I mean, if you’re bored with life, an expensive and time-consuming hobby might be exactly what you need.
Me when I got back into horses after 13 years.
Send help, I have an addiction for grooming supplies. I own like 4 stiff bristle brushes.
If you buy more you can wear them during the next Halloween so you can become a horse yourself.
Aw c’mon, let the purple guy get addicted to skydiving.
I used to want to make art
Now I just want to rest
I’m just so tired
Mood
Me: “fucking tariffs. I’ll never an Orion O6 now. Oh well.” Amazon: “hey, we have a close enough knockoff from orange pi now. It’s cheaper, uses almost exactly the same chip, and available in the US right now.”
-glares- God fucking damnit!
I was like, “I’ll just check out Kill Team, that way I can limit it to just the starter set and a few extra teams maybe, seems fun.”
Anyway, I just need one more Eliminator Squad with a Phobos Librarian and another Redemptor and I’ll be up to 3000 points of Blood Angels. I’ll be dead before they’re all painted.
Astro-Photography… quality of yoyr pictures is:
10% skill 90% how much you spend on equipment.
Yup yup. The cheapest stuff you can find for the hobby will still set you back several hundred dollars, and you’ll be doing the equivalent of doodling with crayons. I do not regret buying a Celestron Astromaster 130EQ, but I’m also fully aware of why people call this thing a hobby killer
If you are able to hack some ground satellite dishes, it becomes 99% skill and 1% how much you spend.
Leave my recent “$20k and 80 hours of frustration for not getting parts you find out later you’ll need” upgrade out of this!
$12k for a pier-mounted SB mount? Sure, why not
So far, I have started collecting Classic Oliver people sunglasses from the 2000s. Niche fragrances from perfume houses such as Kilian and Parfum De Marly. And then theres the lego…
And I tell ya, even when you go looking for fragrances that arent expensive, you end up buying more trying to find the perfect one. And all those 20 quids start adding up fast. But the sunglasses, the fucking sunglasses. I live in Scotland, its not even that fucking sunny. The summer is like one week a fucking year. In saying that, my pride and joy right now is actually a more recent pair. Victory LA in gold with a burgundy lens. So fucking cool. It really is a shame to put them on my ugly mug lol.
Fuck, I just remembered I also collect power tools that I rarely use. Spent almost 200 quid on a purple Makita impact driver. I have zero need for an impact driver lol
Or 3D-printing!
Fk me
FPV drones!
RC cars
Magic: the Gathering
Psh! Unless you’re constantly buying the newest machine every year, 3d printing isn’t that expensive of a hobby. Not compared to shit like golfing or being a car guy or ATV/snowmobiling
it is when you factor in the amount of time you use it, just to let it collect dust afterwards.
Well, why aren’t you using it?
If you’re not using it, it’s not a hobby. Buying shit you don’t use is just consumerism.
Arghs, wrong community, sorry. Thought we where in an ADHD related topic, where buying new (and expensive) things just to loose interest shortly after is pretty common. This comic was posted there already multiple times.
3D-printing Warhammer figurines ? (No, that sounds like heresy)
i don’t find it to be that expensive tbh.
That depends on what you’re printing!
Did you know that the LD2410 can be wired directly into an ESP32 or equivalent because it operates at the 3V3 level and has an RTC GPIO that can be used as a wakeup pin? This is a huge upgrade from the LTR5-series of light sensing chips which all use the I2C protocol, because those need a UART chip on the device to handle the clock signal with a 5V open drain, despite being an easier 2-wire implementation. The send protocol of I2C slave devices are much simpler than the 1-wire or Dallas protocol used for multiplexing sensors, and relies on sending information bits in 60microsecond intervals when the clock bit is high, this ensures…
(don’t drink coffee on the train)
I wanna get into maker stuff so bad but I just don’t have the time 😭
Real talk: you will never have the time. There’s a 101 other things I should absolutely be doing but am not. I think just jump in, see where your interest takes you, and see how your life schedule evolves around it
lol. I’ve been playing around with OpenThread (XIAO ESP32C6 is officially my favorite board right now), and I’ve learned a lot. But now my bathroom light won’t reliably turn on when I walk in… But I’m learning!
All part of the fun!
And my family gets to be QA!
“Who needs beta testers when the world is your beta tester!”
Microsoft, circa 2020, probably
(don’t drink coffee on the train)
(well now i gotta find a train and drink coffee on it)
$15.99 for two LD2410 is a bargain considering I’ve been looking a presence sensors for HA and they easily cost $60+ each. This is legitimately useful information!
Do you only need the ESP and presence sensor or is extra circuitry needed? I can probably print out some type of enclosure.
You can get them much cheaper than that on AliExpress hehe, though you might pay twice for quality. And yep you can wire them straight into each other, no pull-ups or nothing!
Caveats:
- I got the LD2410s variant because I think it’s the only one that actually operates at 3v3, but unfortunately it’s not quite supported by ESPhome yet so I’ve been having issues getting it to do anything with HA. Methinks stick with 5V versions for now and use a voltage regulator for the GPIO since the ESP32 is not 5v tolerant for GPIO inputs (or: use a Raspberry Pi which can handle anything).
- Do not use the brand new spanking ESP32C6 for that sweet sweet BLE and Zigbee functionality, because despite the arduino framework saying they support it in practice you’ll have to default to using the idf-esp framework, which isn’t a huge issue but does seem to throw me stranger errors.
Me and selfhosting :3
Self-hosting is calling to me right now… I’ve been watching videos on it for the last couple of nights. I fear it’s too late for me.
Tbf, it CAN be pretty cheap, depending on where you live (or what you got available at home), all things considered. Might even save you some money in the long run from not having to pay subscriptions.
I have a cluster of $100 Lenovo mini PCs that I’ve been using for 5 years now. The hobby doesn’t have to be expensive.
Until you get to storage. I’ll admit, I dropped $4500 on VM and Media storage a few years back. But that should still last me a few more years before that fills up!
“Should” is doing some serious work in your last statement.
As someone with ~72 TB of raw storage… Heh. Good luck.
12 TB raw SSD and 200 TB of raw spinning rust. :D
Sadly for me, my region is terrible for buying any kind of tech, so its been quite expensive. Still better than most hobbies however! Storage really hurts tho yeah, its never enough (never enough RAM either).
My plan is to start by turning an old PC into a Jellyfin server, just to see how everything works. Then later I might buy dedicated hardware.
Smart. One tip is if it is really old and can’t do AV1 hardware transcoding make sure to set it up so it downloads HEVC or H.264 only. I also started selfhosting this year and one thing I wish I knew from the start is about https://github.com/getarcaneapp/arcane , makes it much easier to spin up new docker containers or update them.
I’m not sure what this means yet, but I’ll try to remember when it comes up, thanks. The PC I plan on using is fairly old - a 2013 build with a 770.
fairly old
770
For a Jellyfin server.
Uses the same card as my current gaming rig…
Aww jeez. I am but a peasant in a lord’s world.
To be fair, I’m a complete noob and don’t know if what I have is too weak or overkill. I just figured that it’s a 12 year old computer and might be worse than what others are using.
Ah sorry, putting the carriage ahead of the horses here. I think that pc will be really good to get a taste of the hobby but if you do decide to stick with it you might wanna switch to something less power hungry (since servers are on 24/7). Anyhow, the selfhosted community can be helpful but often they assume you know a lot of things so feel free to dm me if you have questions, I’ve gone through all the beginner hustles just recently
Will do, thanks! I haven’t even thought about the power consumption yet. Hmm… maybe I’ll do some math once a power bill comes back to bite me.
Wait what’s arcane? Like portainer, but good?
Like Dockge but can update images, has OIDC and a bunch of other features
Just spent two hours looking for cheap hdd online… I’m poor in a poor country man…its expensive af to buy PC parts even used ones because everybody is poor and don’t just sell them for cheap to buy new ones
I guess I’ll have to live deleting my movies and series and hoping to find them again later
My hobbies are distrohopping and reading books
What is your current distro?
Debian 13
Time to stop distro hopping
True, but I am kinda interested to try devuan just to test it but Debian 13 with KDE plasma works great
What’s on your bedside table?
Jasper Fforde’s latest two novels
All sorts of things, books, parfume, candies, calculator, printer and laptop
>printer
That’s no bedside table that’s straight up a table.
I love distrohopping, then I decided to try CachyOS for a few days and it’s been months.
Cooking is a cheap, easy to start hobby with endless possibilities for development.
“Cooking is a cheap” how costly is groceries at your place?
Were you just not gonna eat otherwise?
On the assumption that you need to feed yourself regardless, cooking as a hobby can be really cheap, since worst-case you only spend whatever you’d have spent on food anyway. You might even end up saving money!
I do understand the bit of needing to feed myself and all, but just randomly going up and cooking is sadly not something I can afford Which is quite f-ed, I like to knead bread loaf
Can you explain? Is it cheaper to eat out / eat processed foods than buy groceries to cook? I’ve never lived in a place with that situation, but I understand it’s a possibility.
Assuming that you can cook well enough that your meals are guaranteed to be edible, which is assuming a lot for novices.
The biggest factor to success when starting out is your ability to follow instructions.
Pick a recipe, read through it, buy all the ingredients, and follow the instructions.
It’s not that hard. The reason people struggle is because they ignore the instructions like a dad in the 80’s
Cooking instructions don’t mesh well with some people. I’m one of them.
Half of the time the instructions are vague (like “golden brown”, which has vastly different definitions based on what you’re cooking) and the measurements are often inexact (“to taste” is completely useless to someone who doesn’t know how the intermediate product is supposed to taste). Plus, you often have to do things during the heating process and if your multitasking isn’t good enough your meal is ruined.
All of this is less of a deal if you have someone with cooking experience in the kitchen. If you don’t, well, good luck.
I consider cooking to be highly stressful even with a recipe. Baking is much better since the measurements tend to be precise to the gram and the heating step happens in isolation.
Good point. Some meals are pretty hard to mess up, though. Beans, rice, stews.
there’s cooking to eat and cooking for fun. cooking for fun can get pretty expensive
Cheaper than any other way of eating. Single McDonald’s for me and my partner costs the same as 4 to 5 home cooked meals.
Being more relative to itself from a few years ago doesn’t mean groceries are objectively expensive. Especially if you’re buying ingredients and not premade shit- that’s where most of the increase has gone
Here’s why bread making is the best hobby:
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Minimal equipment and ingredients to get started
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Amount of time is up to you. You can select a recipe that suits your needs. Plus you can go and do other things while the dough proofs and cooks, so if you make a 3 hour loaf, you still get some of that time back.
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Most of bread making is working on your skills and knowledge and is highly rewarding as a result
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You make tasty bread that will either contribute to your weekly pantry or makes a great gift for others.
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Store bought bread sucks ass. Once you start making your own, you’ll never go back.
I went back because I wasn’t getting good enough results
I want to try again. but I did start making my own and then go back
Same here. French bread is weirdly hard to make.
my brother has a pretty foolproof baguette recipe he might be willing to share
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If I ever make enough money to really get into motorcycle track riding (many track days a year with a track prepped bike), I will probably not have the time for getting there and all the maintenance…
