it was transformative for them.
https://successfulsoftware.net/2018/02/04/volunteering-your-...
Recreational mapmaking.
Every couple of months the family and I will book out some long weekend to just go to an Airbnb in some random town with some copy paper and just go around trying to draw what we think is around us. Inevitably the lines collide and we have to ask some local passerby for help, and if they know any interesting places nearby, and before you know it they're following along with a colored pencil and some copy paper against a hardcover book too.
This sounded very interesting. Can you share some map that you created?
Wow, that's really cool -- what places have you done so far?
You could get a sextant and become an amateur surveyor :)
Now that's a niche hobby that sounds interesting.
I’m obsessed with powerlifting. Not only because big numbers get bigger but also the physical changes that occur with a healthy dose of lifting each week. It’s also easy to track lifting stats and there are tons of analysis tools out there if data analysis is something you enjoy.
Also, I’m trying to learn guitar - right now following the Justinguitar.com lessons
I do powerlifting 3x a week but I don't otherwise view myself as obsessed with it. I don't have a coach, I don't enter competitions. I know my PRs in my head but I don't keep spreadsheets or stats or have any kind of real programming. I don't video my lifts, I don't post about it on social media. I'm just content with getting stronger.
I really don't get obsessed with anything, which might be a fault as that seems to be a trait of people who are really successful in what they do.
On the other hand, it's the one type of exercise I have actually been able to stick with for any length of time. Started about 5 years ago at age 55. So never too late to try it, even if exercise has never been appealing to you.
ditto. I don't have great numbers, my bench is terrible, not even 1.5x BW, but I did manage to get my DL to ~2.5x in a competition, then tweaked my back and now only double overhand, which means my grip tends to go when I get to ~2x BW (my gym doesn't allow chalk, and I don't use straps, so it is what it is).
Do you mind if I ask what you did which restricts your ability to mixed grip? In terms of loading, I would expect your back to be loaded in a similar manner irrespective of the hand position.
I assume you've considered/use hook grip?
Not who you asked but I use overhand hook grip and do conventional deadlifts (not sumo). I find mixed grip bothers my bicep on the underhand side. I also use chalk, and straps for heavy pulls.
I don't understand a gym that doesn't allow chalk.
somehow mixed grip makes me twist slightly which caused me back problems; after a few tweaks to the lower back, I decided that mixed wasn't worth it (I don't compete anymore). Yes, you are right, I do use the hook grip, since I also do some weightlifting.
+1 on this - powerlifting is great due to 1) Rapid, specific initial progress, 2) Highly structured programming (e.g., RPE based), 3) Focus on strength vs. aesthetics is a great way to be more holistic about health & performance, 4) Forcing function on all downstream decisions (diet, sleep, alcohol). Adding +15 lbs on your deadlift can become strong motivation to drive discipline, 5) Drives the importance of recovery/rest on long term progress
I've started going down the rabbit hole with Reactive Training Systems and Emerging Strategies. Been a very satisfying deep dive into all sorts of data, variables, etc. to play with that has me constantly playing around with different ideas. Their free training tracker is just the tip of the iceberg but focusing on RPEs and protocols already feels like a game changer.
Started with Stronglifts 5x5 a couple of years ago and has definitely been one of the best things for me. I don't compete but love seeing the numbers go up.
I am 2/3x more productive on days that I get a powerlifting session in before work. There is no better feeling than overcoming a plateau through hard work and dedication.
For guitar I followed Justin up into his intermediate level stuff but then switched to in person lesson and they made a big difference for me. I think I got lucky with my first teacher though, as I've not really gelled with teachers I worked with later.
I'm obsessed with Strongman style functional lifting.
one of my favorite parts of powerlifting, opposed to hiit or other fitness lifting, is the lack in physical change. i feel like i look the same but can point to numbers that show im much stronger
When I started stronglifts, I didn't tell anyone and people noticed just from my physique after like ~5 weeks of training. Noob gains are insane and definitely cause physical change.
True - I guess I am more of a power-builder. Which for those that don't know is powerlifting but also incorporates a lot of bodybuilding-type rep work for aesthetics. You lose some specificity doing this arguably so you're expending energy that would be better spent powerlifting if that was your true goal but this trade off is worth it to me.
my clothes haven't changed in size, but I fill them out better, is probably best to describe it!
Good problem to have! I had to start buying new clothes because the old ones were too tight.
How much ya bench?
415 (gym), 385 (comp)
How niche is retrocomputing?
I absolutely love my ancient machines, and I use them to explore period applications, much more than games.
I also love to restore and preserve them. There’s something magical about a Sun workstation Solaris 2 a Frog Design Trinitron monitor. or a Microvax running VMS and DECWindows. Or a multi-user Altair Z80. I think it’s sad a lot of software was lost and some platforms were denied the documentation that’d enable their preservation (looking at you, IBM - document the AS/400 and release old OS to hobbyists).
I have a lot of fun with my old PDP-11s. Being able to run an original version of Unix on a machine with actual core memory (that I restored to working order) is a real kick for me. Gives a sense of depth to the software I run on my modern Linux laptop.
I have a working Apple II with some of the original games, manuals, etc. Let me know if there's a way to contact you. Happy to send it your way if you cover shipping or something along those lines.
I’m easy to find. There are very few Bánffys named Ricardo.
You call that retro? ;) I have a Curta sitting on my desk. Not as fun to toy around with as the electronic computers from a few decades later, though.
I think a really underrated hobby is amateur Microscopy, I don't know why its not more popular.
Looking at moss, pond water, microbes, tardigrades, paramecia, cells, plants, crystals, stuff around the house
You can get a decent microscope for like $250 and just get a smartphone mount to take high quality pictures/videos.
I feel like with astronomy/telescopes you spend a ton of money just to see a blurry blob whereas microscopes are way more bang-for-buck in terms of how much cool science stuff you can see for cheap.
Any suggestions for a good bang for the buck microscope? I have been wanting to get one for ages
I got a Swift SW380T and have been pretty impressed with it
These are some examples of the quality taken with an iPhone: https://imgur.com/a/Fvgfk7J
When I started out I got a lot of good info from the youtube channel Microbehunter
I can recommend the mono 'zoom tube' industrial cameras with live USB output. Very cheap in China, often expensive when resold overseas. I think a 4k one should be $100 or less. Maybe $150 including stand, ring light, etc. USB UVC control.
Despite AI starting to crowd this space, I've been spending all of my free time learning music production (doing it the old fashion way without AI). It's a great mix of technical and creative problem solving. Mostly focusing on dark ambient/cinematic composition, playing around hardware synths (Prophet 6, Subsequent 37, modular / eurorack, Digitone II).
If anyone is curious, I put out a single recently (remaster from last year): https://soundcloud.com/vectordust/ion-dunes-1
My main personal goal right now is to release a full length album this year.
Very nice listen. Perfect sort of song to have on while working. It reminds me of an album called Obsidian by Jónsi. It had a special exhibit at the museum of old and new art in Tasmania that was stupendous. (https://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/exhibitions/741-jonsi-h...)
That is a mighty compliment that this reminds you of Jónsi, thank you for that! He has been an inspiration of mine for a long time, amongst a long list of other very talented artists.
I had no idea about his Obsidian project, I will certainly be taking a look at that, thanks for the recommendation!
Ion Dunes is outstanding. Very nice work. I would be happy to hear more, and would very much enjoy a writeup too.
Thank you so much for that! I've actually been debating starting a self hosted blog (or maybe a Substack...) to capture and document my process and provide more context around the music I'm producing, maybe I'll spend some time working on that this weekend!
Edit: for anyone who may be interested, I've created a Substack for this: https://substack.com/@vectordust
I'll likely setup a self hosted blog on vectordust.com to mirror any Substack posts I make as well, so I truly own those posts.
you know the OP has "ion" and "dust" in the middle so this was hard to find.
I normally can't stand ambient, but you went a different direction in the middle there. You should put out an album, that probably no one will buy, but maybe eventually you get asked to do soundtracks for things.
anyhow, i used to write music. a lot. sometimes you just have to get it out of your skull... https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/valley-boulevard-0237
Walking and finding history if your location has such history to offer to find.
People pay vast accruing cumulative sums over time to go to the gym and my exercise pays me with every single walk. Some of that modern human history I have found dates back hundreds of years in the form of coins and bottles while some of the native human history I have found dates back 10 thousand years. I cannot neglect the fossils either as the oldest I have found reviewed by an expert is said to be Paleozoic tabulate coral being over 251 million years aged.
Thanks to gravity everything lost in the past is under our feet and as digitalization has taken over our global society, created by some of those reading this here, there are not many folks walking let alone looking. I found my first item over 14 years ago now and while my partner HATES the aggregate volume of the things I have collected she cannot neglect the uniqueness, rarity and value of some of those items. Every single walk inspires real motivation however one needs their health first to take that walk.
Stay Healthy!
Curious if you mean metal detecting. Either way, sounds like a great location!
I have one yes but I rarely take it given the overwhelming amounts of false signals from iron, ironstone, and slag. There are so many surface finds with each tide change that the added human effort of swinging and digging quickly fades.
Very interested to hear more. Do you live in an (old) city or more rurally?
A town along the water in Maryland founded in 1694 that has documented colonial roots as well with being present in water way form on the only known Native American Chesapeake Bay hand drawn deer hide map, 1590-1620, which still exists in a British museum.
The history here over time is extremely vast and I have been very fortunate in my walks to have located many items related to that history. Speaking only to the Native American finds I have located hundreds of points of vast variety, many hundreds of tools large and small along with objects no expert can explain yet they know to be Native American from their workings. With each tide change the shoreline is manipulated thus revealing more while covering the things missed until another tide change.
One's mind may be curious to ask also of what other things I have found and foregoing specifics I can say as a lead on to those curious that one of the first railroads in the US terminated at the waters edge behind my location. And on that railroad it has been documented that U.S. Presidents, Kings and Queens, Daniel Boone, Benjamin Latrobe, Lafayette and more road those rails and therefore stood on this ground I now walk. Not to far from that railroad was the county's first tavern which hosted those riding the rails and served them libations in bottles while along that journey.
The British landed behind my location too during the War of 1812 and burnt a small supporting outpost town and many boats very near that railroad. In 1999 a water based archeological dig was conducted where a British boat was discovered along with many items in the vessels hull from that era.
I left much out but this alone should reflect the quantity and quality of the items I have found. I have literal buckets of finds and even more buckets of items I have yet to sort.
Watchmaker in training here - after 20 years in startups I am now in my first semester of watchmaking school. It is one of the hardest things I've done in my 47 years, and I am loving every minute of it. It is training my brain, hands, and eyes to see and do things I never thought possible.
Repairing a watch feels similar to dealing with code to me:
- observing to see how/why certain watch components/chunks of code work and interact with each other - analyzing performance - disassembling and cleaning parts/"cleaning" code - troubleshooting why something isn't working - repairing faults caused by the previous watchmaker/developer
I highly recommend it to anyone needing something physical to do after a day spent staring at a screen. Stare at a watch instead!
It's a great time to get into programming languages stuff: designing domain-specific languages, building new tools/abstractions and, especially, formal verification. If you're mathematically oriented, you can explore formalizing mathematical proofs in Lean.
LLMs have really revitalized interest in these areas. AI can really help navigate the initial learning curve, can do a surprising amount of "heavy lifting" and can make tedious but useful work much easier. Do you want your little language to have a language server and nice editor-specific syntax highlighting? Do you need to write a parser with decent error messages? Do you need to prove a bunch of largely straightforward lemmas to get to the proof you actually care about? All of these things are easier (and, hopefully, more fun) than they were a few years ago. But, at the same time, there is still a lot of room for human insight and design in this process. There are a lot of areas that AI can't handle (or, at least, can't handle well) and, of course, nothing stops you from doing the fun stuff by hand even if you could hand it off to Claude.
And, of course, all this PL stuff was fun before LLMs. It's even more fun now even if you don't want to use AI yourself, because more people are doing and talking about PL stuff online, and there are more tools and libraries you can use yourself.
I've been building small games on and off over the last decade
Started taking it a bit more seriously over the last 3 months and I've started building a specific game that I'm slowly building out
It's a top down ARPG called Mechstain where the player creates and pilots voxel based mechs
Instead of traditional gear, your mech has a physical voxel footprint that you the player have to fit weapons and components inside
Your job is to manage space, power and mass, what you can fit and power directly becomes your stats and abilities, essentially a bin packing problem
Basically take Diablo 2 and remix it with Kerbal Space Program, still fleshing out the various systems, but I'm really enjoying the process of slowly designing systems, iterating on it and fleshing it out
It's quite fun taking thoughts I've been noodling on for years and trying to figure out if they synergise with what I'm looking at and do they provide interesting player decisions
Recently onboarded a 3d artist and it's really making things look a lot better
If anyone has experience lighting this sort of game, I'd love to talk to them, still trying to figure that out =)
I make my own hot sauce:
https://successfulsoftware.net/2024/08/04/making-your-own-ho...
It's quite easy and you don't have to make it super hot.
I am currently growing chillis for the next batch.
I've got a local guy that provides me all my hot sauce. I used to buy from supermarkets but I've become convinced that sourcing everything I eat locally is the way to go.
Anyway I only need to order from him like once per year because he sends me about 1l of this carolina reaper sauce that is so potent it only takes a few drops.
Growing chillies easily becomes its own rabbit-hole. I grow between 30-40 different varieties, which, depending on where you live, can be an interesting and near year-long venture.
My hobby involves trying to help my brother get a job. He has a disability and can only work remotely at low-skill jobs. So, I have spent years applying, starting, and doing work in virtual assistant, support desk, and social media management roles for him. I apply to contract and freelance projects on his behalf, get started with the work, and later try to hand it off to him. He will either say one of two things: "You do it yourself" or that his brain cannot process the work. I make 10-15 times more money at my regular job, so hearing him say "You do it yourself" is not fun.
This hobby also includes trying to convince him that the business schemes he comes up with are not great—they're exclusively fraud-related, such as various forms of gambling and crypto stuff.
Mum keeps telling me that if I do not look after him, he will likely end up in a worst situation. He is in his early 40s by the way.
I did a second job as a hobby so I could just pay him the money, but that did not work because he keeps investing it in one of his schemes. So, I have to find him a job and convince him to keep it. I have a set of fake accounts that I use to apply to jobs and beg him take them on while he continuously says "you do it".
This has been going on for 7 years now.
:(
Dunno which kind of disability, but at some point you being the good brother can reach a limit.
He has a physical disability, and he had major trauma that he is dealing with, but that was more than a decade ago. He went to therapy a few times but a couple of therapist essentially gave up on him. He said they were zoned out when he keeps talking.
I have been at my "limit" for several years already. I have a day job, and at night I am making freaking "Happy Easter" posters in Canva for a print shop with 200 followers on Instagram. Everyday I am begging the guy to take over the contract while he continuously keeps saying "you do it" or that his brain does not work. He is literally doing the whole 9 yards. Even has a podcast and live streams. I am not kidding at all. I told myself maybe talking to the camera is a way for him to connect with his friends and a coping mechanism.
We all carry our burdens. It sounds extremely disrespectful and dishonorable, but without the help of autistic parenting groups, I wouldn’t have lasted this long. He is my platonic autistic surrogate son.
You’re a great brother! Sorry to hear your unappreciated.
I have a friend, philosophy masters, smart, autistic and he is not entering the work force. Any tips?
No, I am not. That is the thing—it has been 7 years, and we are stuck in the same loop. If I were to give your friend advice, it is to send a lot of warm emails. Joining a freelance marketplace is going to be brutal. Connect with folks in different communities, talk with them a bit, and then ask if they have any jobs. The success rate I would say is about 1 out of 50 to 70 outreaches.
It’s time to let go.
I am not sure that is possible because I act as a buffer between him and my parents.
My other siblings drew a line, and they are miserable themselves because they can't help.
He is the kind of guy who will take a mortgage on my parents' house to do some sort of forex play because he has figured out the true intention of US oil policies and how that impacts South East Asian oil-supplying countries—and wants to bet everything on Brunei and Malaysian currency.
So, I am trying my best to divert his attention.
I don't think chess engines are a solved problem for some use cases. Yes you can make something strong, maybe even the strongest, but can you create a chess engine perfectly tuned to actually teaching a player? Instead of superhuman perfect lines and inscrutable long-horizon strategy, can you teach nearly optimal human play in a way that's actionable, modular and memorable? Can you improve on tournament prep for players against particular opponents or within a particular metagame?
Also, obviously it's your life, and we're here on Earth to fart around, but I have spent a good portion of my life dipping into one hobby after another, as my dad did before me, so I'm half speaking to myself when I ask this: why do you think you can't meaningfully contribute to any of these realms, even now? To me that sounds like some deep seated fear or doubt, some aversion to competition, some overriding bitterness. I'm slightly worried you'll just be back here in another couple of years trying to find another new hobby, unsullied by the efforts and achievements of others. You won't find that! I would actually suggest a particularly expensive hobby: going to therapy. Try that, and learn that you're already enough, and if your contributions are meaningful to you, that's all that matters. Happy to be way off the mark here though.
This. For those more into reading instead of straight to therapy, Barbara Sher's "Refuse to Choose!" book about living with a multitude of interests can be a good starting point.
Also, making (or maybe tuning) a chess engine to teaching sounds like an interesting challenge, actually.
I’ve started making what I “joy machines” that I am putting up in or near my neighborhood. They’re some combination of public interactive art (e.g. push a button and it prints out a compliment) and little art on display that I design and 3D print for people to take.
I'm intrigued and need to see some images or videos now.
Here’s the initial post about! https://www.instagram.com/p/DUeWPKPEqQB/?igsh=bjJiM3VlM3ZxZ3...
I have this delusion of grandeur about starting a movement to take all of the mostly-idle 3D printers in people’s homes and to use them to create little tokens of joy in people’s neighborhoods.
Very cool! Any links to posts about some of them?
See my reply above!
I've been playing exclusively CRPGs for the last 12 months or so, which was kinda a niche genre before the success of BG3. There are tons of way to beat those games and optimizing how you build your party and characters (what players call "min-maxing") while following a highly narrative story is a lot of fun. Most of them are quite old and often on sales for like 5 bucks on Steam, for which you get hundreds of hours of gameplay. A few recommendations: Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2, Owlcat's Pathfinders & W40K Rogue Trader, Larian's Divinity 1, 2 & BG3, Bioware's BG1 & BG2, etc…
These are a blast. I went through a phase in highschool where I exclusively played 90's CRPGs. There are some real gems that find a unique playstyle with tons of freedom due to how low fidelity the games are, while still being visually engaging and beautiful. Definitely check out fallout 2 if you haven't tried it yet, it's one of my favorites!
I always meant to go back to Wizardry 7 I think it is. (Or 5, I forget)
I was convinced that a party of all Ninjas and Samurai would be unstoppable, but I never could make it work. I recall leveling up to a point where a high enough character would get 3 attacks per turn, and then when hit counterattack twice. Multiply this by the whole party.
But realistically, at some point this flurry of attacks every round just fell over because you need better magic users for enemies with certain weaknesses. My memory is fuzzy, but it also may have related to the increasingly large hordes of enemies which would dilute the effects of so many attacks.
Fight Fight Fight, Parry Parry Parry.
Nice to see people discovering these games. I wouldn't really say it was niche until BG3 though, there were plenty of highly acclaimed games long before that.
You might like this blog, the author plays through CRPGs in chronological order. Currently they're at the mid 90s. https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/
Check out the Epic Encounters 2 mod for D:OS2. Best tactics experience I've ever had. Runners up are LWOTC for XCOM3 and Homebrew for BG3.
Fallout 1 & 2! Formative titles for young me.
Get a microscope and help me explore the role of structured water in rouleaux formation.
Rouleaux formations are clumps of red blood cells, and they're bad because 90% of our circulatory system is < 1 cell wide, so clumps cannot pass. Hematological literature of past 50 years is a bit of a mess regarding mechanisms, seemingly has not considered structured water because it's recent and looks a little fringe. Structured water is known to be disrupted by WiFi, so if a clearer connection can be made between structured water and rouleaux, it could offer the simplest and most encompassing explanation for biological harm from EMF; would also make the benefits of sauna, red light therapy, grounding/earthing, and other practices more legible.
I did an n=5 study on sauna and rouleaux (positive result; draft report: https://thespacebetween.xyz/p/sangre-y-sauna/), and some n=1 observations of myself with grounding and wifi. Blog post: https://thespacebetweenx.substack.com/p/blood-and-the-specte...
> it could offer the simplest and most encompassing explanation for biological harm from EMF
Frankly this is a bit of a red flag for me in terms of scientific rigour. It sounds like you want the conclusion to be true, or you already believe it to be true, that EMFs are harmful, and you are searching for ways to justify it. Careful with confirmation bias.
> would also make the benefits of sauna, red light therapy, grounding/earthing, and other practices more legible
This is also a bit suspect. These treatments don't seem to have much in common and it's unclear how they may affect the phenomenon you are discussing. Coincidentally they also tend to be some of the go-to treatments for a myriad unscientific wellness practices.
And I'm not sure how you plan to observe the molecular structure of water with a basic microscope. I suppose that trying to induce Rouleaux formations by exposing red blood cells to WiFi is worth a try of course, but it would be very strange if such a basic thing hadn't been observed already by the scientific community.
>It sounds like you want the conclusion to be true, or you already believe it to be true, that EMFs are harmful, and
Wouldn't it be more accurate to hypothesize for a start, that man-made EMFs are likely to be harmful than safe. We co-existed with nature for eons and our bodies will be tuned to deal with the 'natural' EMFs, magnetic fields etc. Anything that is not 'natural' has to be viewed with more suspicion than something natural. Note that I'm not claiming that everything natural is good and everything 'artificial' is bad. Also the distinction between natural/artificial can be blurred.
What is structured water?
Yeah okay... Surprised to see this as the top comment.
> Hexagonal water, also known as gel water, structured water, cluster water,[1] H3O2 or H3O2 is a term used in a marketing scam[2][3] that claims the ability to create a certain configuration of water that is better for the body.[4]
> The concept of hexagonal water clashes with several established scientific ideas. Although water clusters have been observed experimentally, they have a very short lifetime: the hydrogen bonds are continually breaking and reforming at timescales shorter than 200 femtoseconds.[7] This contradicts the hexagonal water model's claim that the particular structure of water consumed is the same structure used by the body.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_water
Though funnily enough, you can make real 'structured water' at home in your freezer. Making your ice crystals hexagonal is theoretically possible, but it's really, really hard to grow monocrystaline water ice. That might be a really interesting niche hobby, though.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA710QYxEu0 for the latter.
Well yes, that’s in a solid state. Lots of crystals have hexagonal structures since it’s the optimal packing distribution.
If “structured water” just means that there are tiny ice crystals in water, sure that’s very plausible, but I doubt it would have much of an effect.
PS: Trying to grow crystals of different challenging structures does sound like an awesome hobby.
Oh, the pseudo-science 'structured water' is absolutely bonkers. I just went off on a mildly interesting tangent.
I've been doing photography for a long time but over the last few years had phases where I got bored of it and tried something new.
I had a long time when I was bored and carried the camera in my pack but never took any pictures, then one day I looked out at the sports center out my window and decided to start shooting sports.
Posting photos to socials I found flower photographs were popular so I take a lot of them and find ways to not get bored. (Maybe I will start focus stacking one of these days)
Since the beginning of the year I have been "going out" as a character who is a bit like a Disney cast member who gets photos like
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116326541009492328
from people who recognize my character. Like the Disney cast member it works better when people have seen the movie so i hand out these tokens
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116086491667959840
which spread virally around a university campus, particularly among Chinese students who recognize the huli jing and all the time I have experiences "that could only happen in a manga" when, for instance, somebody who's heard the rumors is waiting at the bus stop for me. Laugh but all my marketing KPIs have an extra zero on the right!
Same, but not the same. I've also been doing photography for a long time and when I had kids I added some gear & skills to shoot them playing sports. After a few years of this I realized since I was already there I might as well shoot the whole team, or both/all teams, since everyone's families would value the photos.
When I was laid off at the end of last year I decided to formalize this and now have a side gig (real, insured business) where I shoot local youth & high school sports for free, but make a few bucks (to cover my equipment costs plus spending money) doing portraits, headshots and team media days. It's proven fulfilling, mostly because since I do the events for free I tend to receive a lot of goodwill and word-of-mouth referrals. Far more than I can handle given my day job.
That gig is something I tried to do w/ my daughter's sports for the past 5-ish years. I loved shooting her games and distributing the photos both teams. It was so much fun.
I had a nasty altercation with a parent last fall and now I can't pick up the camera w/o getting PTSD-like symptoms. I'd love to know how "pros" handle dealing with that kind of thing. I had a similar situation years ago w/ a guy who got in my face for shooting on the street at a festival. My solution there was to just stop doing it.
Make up an official-looking "Event Photographer" vest, hat, lanyard with "Photographer Pass" on it, etc?
People generally ignore or even help workers with a bright vest, carrying a ladder, etc. So I imagine you would get a lot less suspicious looks doing something like that versus looking like an Average Joe.
Maybe with a polo shirt and embroidered made-up photography company logo and name on it.
It depends on the type of experience that altercation was. If it was you being confronted about photographing their kid without a model release, that's one thing, but if it was a more general unease of a photographer being present at the event, that's different.
For the latter, make sure you don't need a media credential (you probably don't) and get one if you do.
For the former, if your kid is competing, the odds are good that you already are acquainted with their teammates' parents so you can just ask directly, especially if you intend to share your album with them afterward.
My experience is that, with littler kids, if a photographer is not in the parent sideline/area, parents may wonder who they are. With older (high school) kids, they expect some media coverage so that part isn't a big deal. What they do care about is being able to reshare your shots to their socials or use them for other personal reasons. Depending on the high school or club, you may or may not need a media credential. If not, it's usually up to the coach (for high school) to decide whether you're allowed on/next-to the field/track/court. It's helpful to build a rapport with the coaches. It's also helpful to be able to show that you're a legitimate business and not just some rando.
In my case, I do events for free and provide full-res post-processed albums via Google Photos. This is a labor of love because I know athletes and their families (not to mention yearbook staff!) appreciate it. Maxpreps, SBLive and others contract with local photogs to cover events, too, and those sites aggregate and host the albums... but downloads average ~$20/image. It's not hard for a decent local photographer to favorably compete against those freelancers. Then it's also easier for me to upsell on portraits and media days. Media Days for school teams I typically charge ~$35/kid. For club teams it's usually $50/kid. For that they get a guaranteed 3 poses each plus leftover time for fun poses. Unlike a lot of commercial photogs, I charge this flat rate per athlete instead of a booking fee + per-image download or print packages. My experience is that they really just want digitals most of the time anyway, and even if I net less I don't really care because this is just a labor of love where I can cover my expenses and earn some spending money (~$10k/yr is acceptable given the time I'm putting into it).
You need to be extremely careful about taking photos of children without explicit permission from the parents.
You need to know the law. That is being careful, but it doesn't mean it's always illegal to photograph children in public.
For sure, but it didn't help me because I don't have the fortitude to stand my ground. I'm very non-confrontational.
(Yikes-- I feel my pulse in my neck and chest just writing about this.)
I likely need to see a therapist about it. Wow.
That’s the first step. Good for you - well done.
At least on the street and in sports my experience is people using purpose-built cameras get harassed.
People using cell phones as cameras get a pass (at least in sports).
It's common that they don't even let you into the venue if you have a interchangable lens camera. I wouldn't even try going into a pro game with a camera if I didn't have a credential.
At my Uni I usually go right in without any trouble, the only case I got hassled was a woman's hockey game and that time I kept repeating "I've never had trouble getting into a game before" (true) until they gave up and let me in. (Which doesn't leave me inclined to try again, but I'd already bought a ticket and didn't want to back and stash my gear in my office) I hear in hockey they are really worried about wildcat video streams.
Some of the sports at Cornell are exceptionally laid back. We are one of a few schools that plays sprint football which is 100% the same as regular football except players have to weigh less than 178 lbs [1], I know the head coach, I know people in the parent's association, they leave the gate unlocked and i go right down to the sidelines.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_football
In Munich in 1999 I almost got my ass kicked by some guy at a rave for taking a picture of his girlfriend with a frickin' Game Boy Camera. (Got GBC shots featured in Nintendo Power!)
My current style is centered around getting posed group portraits at events and is low risk. My act seems to disrupt people's patterns and drag them along with my script, I suspect a lot of people who might want to mess with a foxographer might think twice about messing with a huli jing (rabies, fleas, ticks, cantrips, curses, ...) and if they aren't afraid of a dangerous beast they might be afraid of a dangerous and delusional therian. I think I run a tiny risk of the sort of violence you might be targeted for if you go out in drag but so what...
I do get harassed by some people online who keep asking if I have consent for my photos and it bothers me more than it should and for now I reply like "notice that they posed for me" or "that person was carrying that protest sign on a busy road with thousands of cars going by". It's a matter of time before they lecture me again that it boggles their mind that I'd take pictures at a No Kings protest and I am plotting how to bait them so that they embarrass themselves enough that they give up.
Insect macro photography is an interesting and challenging niche within photography. Trying to find insects and then get a sharp photo, when you have less than 1mm depth of field, is quite a challenge! It also opens up a whole world that you wouldn't normally see.
I've seen photos by people who use the native focus stacking in Olympus Micro 4/3 cameras to get awesome shots of insects. I am firmly in the Sony camp but I have been thinking of getting an Olympus body and a lens or two for birds (lens+body is much less than the Sony lens and it can be hand-held) and macro work... Like once I saw focus stacked flower pictures I couldn't be 100% happy w/ the ones I take)
See https://learnandsupport.getolympus.com/om-system-ambassadors...
Stacking is difficult with insects. Unless you kill them first, which I don't want to do.
A sub-niche of this I'm currently into is film photography. It's a bit more cost over time and much more "work" for objectively inferior results. But for personal and family photos, I feel more connected to the photos I take with film.
As an example, we've just came back from a holiday trip, and if I had taken a digital camera I would've taken a photo of a beautiful scene, looked at the screen and feel dissatisfied with it, and try to take another, and another, eventually heading back to the hotel dissatisfied and thinking I could've done better. But with a film camera, I end up taking one or two photos and then continue enjoying the place. Two weeks later at home I either get surprised or disappointed.
I don't share it on social media. I don't even share it with friends and family anymore. It's just for me, and every now and then I share it with a small online community who are also into film photography.
I'd love to get into darkroom printing next but financials and physical space is limited at the moment.
I build weird experimental instruments and then play them at the local electronic music open mic nights.
My main instrument is the electroduochord, a stereo two-stringed instrument played with a drone motor rotary magnetic bow. https://youtu.be/G1ftvw-Y6pk
I've also hooked up audio jacks to small solar panels to convert vibrations in light into sound. https://youtu.be/ZF2Rn5YfBC8
Now I'm working on cybernetic drumming and rhythm synthesis. https://youtu.be/oJZeP4Naqxo https://youtu.be/NwNrJLvHuAE
I dig the electroduotone. Congrats!
Have you heard of electronicos fantasticos? It's this band from Japan who make incredible music with instruments they made themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0VYsiMtrNE
Yup, I've seen some of their stuff. They mostly make conventional music with unconventional instruments which is cute but doesn't quite interest me. I prefer music that is a bit more experimental and works with the texture of the sound more than melodic structure.
Really dig the sound of the first one, though all of these are really cool.
Thanks! I have some albums that were made using the electroduochord.
This one was created autonomously using a feedback algorithm controlling the speed of the rotary magnetic bow. https://stefanpowell.bandcamp.com/album/autonomous-drone-lul...
It's an album meant for falling asleep.
FDM 3d printing is still a wild-west and there are plenty of avenues to explore. Not sure what else to say about that other than as someone with daily and close personal proximity to the 'industry' that cropped up I am well aware that there is plenty of work to be done by enthusiasts and niche-people.
Engineering and machinery is still a place full of exploration if you have the chops. If you don't have them yet then there is plenty of topics within that domain to explore; you'll never run out of things to learn there.
My 0.02c : learn to disregard the crowds and focus on your own work. Just because people are doing something you used to do doesn't mean they have anywhere near the depth of understanding and 'freedom of movement' as you do as a 'resident expert'.
also : the fact that no one is doing something may be a signal; crowds form for a reason. Very few hobbyist bomb-squad folk and rabid-racoon-caregivers, get what I mean?
the GPT3 models didn't keep you from learning about ML. The industry didn't push you from keyboard and printers. You did these things.
If you're trying to lead an entirely one-off human life with total uniqueness from other people then all I could suggest is hallucinogens , but personally I think that the goal of just being unique for the sake of being unique is ludicrous.
Just find enjoyment, that's the goal for me at least.
I knew a guy who found an interesting 3d printing niche: 2 way radios for professionals (mainly SAR crews) are always getting fetched up on clothing, and you're often finding the radio turned off because the knobs got moved. Dumb problem, should have been solved by fundamental engineering years ago - but whatever. He built a 3d printed shroud for a variety of popular radios, and now makes a living selling these.
He's a tech guy, but no engineer. He saw the need (he works on a SAR team), saw the solution and made it happen. Inspiring, really.
I do a bit of 3d printing stuff myself. Personally, I'm attracted that it's getting more professional. I can use it as the impetus to learn real engineering/CAD, etc. Not in an "I'm an engineer" way, but still using real principles to make better things. You don't have to be intimidated if you keep your identity small and let it inspire you instead.
I melt milk jugs and other HDPE plastics into musical claves and drum sticks as an answer to "recycling plastic is kind of bs". It melts at 350 degrees and can be done in a toaster oven in the garage or even the kitchen with proper ventilation. The smell isn't that bad, nothing like if you dropped plastic in a fire.
I've also made some sticks from braiding plastic grocery bags which are also often made of HDPE (#2) type plastic.
Started a volunteer run, drop-in, bicycle workshop a few years ago. Its still going strong- something about the vibe, the practicality, and bike maintenance being just the right level of hard. I don't run it any more, but I drop in from time to time, and it always makes me feel better.
My hobby involves some of the oldest technology we've been able to find evidence of.
It started as spinning with a hand spindle using prepared (combed/carded) wool, and has evolved into looking for interesting fleeces directly from the shepherds (plenty given away or sold cheaply around here), figuring out how best to wash and process (hand comb? drum carder? spin directly from the slightly-opened locks?), working on which settings on my spinnng wheel will produce the twist I'm looking for, and most recently, dyeing using Easter egg dye and vinegar, which is surprisingly effective.
Oh, and of course, knitting and crocheting with the results.
I still use hand spindles to spin while walking, watching my kid on the playground, or on transit.
Im imterested in hearing more about this. Do you have a YouTube channel or any other place to follow you?
Hnefatafl, a simple board game that was played by the vikings and others who had frequent contact with them. Or rather, what we play today is an approximation of what they played back then as we don't really know the exact rules they used. It's interesting in that unlike chess and others, it is asymmetrical, and there are a number of different variants each with their own challenges and different balances between attacker and defender.
The main community and learning resource is at http://aagenielsen.dk.
amateur liquid bi-prop rocket engines for the High Power Rocketry hobby are gaining momentum. There's lot of opportunity there for performance profiling and even more if you have access to a machine tools like CNC lathes. There's also interest in active stabilization of amateur rockets using engine gimbaling which would put so much more performance in reach.
These guys are legit and actually flying airframes instead of just ignition on a test stand. https://www.halfcatrocketry.com/
The hobby is geography constrained though, you need access to large open spaces. Even small engines are spectacularly loud and igniting one in your garage would scare the crap out of your neighbors.
Edit: if you're in/near LA this club is pretty much ground zero. Tom Mueller of SpaceX's Merlin engine series fame was discovered here iirc. https://rrs.org
I was at a High powered Rocketry event and saw these guys and their rocket. Talked to them a while. Very interesting.
As a kid, I dreamed of doing this. Some of my earliest googling was related to rocket fuel, probably right after October Sky came out.
What differentiates High-Power from the other options?
Model rockets are classified as 'high power' above a certain impulse. In places like the UK and US you are expected to gradually work your way up from low impulse motors (A,B,C) to high impulse motors (J,K,L+).
Probably better to start with solid fuel motors? lots to learn before progressing onto liquid fuel motors.
Solid rocket motors are conceptually simpler, but much more dangerous and in many jurisdictions legally dubious to make yourself compared to hobbyist bi-liquid or hybrid designs.
Off the shelf, solid fuel motors are almost impossible to start accidentally. I don't see how they are more dangerous than dealing with tanks of pressurised gases.
Making solid fuel motors yourself is dangerous (and illegal without a licence in the UK).
Local urbex and exploration of 'haikyo' areas. Easy for me since I am in Tokyo and it's super walkable. I have taken to just getting on the train and getting off at random stations and walking in a random direction for a couple of kilometers. Every now and then I run into interesting abandoned buildings or neat shrines. Also makes for good exercise.
Not sure if you were looking only for indoor hobbies, but I picked up Kiteboarding recently, and it is the most outrageously fun thing I've ever done.
It's like being a kid and jumping off the house with a bedsheet, except it works. Most mistakes are laughed off by splashing in the water. I'm 3 years in and I can jump 7-10m then fly like a bird for 5-10 seconds without consequences.
Even as a beginner, sailing around or just feeling a kite pull you around is such a blast. Keep in mind it's really difficult and pretty much requires 10-20 hours of private lessons.
I always thought that looked fun but I would worry about being blown away up too high or into some obstacle like rocks
Is that something that happens to people?
Also how dependent is it on weather? Do you have to monitor the wind to know if its worth going out?
Jumping takes real skill. I went like 60 times and can barely jump 7m in perfect conditions by trying very hard.
That happens very rarely like recently in Israel where they went out on a storm, and there was a very rare very-big gust. But extremely rare comibation of things that can go wrong.
Yes you need to monitor the wind. I'm kiting today for example.
Really fun! I used to do it too, and I miss it.
How do you combine it with work? Where I live in NL, there are few days where I’m able to go kiteboarding and I probably won’t know until the day off if it’s possible or not.
Very hard to schedule!
I work remotely, and my schedule is flexible. I live in Squamish BC all summer which is great for wind. In the winter we are in UT but my friends take lots of kiting destination vacations.
I’m fairly late in my career though (44yo), so I’ve opted for a lower salary, low stress and flexible job.
I'll take whatever lower salary is allowing you to snowbird in squamish!
Kitesurfing is insane yes! I can jump up to ~6m in 1 year.
Really efficient adrenaline with relatively very low risk.
I don't know if it's niche, but I like making granola for my friends and family. I give them a big jar and tell them free refills are included ("just bring me the empty jar"). I get pretty good nuts and tend to make largish batches (around 2 kg), and, because of the refills, I get a good sense of who appreciates it — always happy to make more for them. My recipe is here: https://alejo.ch/365
any chance we got it in English? would love to try
You need help translating a two-step recipe?
On HN?
Are you sure?
2 years ago I wanted an easy way to listen to commodore 64 sid tunes on my computer without the need of powering on my c64 everytime but with the benefits of having real sid chips. After doing some research I concluded that the available uab hardware sid boards were either unavailable or outdated. This started my journey to create my own usb board, USBSID-Pico. Currently at version 1.3 of the pcb with an improved version and pro version in development.
The board is supported in various commodore 64 emulators, sid trackers and web players. It also supports midi (still in active development) and even has an onboard embedded emulator.
As far as I know there are now approximately 300+ boards in the hands of enthusiasts. Ranging from users, chiptunes lovers, demo creators to musicians. The board and it's firmware are open source, and the board is available at PCBWay and via my Tindie. Just yesterday I shipped 11 new boards to new owners across the globe.
From personal need to niche hobby supplying fun to other enthusiasts in just 2 years
Jogging isn’t niche, but after being sedentary for ten years I had to start doing something. When I was young I could run a 7 minute mile which was nothing to brag about. Now at 50+ that seems like an impossibility. I’ve been doing walk/jog intervals for almost a year and I’m getting better, and focusing on not blowing out my knees.
A group of us in our community broadcast many of the local high school sports. Our original setup had a scoreboard that was really clunky to manage and was hard to learn, so I built a web-based version that pretty much any 12 year old with an iPad could use.
I have worked with the logs extensively over time to convert the simple data inputs from the scoreboard controls into charts & graphs that update in real time on the screen to “tell the story” of the game, and generate “talking points” from the data. It allows us to plug in students as commentators and they can talk about the game much more confidently because they can visually see the game's storyline that is based on actual data. “The Trojans are on a 14-4 streak starting late in the 3rd quarter, and that has flipped the lead in their favor” is a lot more fun than “the Trojans are doing well the last little bit”.
It’s been fun (and challenging) to develop the right UI to display the game’s story in a way that is rich yet easy to read at a glance. And it has been cool to see the students increase in how professional they sound on the live broadcast.
Would love to see this in action. Anything you can share? Also, what gear is used for this? Having recently been in charge of a scoreboard made by Daktronics for high school games, I was intimidated by the UX.
You can use it here: https://scoreboardmax.com/
All features are included in the free version, just some usage limits. If you decide to use it, send a message using the “Contact Us” from with the account and I’ll send you the details on the analytics / charts as they are at unpublished URLs.
Thank you!
Fishing. But not just regular fishing, life listing. I catalogue and detail ever fish I catch; the conditions, the type of lure or bait, the rod etc. From there you can get into microfishing with tanago rods, surf fishing etc. It's can get quite deep and a good additional hobby for people who love to travel.
I also take notes when I fish. It's less about recording a life list, and more about trying to collate what is otherwise very thing spotty data enough to get better at fishing.
As someone who has learned a lot of skills and hobbies online and likes sharing info, fishing has been a really interesting different world. Because anglers are effectively competing for a scarce resource, specific information about good fishing spots is understandably not shared widely.
So you have to put in the time yourself to try spots and see what produces. But in order to catch fish, you need to be at the right place, at the right time of year, at the right time of day, with the right lure, and the right technique. Get any one of those wrong and the only signal you get is "no bites". That makes it really tough to learn and improve.
I've found that taking detailed notes helps me see patterns in what works that would otherwise be hard to see.
I fish for salmon. In my part of the UK it has become very niche due to the scarcity. I joined clubs and never went, but now I'm in a syndicate where I fish one Saturday per month for the season, and never miss it. I'm years in and still never got one into the net! Fishing for migratory fish that don't feed once they are in the river is mad. On my fishing days I don't think of anything else
You have an app for this? Been wanting to do something similar
Warning I am not a developer. It could be better.
https://github.com/MichaelAPerry/FishDex
I make holiday light shows with an open source program called XLights[0]. I'm sure you've seen the videos[1] of what people[2] can do. Usually the top comment is "man that is cool but I wouldn't want to be their neighbor!" followed by "my neighbors love my light shows".
Creating the sequences is time consuming, and lot of people end up buying them or sharing them, but those are rarely as good as the ones you make for yourself.
Some folks have dabbled with using AI to create the sequences. I think the biggest issues are lack of training data and it's a very visual art, so there needs to be a better feedback between the text representation and the visual manifestation.
So if you're into using AI to make physical world things better, that would be a good place to look!
[0] https://xlights.org
[1] https://youtu.be/enhhtPZMwCE?t=119
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5dfpe_-Lgg
Warning: Do NOT click on [1] unless you have 25 minutes to spend transfixed on a video. Holy cow...
It takes about 10 hours per minute of song to make a sequence like that. Imagine if AI could help speed that up!
I wonder if you can break down the sequences into segments (parts) and then the AI doesn't have to know how to control LEDs directly, but can instead put sequences together in accordance with the music.
Maybe even process MIDI files somehow ...
When we do it as humans, that's basically how we do it. We may have an overall idea for a theme across the song, but usually you're zoomed into a few seconds of music and adding light effects to it.
I assume you've seen this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47675446 which is related
I had not, thanks! Interestingly, using FFT for this has been around for a long time, but combining it with transformers could have interesting new results.
It's interesting to me that you can have something like this that is "hard to build" but "easy to verify" - humans are really good at telling if something is "off" about the visualization.
Guess this doesn't count as a hobby since I switched careers, but I left software recently to attend violin making school. I'm happier than I've been in a long time.
I'd encourage all "mental work" folks to engage with something physical in the 3D realm (art, cooking, gardening, etc.). I really believe humans have a special affinity for creating refined objects, and I don't think software "scratches that itch".
Really cool! I split my time between cello and software so I'm decently familiar with this line of work. What inspired you to switch careers? I imagine it's not easy to get a foothold as a luthier either. Do you feel like you're taking a big risk?
I switched careers because the software and tech world has changed drastically since I first started, and not in ways that I enjoy or that play to my strengths.
Fundamentally I enjoy being a craftsperson. That is, someone who through training and experience gets really good at something, and then uses that expertise to create new things. Software wasn't always like that, but more often than not I enjoyed it, so I count myself as really lucky. I think the business of software engineering has changed in ways that make it much less amenable to the "craftsperson ethos".
It's not really that hard to start as a luthier - there are 3 violin making schools in the US and you don't really need previous experience, they teach you everything (shout out to The Violin Making School of America - violin making as a newbie can be difficult and frustrating at times but I look forward to school every single day). Since I was a software engineer for 25 years with rather inexpensive tastes generally and no children, and a working spouse, I had saved up enough to not really worry about finances (I certainly needed to downshift some of my expenses, but again, it wasn't that hard for me and in many ways I felt it was liberating - I cook a lot more now, I walk to school instead of rot in traffic, I sold my house which I always hated the maintenance, upkeep and expense of, etc.) I certainly don't have "FU money" but I'm fine being in school for a few years and then making much less than I did as a software engineer.
Bellringing, specifically change ringing. It’s a type of church bell ringing that is rather algorithmic in nature. Tends to attract mathy types. Religion not required or expected!
If you have English-style tower bells near you, it's worth checking out, even if only to listen.
Rest assured, my mind is blown.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lyDCUKsWZs
Is buying hopefully broken electronic test equipment at the flea market, fixing it and then blogging about it a niche hobby?
of course
I'm into book restoration, here's a gallery: https://photos.app.goo.gl/1oNxCfKJp4k6yjoZ9
Much less niche, but I'm also really into acting: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=do5PicgU0Jw
Hi! I've been interested in starting book restoration as a hobby as well, are there any resources you recommend to start learning?
I learned primarily by trial and error, haven't found any good articles or videos :(
That's impressive work! But how come the books are in mixed languages? Are they your books? Do you fix books for random people?
Hahaha, good observation :) I ran out of my childhood books (in Spanish) to fix, then I ran out of my GFs childhood books (in Latvian), so at that point I offered my services to anyone in the Google Zürich office. I got books in all kinds of languages I couldn't read, and a few chocolates and bottles of wine for my troubles :)
Some of the most interesting books were especially challenging. One in old German that was missing a couple of pages. It was a popular fairytale so I found the missing content online and a closely matching font, and reconstructed the pages. Another was in an Asian script I not only couldn't read, I didn't know how to sort or even properly rotate some loose pages, so I had to ask the owner. In a few cases when bits of the cover were missing, I found photos online, and printed a patch. Fun times!
that seems wonderfully varied and entertaining :)
There's a lot of legacy / retro coding out there that despite the output being used by anywhere from hundreds, to thousands to even millions of end-users, it still involves small tight night communities per project, sometimes they overlap somewhat. I've mentioned it before, if you follow people reverse engineering Shockwave, you will note that they are all on the same communities to capture as much wisdom from others as possible. In niche reverse engineering communities, the smallest thing can be a life changer.
Flying sailplanes/gliders. Once you get good at it, you can fly hundreds of miles (or more) by understanding the weather and figuring out where the air is going up. Lots of opportunities to nerd out. Aerodynamics, weather forecasting, remote sensing, in-flight user interfaces, strategy, communications, and also just satisfying to figure out how to coax the atmosphere to get you somewhere for free.
I did a few flights in college but never got my license because there wasn’t an instructor light enough to meet weight requirements with me lol. Do you have yours? If so, how long did it take you?
I did it back in college too. We had a great club that really catered to students. It was $ 14 for a 2000 ft tow, and $99/yr for a membership, that included all glider rental for the lower performance ships (Schweizers). The instructors were volunteers, but you had to wait. There was a signup sheet, and the first one to get to the field got the first flight.
Weight wise I was skinny back then and it wasn’t a problem. I soloed my first full year and got my license the next year.
Get your Part 107 federal drone license and volunteer for your local fire department or search and rescue. When the FD responds to structure fires they sometimes have to go up on the roof to cut an air hole. This allows oxygen into the building which helps prevent backdrafts. A FLIR equipped drone can help direct the hole cutter around hotspots on the roof. If your local fire department has a drone, it might not have the staff to be able to use it on calls.
How involved is the license? I've flown racing quads and RC planes, so I think I have the hand-eye coordination and spatial awareness skills.
Is this something that would be saturated in the Bay Area? Does the SAR team provide the drone?
You'd need to schedule and take an exam. There are lots of resources online to help you study. I recommend the Youtube video from Tony and Chelsea Northrup.
I'm not sure how saturated it would be. My advice would be to contact the closest FD (or PD if you wanted to go the SAR route) and ask. If they say they're covered, ask if they know any other stations that could use a hand. There's bound to be a department that needs volunteers.
The FD should have an enterprise level DJI (or equivalent) with color and IR cameras but it will probably depend on how well funded the department is. SAR may be a different story as far as equipment but I don't know since that's not the route I pursued.
I don’t know how niche they are, but a few I’ve done in the past
- 3D printed musical instruments. Print other designs or contribute your own
- lock picking. When you really get into it, you modify locks to make them more of a challenge and mail them to people
- Ham radio is hundreds of sub-hobbies in a trench coat. I’m currently mainly interested in linearizing switch-mode amplifiers, but was doing fox hunting for a bit (radio direction finding), and periodically do POTA (transmitting from parks)
> Ham radio is hundreds of sub-hobbies in a trench coat
Really good way of putting it! POTA can be a lot of fun.
HAM radio is whole range of things that were not possible when I was getting into it - first of all it's super cheap to start now, and you can probably bounce RF signals off the moon for less than $100 nowadays. Shortwave radio has always allowed signals to go around the world (by bouncing off the stratosphere). Most likely the new digital + AI capabilities means that a few well positioned relays could make for a very independent, low bandwidth Internet. Solar powered BTS or APs all kinds of experiments are possible...
Lock picking is great! Many security conferences will have a "lockpick village" where there are just a bunch of locks, lockpicks, and volunteers teaching people how to do it.
Any pointers to resources or groups around 3D printed musical instruments? Sounds really interesting!
There is a /r/3dprintedinstruments subreddit that if you sort by best of all time has a lot of good stuff.
Fipple flutes like recorders and ocarinas tend to be easy to start with. I also had good luck with the Modular Fiddle [https://openfabpdx.com/download/modular-fiddle-complete-desi... .
1. Lacto fermented food, you can spend plenty of time making unique food not available anywhere. Good niche to start is lacto fermented hot sauce. You can go very mild or crazy hot depending on your preference. 2. Sourdough is pretty understood, but there is hardly anything about gluten free sourdough. Basic principles are the same, you make a starter from flour and water, but you need to make it across different gluten free flour and combine them at the end. Endless possibilities with playing with ratios, toppings, etc. 3. Building meshcore / meshtastic nodes for your local area. There are kits / ready make nodes online or you can build your own. 4. Building a cyberdeck. You can start small with ready made parts, while you work towards designing your own PCB, handling battery with BMS, CADing everything, 3d printing, etc. You can specialise by only doing themed cyberdecks like only wearable or only fallout inspired. 5. Self host at home, but only rootless, distroless podman containers. 6. Automate all you can at home and integrate into home assistant. Install wleds, sync them to the music or use them as visual notification for things you care about
I would appreciate more data on the gluten-free sourdough. I have a family member who has a wheat/gluten allergy and spends a tonne of money on special diet bread.
Impeccable timing!
About 2: Gluten free sourdoughs.
Do you have any good starting points or resources to share?
I admit I haven't gotten around to search very deeply for them yet as I just started thinking about this again yesterday but previous attempts have not given me any good information just one off recipes rather than creating a new bubbly family member to store in your fridge ;)
You lost me at gluten-free sourdough.
I'm big into anti tech/work related activities. It reminds me that no matter how much I know, or think I know, that I have so much more to learn.
I got into scuba diving while living in NC, and it just happens that there's a lot of it off the coast! The other problem is that it's deep. Diving down to 130 feet sounds cool until you experience hours on a boat only to get a few minutes at the bottom. Eventually I got bothered to learn more about diving.
I headed down to northern Florida to dive with GUE. My instructor was a person who regularly got hit up to dive to exotic places all over the world. Missions like collecting/deploying samples, archaeology, recovery. Here were people meaningfully impacting the environment, science, and keeping technical know-how alive.
I don't know how to convey a the wonder I feel in text. Check it out maybe.
GUE Fundies is on my bucket list. I don't think I'd be interested in cave diving or deep stuff where I need helium, but the level of skill that tech divers show is something I want to be able to do.
I've done Fundies, of all my diving qualifications, this one had the biggest impact on my diving.
Some instructors have a saying: "Students pay for the training; the certification must be earned."
Do fundies! We all failed, initially. We had a blast bunking up and spending days in the water though.
I have been spending an inordinate amount of time trying to find the owners of the old Digital Research "Concurrent DOS" operating system. There's a lot of interesting turns in the search and it's been fun to document.
I've written a blog post about it [1] though there have been a few updates since I've written that.
I honestly think it might be a fun thing for me to keep doing, whether or not I'm successful with my search. I think there is a lot of old software that is just sitting on old hard drives that is waiting to be preserved.
[1] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Technical/2026/03-March/The-Q...
FYI 4699 OS is based on Concurrent DOS 286 and runs worldwide to this day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4690_Operating_System?wprov=sf...
Thanks for reading the post!
I have been looking into the Concurrent DOS 286 and FlexOS lineage. Since there is still some level of commercial usage of it, it seems like people are a big more reluctant to talk about it in any capacity.
https://dejabru.org - The Homebrew Competition Remembering Historic and Long-Forgotten Beer Styles
My hobbies are not niche in themselves; however, they are giving me the chance to distract myself from IT and to do something that inspires me and gives me some skills.
My philosophy around hobbies is that every learned skill can be reused in different areas.
So, I'm trying to: - taking photos. I have photography equipment and some experience in nature/portrait photography;
- learning languages. Not only mainstream languages like English (I'm not a native English speaker), but languages like Latin or Interslavic;
- biking and running. Just get a good health habit to clear your mind and improve your overall state after a long working day;
- playing musical instruments. I have a ukulele, guitar, and keyboard so I'm trying to make my own music;
- collecting antique items. For that, on every trip I'm trying to visit flea markets, where sometimes I find interesting items.
- vinyl music. That hobby is connected with the previous one;
- playing Go. I found this game much more interesting than Chess;
- bartending. Not only classical cocktails but some random mixes;
Sailing, archery are some I'm looking into at this moment.
I’ve recently started making bread, at the moment still with fresh or bakers yeast and planning to grow my own sourdough.
It’s not very niche, but as a hobby it’s pretty fulfilling. It allows for a lot of play, and you end with something tasty. Also, makes for a great small gift for friends and family.
I make most of my bread with sourdough. It is really easy, it takes a bit longer, but there are less steps - just mix some more flour/water (sometimes salt, but I've not had a problem when I forget though others say it helps the taste to add salt - YMMV) into your starter and wait. Yeast is faster by a lot, but it is a lot more complex and so I don't find it worth it.
My wife got a square cast iron dutch oven that she bakes bread in. The breads have this nice crust and soft texture inside. To die for.
> I'm looking for something novel and interesting, that isn't absolutely crowded that I could meaningfully contribute to.
I would say that a hobby is a bit like a fetish in that it is derived from our interior psychology. My father’s hobby was repairing old scientific instruments, which was perfectly suited to his disposition for quantifying everything in his life, including his family (bless you dad).
I don't think it's a niche hobby, but I really enjoy cooking. Trying out new techniques and receipts, cooking dinner for friends and family or just preparing a delicious meal in advance.
Cooking is possibly the least niche hobby ever, but it sounds like you're elevating it. Maybe call it "gastronomy", lol.
Taught myself to use a sewing machine. Then I made my own EDC wallet thing. Basically a zipper pouch that can fit a lot of things while keep them as spread out in my front pocket.
I've got a version of this now in my front pocket for like 9 months: https://share.zight.com/wbu487ew Yes, it's big, but it's the most comfortable from of a big wallet.
It's funny though. I can't help feel the pull to try and make the hobby a business. But then it probably becomes unfun. But my brain just can't not think that way.
Did the same two years ago, it's such an underrated skill. There's a good amount of complexity that goes into making an item without just following a pattern.
I recommend going through the basics (Tock Custom has a nice energy [0]), then picking up a fairly complex pattern for a common piece of clothing. Of course there's also r/myog.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@TockCustom
Yeah, it's funny how many times I basically made the same damn thing just fine tuning a half inch wider, or seam allowance.
I also can't believe how tedious cutting fabric is. Even for a tiny project like this it was such a pain in the ass. Even with nice circular cutters and mats and rulers. I'm now tempted to get a cricut 4 to make the cutting easier.
So interesting to read from other's hobbies!
I believe we all have three major parts: emotional, intellectual, and physical.
I have been very intellectually oriented, meaning I used my intellectual part even when it was not so useful for the thing I was doing. For example, thinking about emotions or how to do something when it is better than just feel or do.
My aim has been to become more balanced human being, meaning choosing pursuits that activate those other parts as well.
What has stayed with me over the years has been couples' dancing, which fits nicely with physical/emotional side. You just need to find a teacher whose apporach is not intellectual, i.e. based on steps and sequences! I am still doing it 2-5 times per week.
I am also doing regularly: - yin yoga - tai chi - winterswimming
I have had several other niche hobbies throughout the years, like: - fencing - improv theatre - leather works -- I ended up on a very demanding leather shoe course and made my own dancing shoes - wood crafting -- wooden spoons - traditional survival skills -- various kinds of traditional fire making skills, making traditional traps, making emergency tents, making emergency drafts, learning about plants, learning to skin/handle game etc.
Something I wanted to try but did not yet: - flint knapping
I got into improv theatre. There are groups in every city, at least here in the EU. It is both fun and developing creativity, alertness, etc.
I design treasure hunts and then hide them in books. Well, I've just started to. Was obsessed by the book Masquerade, by Kit Williams as a kid. Finally decided that I could probably do that as well. So have started. Very much enjoying it.
I'm just trying to understand what it is you do...
Do you make some sort of map and/or list of clues that you hide between the pages of books
Or
Do you write books that have maps and/or clues in the text?
I'm into innovation in HCI as a hobby, but it does get expensive so I would like to bring in some additional financial support for my unusual builds.
I didn't really plan to build HCI as a hobby, but I have a strong interest in hardware engineering and eventually I wanted to switch back to building things that anyone can physically see.
Years ago I built a hemisphere keyboard and now I've built an LED globe with a viewing portal. I started building visible things again because I had a vision and it's very satisfying to use the result. I spend more time using it now than I did originally building it, although it is definitely a work in progress. I want to build it again for a 2.0 version.
HCI innovation is definitely an interesting hobby - anything you can share or point me towards?
I’ve been learning Gregg Shorthand (Anniversary) since the start of the year. It’s a fun challenge even if it feels fantastically obsolete at this point with transcription models getting better and better every day. I’ve always liked paper-and-pen notes, so the idea of basically learning analog Vim was appealing :)
Not sure if this is an established hobby or something I've just come up with myself, but I've been "dashboarding." Essentially I have a Blazor webapp that integrates lots of data sources (some manual, some automatic) from areas of my life and I use that to visualize and analyze goals and habits. The main page consists of rolling-weekly stats that deliver "integration scores." Each score contributes to an overall score that gives me a general idea of how I'm doing on all my habits and goals.
So for instance, I use YNAB for our family budgeting, and I have it setup so that if I go a whole week without performing reconciliations, I get dinged -1. Otherwise this sits at 1.0. Then I have a score for journaling - my goal is to journal 4-5 times per week, so each time I journal it resets the score to 1, and then slowly ticks down to 0 over time. Then I have a number of Apple health scores that get imported automatically via REST API. This part compiles all the data on calories, relevant macronutrients (I mostly track protein and fiber currently), steps, workouts, etc. and builds a nice visualization. I consider a total integration score of 0.8 to be pretty good - keeping at that level is actually better than seeking for a perfect 1.0 all the time as my theory is that it will prevent burnout and allow for some forgiveness, because I can't be perfect.
It's been a fun project, and one that I generally try to avoid any AI use. Fun to just build and because the stakes are so low I just chip away at one feature at a time, carving out 15 minutes here or there.
Do you have more details on this project anywhere? I've been working on habit-building and tracking in my journal for the past year and a half or so, but I'm looking to amp it up a bit more. Your project appeals to my software developer and hobby collector mindset and would love to learn more about it.
Not really, but I'm happy to share more here :)
In all honesty, under the hood it's a bit of a mess. I may have eschewed some of the software engineering best practices in lieu of building something quickly that I wanted. I'll get around to going back through and retrofitting the app with some cleaner code, but for now I couldn't even open-source it without a self-perceived hit to my portfolio.
The project largely started out as something else. I initially wanted a combined TO-DO list and journal. Rather than checking things off I would run the journal content through a local LLM and have it check things off for me based on what I wrote each day. That's yet to be implemented. Then I moved on to an "ordering" system - I was inspired by the way that medical practitioners put in orders once they determined a course of treatment, and thought that might be a useful model to help motivate me to get things on my list done more effectively. I built this, but have utilized it less than I thought. Since then it's mostly been focus on the integrations and scoring system. The whole thing is highly modular, so for each integration I grab a template for the visualization I want to build and then need to reason out how to get the data into the system, which usually involves an API integration, scraping from some online data source, and/or data engineering. It's very fun, because each integration module has its own challenges.
I built the app using a standard stack of .NET core, Blazor server, and the data is stored in SQL server and data operations are handled with EF core. I use the Radzen component library, which I like a lot from a developer perspective but it's challenging to retheme and I'm largely unhappy with the look/feel of the app. This is something I plan on getting to eventually.
Happy to answer any/all questions. It's such a personal, homebrewed app that I can't imagine anyone else would get as much use out of, but it's very powerful and I think the hobby aspect of it could translate to pretty much any other developer.
I've been conlanging since I was about 8yo or so. This hobby also has me randomly learning natural human languages too. I've always just enjoyed it. I could make up reasons for enjoying it, but I am not certain that any of those would be true.
Some fantastic hobbies involve learning a new skill that'll serve you in the long run outside of tech, or teach you something interesting that will last after you drop the hobby. I personally love making things, especially food-related things and so I've been a hobbyist baker for about a decade. The Bread Code on GitHub was a fantastic introduction and taught me the basics to branch out and discover better baking techniques. That's the main one I've stuck with.
I've also dabbled in home wine making, cheese making, preserving and pickling, and they've all given me a deeper understanding of fermentation even if I've not stuck with them as much as I did with bread. However, if I go for a wine-tasting or a beer brewery I now know what they're talking about when they go into the process of it, which is a good conversation starter if nothing else.
There's also gardening, but that's mostly something my partner stuck with instead.
Sailing. Good to focus your eyes on something not glowing, the cold and wet makes you feel really alive. There's a bottomless pit of cheap old boats and maintenance to learn about- or if you like buying toys, the sky is the limit.
I like racing dingies, adds a social aspect, but ymmv.
Printmaking. In a tiny apartment I did linocuts and Gelli prints on my kitchen counter for a few months. https://lucidbeaming.com/art/prints
I like your stuff! I’ve been coveting a plotter for a while, but I’m pretty sure it won’t get used enough to justify the expense. :/
I do find the term “printmaking” hilarious because there’s just sooo many ways to make prints. I tried to get into linocut fairly recently, but the battleship grey linoleum I had wasn’t very good. It cracked and crumbled pretty easily. I did get some of pink Speedball “blocks,” but it gets expensive pretty quickly. I guess more to the point is the feeling that I lack much to say. But, that’s an excuse. :)
Thanks for the compliment. Linocuts and monotypes have been considered printmaking for hundreds of years. Those pen plots are also collaged and modified by hand, so not only mechanical. I see all that as traditional printmaking. As for having nothing to saw, there can be a lot of fulfillment in exploring basic themes, like geometric shapes or silhouettes of animals.
There’s no doubt that stuff is print making. My point is that there are multiple ways of doing (within each of these): relief, Intaglio, lithography, screen printing, offset.
So if you say, “I’m a print maker,” it describes basically nothing. :)
This is just a general statement, not directed at you. Sorry it felt that way.
Hydrophonic farming at home. You can play with sensors (acidity, humidity etc), LED lighting (frequencies, intensity, etc), vision processing (maybe throw in some AI buzzword here) to keep track of your plants and do some decision making.
Bonus: You get to eat the stuff you grow :)
> You can play with sensors (acidity, humidity etc)
Can you share some useful sensors? Any good pH sensor that can work for some period of time without manual maintenance (cleaning the probes etc)?
The increased speed hydroponic plants grow at compared to plants in soil is what really makes it exciting for me. A plant in my basic countertop "indoor garden" unit is growing 10x as fast as a cutting of the same plant sitting in my windowsill.
Or smoke it…
Maybe not that niche for this group, but I love pen plotting. I use code to create drawings and then pen plot them on paper [0]. The ability to bring something digital into the physical world is really fulfilling for me and makes the process much more tangible. I have an Axidraw A3, and it might be the best purchase I ever made.
In the last few months I haven't done much as I'm currently obsessed by gamedev. But now when you reminded me, I want to plot a few pieces I started last year and never finished.
[0] https://muffinman.io/art/
Naval once said his best engineers all do some form of art. So I am playing with AI art, and making tools for making the iteration fast and closed-loop.
It has to be Git-like control flow for us builders. My project page, if you are interested in playing around.
https://github.com/charismaticchiu/muse
Somebody already mentioned "Modular Synths". There's incredible resources for building your own synth modules for everything from circuit design to simple kits. Check out LMNC on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCTLeNxge54
I started learning how to make croissants. I bought a Japanese hand crank sheeter, and tried different butters and convection ovens. Definitely put me through a rabbit hole.
Hang gliding. It's good if you are in an area with some hills and consistent winds. There are maybe a dozen well-established launch sites around the U.S. Sadly, I broke down my glider around 2001 -- and did a post-mortem on it to discover it had a minor dent in it.
Recommendation -- don't stall the glider at heights between 10 and 25 feet from the ground. Also, avoid barbed wire fences.
My brother-in-law did a lot of hang gliding, and was part of a big community that did.
That community had a tendency to walk around - if they could walk around - in casts for a large part of their life.
He also ended up having a heart attack mid-glide, which was no fun at all. (He survived it, though!)
There's a surprisingly high number of people in my extended social circle who picked up archery as a sport.
It's actually a complex discipline with a huge range of bows and projectiles to choose from, each having unique characteristics you have to train for.
Training using VR equipment is picking up steam, as typically you need a sizeable amount of real estate to practice when the weather is bad.
> Training using VR equipment is picking up steam, as typically you need a sizeable amount of real estate to practice when the weather is bad.
I always wondered, how does that work?
Over in bullseye rifle we live and breathe dryfire (no ammo), but I understand the equivalent (no arrow) with a bow is a recipe for breaking the bow.
Like my brain just cannot comprehend how to get enough reps to get good enough at a thing without being able to do dryfire at the volume we do for rifle.
Answer is that it's the human body that's the weakest link here, as muscles get sore and tendons might get damaged if you overdo it.
Prepping for tournaments is a field in and of itself as you need to time your trainings right to achieve peak form at the event itself.
My sister, who's been doing this competitively for a decade now, showed me an excel sheet her team has - there's an optimisation problem you have to solve to get every member to their best shape within the specified timeframe.
Also there are so-called "trads" - people doing traditional archery with period-correct technology, where the stakes are understandably lower.
Also they ingest, ahem, aiming fluid each meeting, so it's way more casual than what modern competitive archers practice.
Archery does seem like it's having a moment right now.
I wonder if it's some combination of people wanting a more tactile hobby plus some vague apocalyptic undercurrents in society today.
Over here it's a combination of having a tradition of historical reconstruction and fairly strict gun laws, that don't extend to other weapons.
Case in point: you can open-carry a sword, unless you're displaying violent intent. Concealed carry of any obviously dangerous blade is prohibited, which spurred speculation on what to do with, e.g. a bread knife.
Consensus in the community is that you need to hold a loaf of bread in the other hand.
I always shoot 12 grains per pound, it usually gets me around 150-160fps, marginal weather is where the fun begins.
Archery is a lot of fun - I go to a monthly archery gathering where the host has a bunch of really nice recurves.
autonomous weapons?
Just kidding. Honestly, the best ideas out there are low-tech. Anything where as you put it is "crowded" with tech people don't want, but is also of good build.
Or if you must add an LLM and a touch screen to everything, do it in a way that respects user consent and boundaries.
One thing I wanted to get into but can't due to time is sub-150ms responsive LLM for use with drones and bots. Faster response time than a human brain. Multiple LLMs running on dedicated hardware to preempt and predict response for various stimuli.
A drone you can't shoot-down with an arrow, and a robot you can't beat at dodgeball.
Now imagine the implications of that!? But the first problem I'd like to solve is remotely piloted work. if that LLM and response-time combo works, you would be able to safely work alongside a remotely piloted robot in a hazardous construction site better than you would with a human (it could even improve safety for humans). At all times it is getting audio/sonar, lidar, infrared and visual (image processing) input and several of these really fast LLMs (not just, LLMs aren't great at certain tasks, so naturally other types of ML and predefined routines would also be running) will be preparing if/else decision trees in case a potential condition is met. Sees a ladder just leaning there? what if it randomly slips, how would it react? plan is in place under 150ms while other plans are being formulated for other things as well.
Interesting, I am getting exactly into this now. Did you have anything done you can share?
Echoing others, Chess engines certainly aren't a solved problem! In fact there are a lot of niches that are absolutely starving for effort. Ones I'm interested in are related to Chess variants and puzzles.
Fairy-Stockfish is a fork used by LiChess for the variants on the site, but it can now play a multitude of games from Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) to Shogi (Japanese Chess) to a crazy modern variants. There's a variety of tools to train new neural nets for these variants, generate opening books, puzzles, etc. You can play some of them on PyChess (pychess.org). These are projects basically run by a couple people with huge backlogs of bugs and feature requests. An enthusiastic developer can easily get involved! Or just enjoy playing different variants and getting involved with the player community.
Ohh about fairy stockfish, I had actually looked into it for something like spell-chess (which is an completely unsolved problem!)
I was playing chess with one of my friends and we played spell-chess which is an clash royale/clash of clans x chess thing where you get two spells of freeze and jump
Freeze allows you to select a tile and have a 3x3 square radius which freezes those pieces
Jump allows you to select any piece (opponent or yours) and it will effectively allow you to jump over that.
When me and my friends were playing, I kept trying to do something wonky to find the most optimal play. I had thoughts for a day or two to find/make fairy stockfish or atleast had the idea to do so but not the experience to do so but I certainly wished even from the end point perspective as to what/if the game was solved. I don't know but these things make me feel as if perhaps, just maybe, the game can be played a certain way where even in the best game, its not draw but rather a particular side wins (effectively solving it),
I felt like these spells were too overpowered so there was an possibility about it, you just made me remember a lot of things about these things that I had thought. It was these thoughts which randomly led me to discover fairy stockfish which is an really interesting project!
Belzedar94 made a prototype that plays Spell chess about 6 months ago: https://github.com/Belzedar94/Fairy-Stockfish/pull/37
I'm playing backgammon. Not just online, but live tournaments as well.
What I like about it: it's one of those games that are easy to learn but difficult to master. Modern analyzing tools can detect your errors and weaknesses, providing you with eternal possibilities to improve.
But also, I like the excitement of the live tournaments, which like poker, have money prizes and an entry fee. They are all over the world and I especially like visiting tournaments in places which I otherwise wouldn't visit. Plus after a while you'll make friends in the tournament circuit, so it becomes a social thing as well.
After binging on youtube, I am working on learning to do leatherwork, small stuff at first like making your own wallet etc.
Learn how to calculate longitude and latitude by eyesight using the Ptolemaic system.
Then add a telescope or sextant.
This is lots of fun, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Antkeeping, rockhounding, and flint knapping are things I've gotten into recently. Antkeeping and rockhounding in particular have a ton of room for citizen science. Lots of undiscovered stuff out there.
Ham radio, can be either really technical designing transmit protocols, antennas, SDRs or really just talking to random people as far away as you can reach without being bound to the internet.
I don't quite get your point about 3D printers.
I spent many months redesigning, improving and rebuilding a prusa clone, not because I couldn't afford anything else, but precisely because I could afford to "waste" time and money learning and having fun.
Once I felt like the printer was in a useful state, I spent some more time getting it to a point where it could print nice ABS parts for a Voron Trident. Of course I couldn't just build a Trident. That would be too easy. Before I had even finished assembling it, it already had a number of bespoke modifications that I had designed.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Have you ever _looked_ at the klipper source code? It's like a fractal of weirdness. I mean it works, and clearly the person behind it is very knowledgeable about many things. But it makes for such an enormous and fun playground for improvements and redesigns. I've redesigned the entire build system for the firmware component. I've made the host component an actual (almost) normal python package. I changed a bunch of core aspects so that it could be packages for a linux distro. I am working on making the native helper a normal python native extension library too. And I am also writing some proper test rig for it.
And while I was at it, I started writing my own display software which doesn't use Wayland or X. It is going quite well actually. (Writing it in Rust)
This hobby (and, really, any hobby) has as much depth and obscurity as you are willing to look for.
If you're just a regular joe who wants to print stuff it has definitely changed
You used to have to do all that tinkering because you had no choice which is not the case anymore
If your goal is just to print stuff then it doesn't really feel like a hobby, its just another tool in the workshop the same as a tablesaw or welder
My point was, if you enjoyed it when it was tinkering heavy, nothing stops you from continuing to enjoy that even if there are now plenty of printers that don't require it.
Vermiculture - breeding worms and harvesting their casting.
Outside of software development I enjoy gardening, farming/breeding worms and collecting their compost for the garden was a fun hobby I could dive into. It is a great amendment to my garden's soil and just a unique thing I can do on my own. I would like to start a small side business selling the castings, extracts, and worms one day.
I do gundog training. When I started with our first dog I did not expect to enjoy it that much. It’s hard to express how much it takes mentally and physically, and the bond you build with your dog is crazy.
Best of all, you don’t actually have to hunt. You can stick to dummies.
In terms of contributing in a meaningful way, your local trainer will always be happy with helpers. If you need to setup multiple 200m retrieves for multiple dogs, it helps if you have someone out in the field doing the work. And lots of stuff to organise and help out with.
Muay thai is my favorite hobby. Two kids later, it’s hard to find time, but I had a time where I went boxing everyday. I can really recommend material arts for those with proper work/life balance.
No activity brings you more endorphines than being brutalized under controlled conditions.
Wrestling is my favorite. I'd like to start boxing, muay thai, or BJJ, but it's just a cost issue honestly. I feel like MMA (by extension, kickboxing and BJJ classes) has become a sort of trend, especially among teenagers/young adults, which is probably one of the reasons why classes cost so much lately. I know lots of people at my wrestling gym who do several martial arts at a time and it's got to be pretty hard on their free time.
Outside of drilling and live wrestling, it's really rewarding when I get to teach beginners little movements like relaxing their arms in their stance or different ways to fake shots.
If chess is a solved problem, think about skating to where the puck is going to be, an interest area a bit further away from relatively easier verifiability such as coding, math, and hard sciences.
Do you have any interest in digital humanities? Knowledge work where verification is still important but not as black-and-white as does the math check out, does the code run.
Do you have any interest in family history or genealogy?
https://vibegenealogy.ai/p/the-genealogical-research-assista...
The use of AI assistants in genealogy is interesting. There seems to be a lot of activity in that area
High altitude balloon launches using weather balloons to get photos of the curvature of the earth.
Started pottery (if that's niche anymore) about 4 years ago, my wife wanted to take a class together.
Now I'm a teacher! Which is a hobby in itself, I have learned so much from having to teach and explain it.
Combine it with some non-niche hobbies my son and I enjoy together and boom. https://imgur.com/a/aJqvVVw
Since you mentioned biohacking but are wary of "wetware" risks, consider Personal Bioinformatics via 30x Whole Genome Sequencing. Now that sequencing costs have dropped significantly, you can use AI to take a deep dive into the latest research surrounding your own genomic data.
While severall open medical databases and open-source tools exist, they are often fragmented or built for academia. There is significant room to contribute by hacking together better toolsets, localized databases, or AI-driven interfaces to make this data truly accessible.
Designing origami tessellations: https://origami.kosmulski.org/albums/tessellation-examples
It's lots of fun, with folding allowing you to go offline for a while. The community is very friendly, both online and with IRL meetings such as yearly conventions in many countries.
Still a kind of niche within origami, so there's lots of room for novelty and explorations. And there are strong ties to mathematical and computational origami if you're into this kind of thing.
Just a suggestion as this isn't my hobby, but look into gem cutting. There are some tools for designing new cuts, but I think I lot more is possible than is commonly accomplished. And every gem material is different so that adds to things. Plus, the more precise the cut the better the result. And it's very math and loop driven.
This sounds really interesting! How does one get started? Is it expensive?
I think lapidary and faceting often have guilds or clubs that let you use shared equipment. I think in terms of materials gem rough material is cheap for some gemstones and expensive for others. Obviously synthetic and quartz are cheaper than natural sapphire, but there's a whole range. In terms of equipment I think the faceting machines come in different kinds with different features and are maybe circa okayish laptop prices for a used one but get much more expensive for new ones or specialty ones. I know there are at least two kinds - traditional faceting and concave. I don't know that much about how designing new cuts works, but it's definitely its own niche thing and if you look into groups that do it they'll talk about facet designs and who designed them. I think there are some books and software that folks use, but I don't know a whole lot about it.
We got into scuba diving about 3 years ago. Have something like 200 dives now logged across Southern California, Hawaii and the Caribbean. Planning on adding Indonesia to the list later this year. That wow factor you experience the first time you dive hasn't gone away after 200 dives and I don't think it'll go away after 2000. Probably the most life-affirming thing I've ever gotten into and can't recommend it enough.
I started hand carving and painting fishing lures a few years back, mostly from gathered or gleaned materials.
It started as something to keep my hands busy in the Minnesota winter evenings, but there is actually quite a lot of depth to the materials/buoyancy/fluid dynamics that dictate how the lure moves in different water conditions. Each one is also a little work of art which is nice.
Try playing Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder (or any number of other systems.) Pathfinder is super deep and complex.
There's also an entire community of people who play Table Top Role-Playing Games (TTRPGs) solo and use the outcomes of their play reports to blog or write fiction.
Also, the tooling around these games is very interesting if you want to build an app: Crafting calculator? Generative hexcrawl maps? Random tables? Statistics tools for dice rolls?
I've designed jewellery for my wife's last few birthdays. Nothing fancy, geometries, square kufic and such.
Very crude approach: I've been doing it in Blender, if you've 3D skills should be easy. I've got a friend who does the printing and casting, so there's more I could explore there later.
I also do dioramas, which grew out of 40K. Got bored with hench guys with guns and moved to 6mm, it's been great fun focusing on buildings.
I've been using Codex to build a repo that pulls down astronomical datasets and runs simulation to try to find explanation for the hubble tension. Having an agent to do the tedious bits and also having an LLM to bounce ideas has tough me so much about astronomy. I don't have serious hopes of finding anything new and novel but it's still a lot of fun.
I have a collection of years on the facades of the buildings.
https://year-on-facade.uk/
With focus on unique years rather than number of buildings. Still quite a few to find (and visit) but I consider this to be an almost perfect collection.
Not a new hobby per se, but the combination of
- a good audio book
- a massage chair
- a mindless idle game that you don't need to think of while listening to a good book and getting a massage
Priceless.
massage chair recc?
Many niche sports that are great at making you spend less time sitting in front of a computer.
I want to try trials[1] (both bicycle and moto), but it might be hard to find local community for such niche activities (you can always be first!)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_bike_trials
wargaming
designing improvements to democracy & taxation
I'm very much into niche hobbies: they usually have nice tight & friendly communities.
Below are some of my favorite I'd love to share:
- FPV drone flying: once you've spent 5-10 hours to get initial reflexes for the controls in the simulator, the first flight on a real machine outside feels magical.
- Electric unicycles: the "mind-controlled" PEV, and arguably the best way to get around in San Francisco.
- Foiling: the closest feeling to riding a hoverboard. You can kite-foil, pump-foil, sup-foil etc, but wing foiling is the easiest to get started.
- Knots: tying laces properly just makes life easier, and tying tucker's / voodoo hitches for the first few times feels like a magic trick.
- Cardistry: learning to do a proper riffle shuffle and a few artistic cuts adds some fun to the most boring part of any card game.
>FPV drone flying
What sort of set-up would be a good one for a beginner?
The setup I'd recommend:
- Velocidrone [1] flight sim
- Any FPV controller that connects to laptop. 2 solid choices are TBS Tango 2 or DJI FPV Remote Controller [3]
I spent ~20 hours in the sim before advancing to real drones; a few of my friends followed this path and successfully passed an improvised exam on real drone after just ~10 hours in the sim.
As for the drone itself, the easiest setup is probably DJI Avata [4], but it's less of the proper "FPV feel". I personally fly Flywoo Explorer [5] with DJI system: it's a small & nibmle long range drone, easy to travel with, and powerful enough to chase kiteboarders even in a strong wind.
P.S. Don't be discouraged with sim flying: it's actually very fun, feels similar to TrackMania Nations.
[1] https://www.velocidrone.com/
[2] https://www.team-blacksheep.com/products/prod:tbs_tango_2
[3] https://store.dji.com/product/dji-fpv-remote-controller-3?vi...
[4] https://www.dji.com/avata-2
[5] https://flywoo.net/products/explorer-lr-4-o4-pro-sub250-4k-1...
Thanks!
That's the fun part: most of the stuff currently on the market is quite good. The quads, the gear — if a few people recommend it on Reddit, it's likely totally fine for a beginner and it will fly well.
A few pointers:
The guy we all watch on YouTube is called Joshua Bardwell.
Regarding radio, the protocol you're looking for is ELRS. Everything has converged on ELRS, it's open source and crazy good. ELRS at 250mW will survive more than your video feed, and many ELRS transmitters go to 1W.
Transmitter (the controller): There are options, but you can't go wrong with anything from RadioMaster. FPV quads don't need many inputs, so honestly a RadioMaster Pocket is completely fine. I have both the Pocket and the TX16S (their flagship transmitter, I also fly fixed wings), and it makes zero difference for quads. This is completely up to your budget, just get something with ELRS.
The video situation is a bit more interesting, but generally: analog is alive and kicking with brutal power and range, but shitty video. In digital, DJI is king, although a bit expensive. They sell entire drones, even some (very meh) FPV, but they also sell cameras, video transmitters and goggles for "proper" FPV builds, and these kick ass. If you don't like DJI, there are alternatives (WalkSnail, HDZero), but nothing as open and as compatible as analog.
First you spend some time on a sim. They're all good nowadays, I personally fly Uncrashed the most, but I also have Liftoff and Tryp FPV, it's all good fun. The flight models feel slightly different, but so do real-life quads, so unless you're trying to match your real-life quad down to the last atom, you won't notice any issues.
You either build a quad from scratch (not hard at all, but it takes time and there's some soldering) or you buy a finished one (we call these BNF — bind and fly), or you get something in between and add your own parts (e.g. a camera + VTX (video transmitter) to match your goggles).
You choose the size and type of the quad according to where and how you want to fly. A "tiny whoop" for your apartment, a "cinewhoop" for high-quality video indoors and outdoors, a 3inch freestyle quad for a big garden or a park, a 5inch (the golden standard) for racing and seriously whipping it around, a 7inch for huge environments and longer cruising, and anything bigger for serious long-range missions.
I wouldn't go larger than 5 inches for a first quad, you'll likely crash it a few [dozens of] times and larger quads are both more fragile and more expensive to fix if you do break something.
Crashing a quad is a completely normal thing and they're built to withstand it. Usually you'll just ding or bend a prop, you bend it back and replace it (<1€/$) when it's really bad.
Cool, thanks for the info.
what FPV drones do you recommend for someone just getting into it?
The standard advice is always to buy a transmitter and get started with the simulator. Then buy / build your custom racing drone that suits your flying style and area. Anything from 20 gram whoops that fly indoors to 5" racing quads that need a lot of open space.
But with dji neo 2 / avata you get a fairly beginner friendly set up. Once you're used to it, you can upgrade to a good racing drone by building one yourself.
You should try getting _extremely_ good at Trading Card Games. Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Magic The Gathering all have extremely active current player bases and loads of places to play across the Americas, Europe, and (mostly east) Asia. Getting deep into card advantage, deck construction, and hypergeometric theory has been an absolute blast. Plus, the online simulators are free for Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon are free and pretty current with the paper game. Making new friendships with people not in my usual circles has been so rewarding, I can't recommend it enough. Not to mention the most meaningful contribution of all - winning events moves the needle on the way the rest of the playerbase plays the game. I could go on and on about this.
I decided to run for congressional representative.
How's it going?
I'm going to be respectful and not mention any political parties.
However I'm not part of the big party.
I'm not expected to win, but at least I'm going to put up a fight.
I'm involved in some Zoom calls to learn about the process of campaigning.
I have a creative background (mixed with punk rock) and intend to make this a creative process.
Additional goals are to get away from the computer, meet new people, and have fun.
I play vintage baseball. It's baseball using rules and equipment from the 19th century. There's nothing else in my life that connects me to my eight-year old self, but the feeling I get running out onto the field or going up to bat is exactly what it was back in Little League. It's also a really fun community of passionate baseball nerds, and a good motivation to stay fit.
Is there a breakdown of this to read? Sounds fun!
Making watches. You can start simple ("modding") which is essentially assembling a movement, case, hands, dial, etc. You can keep going deeper: try to fix or build a movement gears.
* playing shortlarps
* using short boardgames to measure cognitive performance on various metrics
* creating simple 3d boardgames with raylib kolibri_engine
* dancing and studying vajra dance and the vajra song from namkai norbu
* reading and studying about: mahamudra and dzogchen vs christian contemplative traditions and mystics, and transpersonal psychology
If you like music and technology - there's a massive world of possibilities out there (e.g., software based music production, tone.js, music programming with Strudel).
If you have more money - 1) DJing/mixing on vinyl + record digging, 2) Modular synthesis (your wallet will hate you your soul will love you)
I got into riding, building and customizing motorcycles. The chopper scene could always use the creativity and skills of tech savy folks. Besides the mechanical skills you learn in moments which are as satisfying as they are frustrating, there's ways to utilize programming skills too...think performance/usage monitoring, trip cataloging software, social tools to connect bikers, camping planners, who knows.
I'd suggest you try out something completely offline. My next candidate is flintknapping, but there are lots of really interesting historical crafts that are in need of preservation and are extremely interesting to learn and gain expertise at.
Woodworking, oil painting, pottery, analog synthesizers, animal husbandry, spinning and yarnmaking, knitting and weaving, sewing, pattern making, metalwork, welding, endurance running, rock climbing, beekeeping, brewing and distilling, the list goes on and on. Contrary to popular opinion they are all extremely technical and demanding fields, and getting to reconnect with the physical world and the people in it, as well as history, is extremely rewarding.
All primitive skills are great fun to learn. A logical followup to flint knapping is arrow making and bowery. There is something magical in making lethal ranged weapons with sticks, rocks, and string.
I've been pretty obsessed with FSRS in general (tldr: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/awesome-fsrs/wiki/...) It's a fantastic new-ish scheduler for spaced repetition - basically a machine learning model which adapts to you, and schedules flash (or anything, really, it's an algorithm) cards according to how well you are personally performing - surfacing data like retention, stability, recall, etc. It's a massive jump over previous "learning algorithms" like
For the past 60d I've been using Anki (a flash card program) and it's FSRS setting to learn my French deck (5000 most common French words) and I'm absolutely zooming. I can already follow a fair chunk of conversational French.
I've also been using the same system to learn Chess more deeply (endgames, tactics, openings) through Chessable and a few other websites that offer FSRS. It's levelled up my chess game a lot
Basically - the thing that hooked me was the data. Being able to see how many cards I've reviewed, how many cards are at 90/80% retention, the stability of every piece of that knowledge, the decay rate, etc... It's really cool.
FSRS is really cool. I'm trying to use it and a modified flashcard system to learn more abstract computer science and higher math. I hadn't considered it as a way of learning Chess - that's really interesting. I'm thinking about expanding my system to cover ear-training, birdsong recognition, a few other things like that.
I never thought about ear-training!
My listening comprehension for Piano has always been lacking. A deck of piano sounds that map to actual notes (or even chords) might do wonders for it...
My current decks are as follows - I spend about an hour in total reviewing/learning them all, daily:
- 5000 most common French words
- 5000 most common French sentences (following the Alex Crompton method: https://www.alexcrompton.com/blog/how-to-learn-a-language)
- English GMAT Vocabulary List (to keep my English sharp)
- Unscrambling 5000 English Anagrams (to practice unscrambling for Scrabble or other similar board games)
- Some machine learning concepts & algorithms relevant to my day job
- Some distributed systems concepts & algorithms relevant to my day job
Two things, but mostly revolves around sports. As my job in software engineering is very sedentary, I try to remain active in my hobbies.
First is gym - I go every morning before work, do a 2-mile run or 5k, depending on my mood, and then power lifting.
On weekends I hike or climb. I find it very liberating when visiting places without any kind of network and it's me, nature and socialising. I've recently also started an outdoor agency (it's local to my place) - for when AI takes over my job completely: https://boa.ba/
I guess I'm a dabbler - I have too many hobbies, none of which I take very seriously. Brewing, dry stone walls, math puzzles, etc.
That said, if you're looking for something meaningful, consider doing something with kids. Technical or not, it doesn't matter. Could be anything from volunteering at a local sports club to teaching part-time at a trade school.
I build ukuleles and guitars from scratch. That's not as niche as what a lot of people do -- it's just woodworking -- but I do software for a living and enjoy making durable, physical things in my free time.
Very cool! I've been playing uke for a few years to help me disconnect from the real world.
Did you go to a luthier school or self taught?
In my views, you don't need an unsolved filed- you need an unexplored angle. Most "crowded" hobbies still have some gaps who build tools, document deeply, or connect ideas across domains. The average isn't in the hobby itself, but it how you approach it.
Juggling! I used to juggle when i was a teenager, managed to juggle 5 balls and clubs. Then after decades of neglecting it, i picked it up again and i found the joy in this hobby again! I can highly recommend.
Same! Highly recommend checking out your local juggling club if you have one!
Six months deep now into analog computing. (I have a modular, hobbyist analog computer wrapping up—just writing the manual).
Going to have to do something on the other end of the spectrum after this. Maybe RISO printing…
Riso printing is cool -- there's a small-ish Riso community on the Mastodon server for type design, typo.social
I haven't really had a hobby until last summer, when I took up collecting banknotes. Growing up in the USSR, I had a few imperial notes as a kid and wanted to expand my "collection", but didn't actually start in earnest until decades later. Got a few late 19th / early 20th century pre-revolution notes, and then found myself in the abyss of Russian Civil War, where every city and local municipality were printing their own money. Anyways, it's a journey without an end, and I saw an interviewee describing this hobby as a "sickness, do not start", which sort of resonated.
As a history lover with appreciation for tactile aspects of history (love 100+ year old books), this scratches this itch better than anything else, while leaving me wanting more. I research and write up every banknote I acquire, and the sense of history I get from browsing my album is like nothing else.
For anyone interested, here are the photos of my collection circa end of last year: https://imgur.com/a/zmCXd8l
That's really neat! I have some old-ish Soviet money laying around that I brought with me when I emigrated. I should really preserve it somehow.
I always assumed that newer banknotes are always going to be easier to obtain than older ones. But the hyperinflation of late imperial, early Soviet times means a ton of paper money was printed and is still available at cheap prices. On the other hand, Soviet money from between 1922 and before 1961 can be quite rare and sometimes very very expensive.
I built a sauna. It was fun and worthwhile and now I have a sauna!
Also I am turning into Middle-Aged Synth Guy.
Visiting and educating/programming for the elderly (in nursing homes or just community members) or the imprisoned is both socially beneficial and mentally and spiritually rewarding.
Likewise for volunteering at hospices, food banks, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters.
I'm getting into old maps, books, and ephemera - mostly travel and tourism related stuff. I'm also currently researching old printing methods like lithography and letterpress. I recently purchased my first rubber brayer, some cotton-rag paper, some ink, and a 1930's letterpress plate. I hope to have my first pulls this weekend if time allows.
I like making transit maps in my spare time.
I got into tech by liking data visualization, information design, and aesthetics in frontend. It turns out transit maps and wayfinding is one of the earliest modern attempts at information design that is standardized and legible. And it’s fun to revisit because there’s no objective truth about what kind of map is best.
I set up trail cameras in remote areas to watch bears, mountain lions and other critters. Getting there is very hard so it keeps me in shape and I am always fascinated when I can watch new footage.
once I have more time I will try classifying and trimming the videos with AI so there is a tech component too. And maybe in the long run do my own cameras that have better detection than the usual PIR sensors that trigger a lot for moving branches or leaves.
How do you manage power source for the cameras, protection from natural elements, and what about internet?
The cameras are sealed and a set of batteries last around 3 months. There are cameras with cell connection but that gets pretty expensive and doesn’t work in remote areas.
I'm tinkering with some electronic gadgets like esp32 to build my own things, such as auto feeder for my aquarium or an auto wattering system for my balcony garden. It's kinda hard and takes time because I'm not an electrican, but I'm really enjoy it and taking it slowly.
I view hobbies as something that I derive value or pleasure from. I do not approach them from the perspective of “meaningfully contributing”. IMO, that sounds more like compensation for career dissatisfaction. I’m not being critical. I just recommend choosing hobbies that you derive value and meaning from, regardless of what the world may think of it. For example, a friend of mine, with high pressure tech management job, quilts in the evening. He says it helps him relax. Doesn’t matter if anyone likes what he does or wants to buy it. As for myself, now that I’m retired I delve into a number of areas, just for me, and absolutely have no interest in sharing them or being recognized for what I do. Good luck on your quest.
Artisan pizzas! Local food bank Clothing give—a-way for homeless (organized) Toastmaster public speaking Organized a youth chess club (great) Lock picking Teaching calculus, physics Exercise at the gym Helping a homeless guy get organized Nature hikes in groups Dancing Spanish lessons Chess puzzles Chess lessons Cooking Making past Home improvement Detail your messy car Take an auto class
You might look into applying RL in the domain of low cost robotics and drones. That would draw on some of your past experience but applied to a domain (robotics) which I perceive is seeing renewed interest.
Someone needs to solve barbecue. The entire industry is based on feel and experience. Why can't a beginner replicate Franklin's brisket by following a recipe online?
It's probably because the main measuring instrument (a probe thermometer) doesn't provide any feedback about fat rendering, moisture, etc. Plus, every brisket cut has different fat ratios and thickness, which means a recipe can't guarantee identical inputs like bread baking. I'd love for someone to throw some over the top engineering & experimentation at this.
The hobbyist cannot replicate Franklin’s brisket because Franklin’s knowledge, ingredients, tools, and their corresponding interactions are largely not attainable to the hobbyist. Franklin has better smokers than the hobbyist and knows how to use them better. Franklin also has dibs on the premier runs of Creekstone Farms briskets that the hobbyist can hardly come by.
The hobbyist can approximate that brisket to a reasonable degree. However, that involves smoking a, hopefully not literal, ton of brisket. Given the cost of beef, time to smoke, and effort it takes to meal-plan brisket throughout the week, attaining Franklin-level quality consistently is a tough row to hoe.
One of my hobbies is organizing events. I, like to think, I am pretty good at it. Main point is to create good initial conditions, then people take care of the rest.
Money to be made there. But then it would be a job.
Design whistle sequences to get dolphins to respond in ways that will help you figure out their meaning. A few multi-million $ projects could use that, such as Google, Baidu, and SDRP.
Exploring my own bio-electricity.
Something is stuck within my body most of the time.
Doing certain movements makes this something flow better.
I feel better when this happens.
Breathing in certain ways enhances this something.
I feel A LOT better when this happens.
Still early, exploring.
My hobby is growing exotic plants, things like rare tropicals. It’s fun, hands-on, and there’s plenty of room to experiment and try new things.
I’ve been building quantum photonics experiments. Repeating the Bell inequality tests that won the 2022 Nobel, quantum erasers, etc.
Probably the coolest part has been automating the optomechanical equipment and optimizing physical experiments with Bayesian optimization. Similar to hyperparameter tuning in ML, but with lasers.
Also, Thorlabs sells some really fun toys.
Boat building is in a really interesting time with new materials allow foiling, along with new battery technology giving new power sources.
I design print on demand t-shirts and merch
https://www.amazon.com/s?refresh=1&rh=n%3A7141123011%2Cp_4%3...
> that isn't absolutely crowded
I'm sure there are field that should be absolutely crowded but where you can do something meaningful.
If I had free time, I would write an app to learn foreign languages I'm interested in. I'm pretty sure that there are good apps, but I tried a few ones, and none really fit my needs.
There are also software that I use a lot, like transcribe! which works well, but that I could see how to improve.
So as others mentioned, do something that you would be interested in.
How about demo-design ? I mean good old PC demoscnece. Try to fit something feasible into 64K.
What you’re looking for is a research topic, or maybe a better way to put it is your hobby is research… if that makes sense?
So for ideas, sorry that’s going to be whatever floats your boat. You listed a bunch of different things.
But hobby is normally “playing softball” or “guitar”, but it could be “researching next gen PCs”… but that seems more like a PhD lab project.
Nowadays, apart from stockpicking as a value investor, I use LLMs to develop AIs that don’t use backpropagation and that support continuous learning.
I'm learning to play the accordion
I ended up giving up on it because my right shoulder is damaged from rheumatoid arthritis. Go where I could not, anon291. May your reeds be clean and your bellows free of mildew.
"A gentleman is someone who can play the accordion, but doesn't"
;0)
I found out something that was shocking to me about two years ago, which is that plenty of people learn to play ice hockey, of all sports, as an adult. I don’t know about you folks, but I always assumed it was one of those where if you didn’t play as a kid, you missed the boat. I didn’t even know how to skate, I learned on the fly. And this is in North Carolina! 10/10 recommend. I’m actually typing this lying on the couch after playing in a tournament in the Carolina Hurricanes arena :-)
You mention chess, Chessboxing is an interesting niche hobby where you play both chess and boxing.
I play chess but not chessboxing but hey, you asked for some interesting niche hobbies!
It seems that what you do is mostly related to computers within the niche hobbies but what if you can do something else too?
> Right now I'm making a chess engine, but that's already a solved problem
Not everything should be done for the end-result, sometimes its the process which matters, there was a great hackernews post about it (https://ergosphere.blog/posts/the-machines-are-fine/)
If you want something niche, perhaps make some portal-2 mods or make more efficient versions of using GlaDOS TTS within browser etc. (this is just something that I want to be honest, but I feel like it can be a niche hobby in its regards seeing your interests)
Let me know if you want more ideas and have fun and have a nice day man!
I do boxing as a form of cardio so I'm not weightlifting all the time. So I've just invited a friend for a 1v1 and he accepted, time to start training both properly I guess.
I do want something related to computers because that's where I'm skilled the most, but it being mixed with something else is fine (i.e., biohacking). But computers generally are becoming stale, considering how much money has been poured into everything digital, it's going to be hard to find something novel. Maybe the next frontier is becoming an electrician?
> But computers generally are becoming stale, considering how much money has been poured into everything digital, it's going to be hard to find something novel
I feel like it depends, there are many sorts of projects which are still low hanging fruits. you might not get appreciated to do things anymore because of the amount of competition but you can feel proud of yourself.
Breaking NATs without root permissions (try searching dropbear without root and building it and running it with something like pinggy to then make a minecraft server beneath a nat work), making a free crypto chain have data embedded within a loop of transactions to embed data on crypto for free, recently using single-file to somehow archive archive.is pages on archive.org* anonymously using piping-server.
I have used AI/LLM assistance in most of these but I feel like aside from being frustrated at the code aspects, I had some good ideas and even with everyone else having AI, I didn't see anyone else doing these things (the reason I say this is because if they did, I would've just used their services :] )
Not sure if a lot of these things sound novel, programmatically not, but idea-wise I think* they might-be novel.
A lot of my novel ideas come out of proving things. Can I prove that I can run minecraft on a free intel server that me and my friends can play on? Can I prove that I can save archive.is pages on archive.org anonymously-ish since the issue with archive.is
So my point is, out of personal experience, there are so many novel-ideas within things which seem obvious but nobody has really implemented them and to be honest, everyone is just creating yet another chatgpt wrapper with AI. Much of these experiments are prototyping/proving these ideas and I believe that there are some low hanging fruits in such sense of these ideas which can be interesting to think about.
So I don't suppose that you have to go bio-hacking to find things which pique your interest, there are some practical things too in my opinion which can pique your interest.
Not sure if this might be the answer you are looking for, but I hope this helps within the context you asked it. Sometimes two normal things combined together can be the novel thing to do.
My opinion is that people with money chase money oriented things, the people with passion/hobby-tinkering will do things that chase passion and so sometimes you have nothing to worry about :-)
So are there any things that you feel is similar to this for you, perhaps?
What you're doing is interesting but those are side-projects. I have plenty of random side-projects, just now after reading Gibson's Burning Chrome, I'm making an OpenBSD server where you can only log in using SSH keys in my implant, and logging in makes you a completely new but very restricted user with 1GB of free storage. Kinda like Johnny Mnemonic.
But I feel very disorganized when most of my attention is on distinct one-off side projects, I want to work on something novel and big. But thanks for your suggestions. It is true that most industries begin when passion oriented people finally meet money oriented people, but most time they are separate.
I've been growing bonsai trees for about 13 years. It doesn't have anything to do with computers, so it's a nice counterbalance to my software job. I don't really even take pictures or videos of my trees, I want to keep the subject as analog and simple as I can.
Hey, I love this thread!! Thanks for asking the question, there's _so many_ interesting responses in here!
Holograms! It's fascinating how they are made and how they can serve as a metaphor for how the universe might work.
I'm looking at doing some field recording. Currently reading around the subject and thinking about starter equipment.
Read manuals to learn niche software, right now I’m reading about LyX and TeXmacs (their manuals are very well written). Lots of these more niche software can always use more love and users.
I'm a football/soccer coach (youth, U12 and U19).
Got started as a "temp" for my sons mini-team (back when he was 5). Temporary turns into UEFA certified youth trainer/coach real fast. It's no longer just about the kids (sorry guys), but a really awesome hobby with lots of personal development paths.
A while back, at a company I used to work at, we did intros of new hires. This was one of the questions. One person shared that they do composting and worm farming. That was memorable. Sharing here since it's about as interesting and niche as I can imagine.
I do a lot of lindyhop Swing dancing as a hobby. It's not innovative work, but I find it rewarding.
Building autonomous security systems as a 17-year-old. Turns out confidence-gated AI execution is a fascinating design problem when the stakes are real infrastructure.
My wife started reselling vintage furniture as a hobby, but now it has become her full-time job and she earns money from it. We live in the UK and went to France for shopping for the first time last weekend. Happy to answer any questions
I used to play Pokémon cards competitively. It was fun going to local tournaments and flying with friends for Regional tournaments. I stopped to focus on night school, and I want to pick it back up with the card legality change happening Friday.
Pokémon Champions just came out, so I might give up cards for the video game. We'll see.
I recently started looking into hydroponics gardening. You can start very easily with a Kratky system and some herbs, and then take it a step at the time.
I’m quite at the beginning myself, but I like it so far! It’s a nice mix of science and craft.
Yep! I have a small setup with just some used food grade pickle buckets, and have been growing greens and things for a bit over a year. Going to get some more and expand them this year. It literally uses no power as pumps are not used, and water usage is very minimal. I live in the desert so low water usage is very important.
It's an interesting hobby, as you have to adapt it to the area you live, and where you grow the plants.
Not exactly niche: raise some kids.
I do wrestling and BJJ, helps me cope with my stressful job and besides my joints hurting (especially fingers) from time to time, it was great for both my mental and physical health
I do some synthetic biology as a hobby - genetically engineered a baker’s yeast to produce grape aroma and then baked bread with it, and gave it to like 100 people at an event I was at.
Also do a few others - learned Esperanto (exclusively through listening and speaking with people), beekeeping, woodworking, etc.
wow I didn't realize this was hobby territory. How accessible is it to a layperson?
do you have any writeups or resources on that yeast?
Perhaps feeding strangers homemade GMOs isn't the best idea...
sailing. you will learn how to be self resilient, to be an electric, plumber, painter, weather and experience (sometimes under your nose if near water) most beautiful places
Does Broadway and live theater count as niche?
Here in NYC it doesn’t feel like it, but we’re a world unto ourselves
there's a print shop nearby that does workshops, i took a short class there and i'll soon be back with some design files, hope to make a few copies of a zine about publishing a website on the internet
I wouldn't say that chess is a solved problem. Just a hard problem to make a better chess engine than current Stockfish.
Gamey Boy / Modretro Chromatic / LSDJ / Dirtywave M8 / anything F# / MiniDisc community
Postcrossing
I had no idea such a thing existed until this post a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47631515
I saw a few videos of making glasses (cups) out of nice liquor bottles. Seems like a nice cheapish hobby.
I am a big fan of fountain pens, and I think they're a great hobby.
Finally someone said fountain pens!!! I got into it as well. Made me write more. It is great.
Qubes OS is a niche security-oriented operating system that runs everything in VMs with about 70k users [0]. Even less users contribute with amazing things like running in RAM [1] or using very minimal VMs with Debian and Fedora [3] to minimize the attack surface and bloat.
[0] https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/latest/introduction/statistics.h...
[1] https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/qubes-os-live-mode-dom0-in-ram-...
[2] https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/how-i-learned-to-love-liteqube-...
NTSC video & film (movie film - 35mm) restoration.
Not too niche: Traditional archery. Niche: Make wood climbing holds.
Baking bread, albeit with a (Panasonic) bread making machine. Might not be niche, however, traditions of giving bread to guests runs deep and people are always delighted if you give them a loaf of extremely fresh bread.
There are different directions that bread making can go. During the pandemic there was a rash of people making rock hard sourdough, and sourdough is still the magic word for 'higher status' bread, even though almost every commercially available sourdough loaf is faked with enzymes added to a regular 'Chorleywood' loaf.
I gave sourdough a go but I prefer my bread making machines creations that are definitely not sourdough. I like to fortify my bread in two different ways, either with fruits and nuts to make a 'fruit loaf' of sorts, or with seeds and wholemeal flour to have bread that covers many a niche nutrient.
Commercial bread in the UK comes with government issued fortifications of folates, B vitamins and whatnot. This might be fine for pregnant mums that can't cook, but I am not one of them! So the challenge is to do a better job of the fortifications, mostly with seeds and choice of flour.
Commercial bread is also not very real, with lots of additives that I don't seem to need in my own creations. Emulsifiers, preservatives and everything else are needed for commercial bread, if it is to have shelf life and appeal, but my intestines are not crying out for these sorts of additives and I seem to still be alive without them, with improved digestive tract functionality.
Although we have more interesting things to eat than bread, our history in the West is the history of bread, we would not be here without it. Once you start baking your own, albeit with a machine, history becomes so much more interesting.
The other optimisation I try is cost. It is easy to produce a decent loaf with very expensive ingredients, however, on a budget it gets to have a different challenge to it.
I introduced my uncle to the hobby and he is a meticulous record keeper, so I wrote a simple app for him to record his bakes and ratings. This enables him to make fine adjustments to quantities so as to improve on his creations.
I did look for an app before I wrote my own, and the app was called 'Microsoft Excel'. I am sure that could be customised with recipes and whatnot, but I wanted to reinvent the wheel, hence my own app, just for myself and my uncle.
With some hobbies that is all you do and an obsession. Bread making is not like that, you can have plenty of more strings to your bow. As mentioned, people are always impressed if you give them a loaf, or if they learn that your sandwiches are made with your own bread. You can insist that it took three minutes with the machine, to downplay everything, however people stay impressed.
I am trying to build microphone capsules in my garage. Trying to go below 14dB (Primo EM272 level), under 1". It is difficult but rewarding. I do not expect any financial benefits from it, even if I make it under 10mm, because it is very time-consuming. Big players already have massive factories doing 10,000x of what I am doing.
This is the most niche tech-related hobby I have currently.
Ooh! What kind of capsules?
I am trying to dial down K67. I am thinking about gold plating myself for the diaphragm in the future, but I am not ready for the expense. It is the hardest part of the project because the sound quality mostly depends on the diaphragm quality, and the rest of the capsule is literally a container.
I started the hobby a while back when I tried to create an ESP32 field recorder, but the sound quality was terrible with the MEMS style micropones. I ordered the Japanese Primo mics (14db for 10mm is crazy), and said if Japanese dudes can do it, I can do it too.
I was trying to create a visualizer tool for my steps in the backyard with ESP32 microphones, which sync perfectly and analyze the sound locations with Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) methods. I got close, but mic sensitivity, even at 14db is not 100% unless I place the mics 30-40 inches apart. I am still working on that project, but that also got expensive because $28 for ESP32-S3 POE and $25 primo mic per node got very expensive quickly as I wanted to cover more areas. I hope to share it soon with HN.
I hope I don’t miss it when you post!
I’ve wanted to make a ribbon mic but haven’t gotten around to it. I’ve seen where people use Mylar emergency blankets as the membrane for condenser mics. The closest I’ve gotten is accidentally having a capacitor in a radio act as a microphone where it shouldn’t :)
Working through PRML and creating a full solution set, albeit very slowly.
https://github.com/abhimanyu-jain/PRML_Solutions
Women's pro soccer. If you're in the US, we have access to some of the world's greatest athletes with World Cup champions and Olympic gold medalists in nearly every match. Even if you're not in the US, yeah you probably do too.
I never feel more connected to my community than when I'm at a game. Supporters groups are welcoming and politically/socially engaged and regularly sponsor community service events. The league is still young and fanbases are small, but it's a really critical point in history to support pro women's sports.
It's definitely worth throwing some of that tech salary at. Bonus: it has none of the drama of the men's game!
I had a route around San Francisco that I would visit, and all the places on the route were where there were good blackberry bushes. I’d take a bucket. Around Golden Gate Park and the Inner Sunset mostly, heading down into the Forest Hills area as well. I did that for a few years. Would pick up some plums along the way as well.
Now on the other side of the Bay I have a couple spots, not as dense a network. About an hour away there are masses.
To some annoyance of my wife and kids, i like to plant all kinds of seeds in little pots to see if i can make it grow.
One kind of success (for me) is a 1m25 / 50 inch tall avocado which is in a big pot now. Took some years.
I am working (again) on paprika, spinach, cucumber and tomatoes . Thinking about to start with another avocado seed.
I think i would like to have a small greenhouse when i’m ready to retire.
I am enjoying "trigbagging"/"trigpointing" in Israel (look it up!). I also built an app for this hobby (currently in open beta)
im an airsoft nerd. its a fun way to blow some steam with friends. not the tight milsim approach just the recreational way,
I make AI music https://suno.com/@igorstechoclub
Go out and record free sounds https://freesound.org/
Go complete OSM quests using the "Street complete" app. Or just add stuff that's not on OSM yet using OsmAnd app.
Record open street view photos using Mapillary or similar.
Flesh out missing albums and metadata on musicbrainz.
I like to target a very specific species (Lake Trout) using vertical jigging techniques. You can do it on a small kayak with a simple fishfinder (histogram "graph") or a large boat with livescope (active sonar).
Because of the bait available for the lakers differs from what they eat in different lakes inland and other surrounding states, they are SUPER aggressive when the fishing is good.
The game is cruising around until you find marks at the depths and/or structure you are looking for. Once you find them, you drop heavy lures down on them (1-4oz) and they will rocket up sometimes 3/4 of the water column +(70ft / 21m) and absolutely crush your lure.
This tactic also requires you to properly reel your lure to match the intensity of the fish. Too fast or slow and they will swim off. Sometimes you have to leave your bait motionless and wait for them to approach and then "fleeing" at the right time to trigger their agression and chase.
I've had fish mess with me for 5+mins and still not bite. This tactic works in both ice fishing as well as open water fishing.
I discovered this technique trying to adapt what I learned on a boat to kayak fishing. Necessity is the mother of invention, and if you want to catch fish that aren't near shore you gotta float somehow.
Part of the kayak adaptation was going from 1/8, 1/4 or 1/2oz lures up to 1, 2, 3 or 4oz. You are often dealing with not only wind that pushes your boat, but also current that pulls your lure in a different direction making it difficult to see your lure on the fishfinder.
There are a couple other ways to do the jigging thing but all of this has resulted in a new lure design i've been trying to figure out how to turn into a viable business. I'm also trying to figure out how to do some kind of kayak fishing guiding because there are much higher restrictions / licensing reqs on taking people out on boats
https://www.verticaltubejig.com
https://youtu.be/1Z5CPrB3Cpk?si=pD1oQLb6ai7rSujg
Synbio but it’s expensive as hell
build a battlebot!
What is barrel shipping nigeria?
Not niche, but photography has a way of opening doors because you push yourself to get to places you might not otherwise.
Maybe learn a new language that isn't European or Japanese.
If "niche" matters to you, anything currently receiving any type of investing (ML etc) is probably not gonna work.
I've been making a seabed simulation of the seabed for interacting with polymetallic nodules. The idea is these nodules contain a lot of cobalt, but due to their location on the seafloor they're had to access, making mining difficult.
It took me a while but I finally got my hands on some polymetallic nodules (basically the rocks you find on the seabed that contain cobalt) which I'm scanning and will hopefully have uploaded soon. Tragically the nodules were damaged through shipping but it's all I have, especially since the first shipment was stolen off my porch lol. It's build with Project Chrono using C++ https://github.com/thansen0/seabed-sim-chrono
Invasive species removal, bird identification, trail running, mountain biking, audiobook listening while walking. All are best done out of doors. :P Most are teh opposite of the posture and brain patterns that intensive computer usage encourages.
Hardware synthesizers, audio engineering, DSP programming, a whole lot of problems to solve in that domain as big manufacturers sell half baked devices for a quick buck that can barely stay in sync, or gear that is inferior to the same kind of gear from 20 years ago... it's not niche though, synth popularity is exploding, it's just that manufacturers aren't making the synthesizers as powerful as they could be, despite the increase in CPU power...
Visit places steeped in history and imagine how people left their mark on these places in the past.
NULF - we support the proliferation of utraquist ideals in all congregations. Our goal is to expand access to the eucharist for the laity. been round about 500 years or so but we're having a come back.
Do you homelab or self host?
Looks like nobody has claimed this yet so I'll add: heavy equipment (excavators, loaders, chippers bigger than they had in "Fargo"...). Began as a solution to the "can't find a contractor to dig that hole" problem but like most things turned into an interesting rabbit hole and money pit. Interesting social side in terms of learning how to deal with mechanics, parts suppliers, welding, hydraulics, getting to know your way around a gravel pit.
Interesting. Do you rent the equipment out or offer repair services?
Well I just learned all my hobbies are boring, so bah.
Lockpicking.
My thing right now is Arcade Machines. I cant get enough of them. I have a 1988 Sega Aero City cabinet that I'm doing a kind of rest-mod on.
So this thing would require you years, if not more before you can contribute meaningfully; and you have to build a community basically from scratch for it -- and before that you not only can't contribute, but you can't even participate. But hear me out.
WhatWhenWhere (спортивное Что Где Когда in Russian. Note the "sport" part -- it's an entirely different, much more interesting game than a regular one). Doesn't ring a bell, I know, but mostly because it is almost exclusively post-USSR deal, but wouldn't it be cool if the movement becomes worldwide? You can help!
The idea is simple. It's a quiz game. Think pub quiz, but formalized. You have a team of 6, you have 36 questions, and you have a minute to give an answer to each one. Sounds boring? It isn't, believe me, otherwise we wouldn't have people who have been doing it for decades -- myself included, I played my first game at about 13, and I'm over 30 now. Obviously I was doing it on and off for a while, but for last seven or so years it was pretty consistent. Last year I participated in 83 games, so about 1.5 a week.
So what's the deal, and what's the appeal? How is it different from a regular pub quiz? First, almost no just trivia questions. Yeah, you can get a question about recent Oscars or Italian brainrot here or there, but rarely and still packaged properlt. Second, and most important, as I mentioned, it is more formalized. There are rules, committees, leagues, nationals, ratings and so on. But the best part -- there is a way to write questions right. There are tools to help you lead players in the right direction, help them determine what possible solutions aren't correct -- all that without revealing anything that would spoil the right answer. Number of letters in the answer, the etymology of the word -- is it Greek, is it Arab, is it French?; grammar pointers, toponyms and personal names. You can make a host read you question in a certain way as a part of the question. You can print out (a lot of games are still played offline) something and turn that into question. You can ask a question that is one word long! You can ask a question without a single word if you set it up right -- recently played one like that. There is metagame to it -- you can set something up in a question 3, to have it come into play in the question 9. There's drama -- captain of one of my teams seduced a wife of opposing team's captain. There's dickmeasuring with global leaderboards. But most importantly, there's a constant race between authors and players to outwit each other. We have a publicly available database of questions played previously -- aptly named gotquestions.online with 6+ thousand of "packets" -- a set of questions, played in one game, usually 36, but since we have 24-hour marathons, some of them are over 600 questions long. And you can see the way questions evolved over the years. It was completely normal to ask something like "What's the name of the painting of the guy with an apple for a face" in the one of the most prestigious tournaments in the late 90s. Now this wouldn't fly even in a school tournament -- because it's not a proper WWW question, it's just a question. A WWW question makes you first unravel the thought process of an author, find a direction of the answer and then try to remember the name of the guy who dug up Troy. So yeah, it would require you to have some general and sometimes pretty deep knowledge of a lot of things, but most of the time it would be just logic, communication -- there are six people solving the same problem in your team, and ability to read hidden hints.
Interesting note: in my experience about half of players on any game would be tech guys and gals; almost all the rest would be split between lawyers of some description, and education professionals. Teams I currently play with consist of about 10 IT professionals (one of which also a professor of compsci), a lawyer, a psychologist, a private school headmaster, a professor of law in university (combo) and a logistics manager. So it also a great hobby for networking.
To finish my ramblings, I'll translate a question from recent school tournament and walk you through the solution. It doesn't require any intricate knowledge of an original language (a lot of hints built using that) or some deep specialized knowledge from any field, just general one.
On the days of the game near the Stadio Pier Luigi Penzo you can find unusual traffic jams. Where does this stadium located?
Solving this will take you just a couple of steps. First, make note of the stadium name. Obviously named after someone, but most likely not from English-speaking country. Sounds Italian if anything, and the guy isn't some world-famous athlete to have a stadium named after him elsewhere but the Italy. Keep that in mind -- it's probably in Italy. Next step: unusual traffic jams. What can be so unusual about the traffic jam? Long? Mundane. Colorful? No one buys colorful cars anymore. Not cars? That might work, but what if not cars? Mopeds? Too close to cars and gives us nothing. Bikes? Not Netherlands, and still leaves too many options for a city on the table. Boats? That might work, that's unusual. Are there any Italian cities full of water? Venice would be one.
And what do you know, that's the right answer.
So yeah, wouldn't this be a great pastime? Join us, play the game, write your own questions, build a community and be remembered as a Person Who Brought The Game to the Anglosphere.
very cool post
FPV drone racing
I wholeheartedly recommend random acts of violence against users of smartphones, social media, and GenAI.
It's fun, educational, and empowering! Not to mention you are doing a favor to those people, as well as to society.