I’ve been stuck in the work, recharge, repeat cycle for about a decade now. I’m looking to get back into hobbies and activities to enjoy my free time and possibly meet other folks.
I’ve heard you should have 3 types of hobbies: something to keep you fit, something to keep you creative, and something that can make some money. I’ve considered gym/triathlon (fitness) and woodworking (creative/income).
What are your hobbies? Anything you recommend I try out?
I’ve been making mechanical keyboards “from scratch” for the last year or so. I leverage a lot of pre-built parts and existing tools of course, but I tweak the standard layouts to fit what I want to do, fabricate the plates and cases with my laser engraver and 3D printer, assemble everything, wire them up to the switches and the microcontroller (usually “dead bug” hand-wiring, but I have done a very basic PCB in KiCAD as well), and configure the firmware. It leverages a lot of my other interests, provides an opportunity to improve incrementally between projects, and results in a product that is legitimately pleasant to use.
Little bastards are piling up, though.
I’m currently in the process of building my first mechanical keyboard. I have a Lily58 mostly assembled, in the troubleshooting steps now. It’s been a fun project so far.
I’d like to do a proper split as a project, but I don’t properly touch-type, so there’s a pretty large learning curve that I’m not particularly interested in overcoming. Before I accepted my truth, my second handwire was a permanent split that just bundled the matrix wires into a ratchet-ass cable. It works fine, but I just never used it, even enough to want to do a refined version.
I own an LGS, so my hobbies have become part of my job. Before i opened i built and painted miniatures, and played a lot of miniature games. I also played RPGs and MTG quite a bit.
Now, i guess my hobbies would be my old job, audio engineering.
Aren’t they usually called FLGS (Friendly local game store)? Or is yours just decidedly unfriendly? :>
Both are used. The F is a recent addition and seems to throw a lot of people do most of the shops I know just use LGS. That said I am a grumpy old neurodivergent, so the F can be questionable (this is a joke, I mask for almost all customers).
I guess those letters mean something in English.
Local games shop, role-playing game, magic the gathering
Somehow still can’t understand a few of those words. Yeah, I’m dumb.
A local game shop is a shop where you can go and purchase games, typically board games, card games (tcg, or trading card games, lcg, or living card games), miniature games, role-playing games (Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Werewolf the Apocalypse, Vampire the Masquerade, and many many others) in which you assume the role of a character you create and roll dice to help randomize the successes and failures of your character. To go with the RPGs and miniature games I also sell dice.
Magic the Gathering is the first, largest, and oldest of the Trading Card Games (TCGs) where you buy packs of randomized cards and use those cards to build a deck to compete against other players. Other games in the genre as Pokémon TCG, YuGiOh!, Lorcana, Flesh and Blood, Weiß Schwarz, and Star Wars Unlimited.
I liked Pokémon as a kid. I had leaf green on my GBA
You might check out the tcg then.
Electronics projects mostly.
Mostly smart home PCBs and interconnect boards and 3D modelled housings. Examples:
- esp32-C3 dumb doorbell (just a doorbell that sends an MQTT message and sleeps the rest of the time). It works fatastic except that my Proximus ISP modem/router completely fucked up and so the network is no longer usable and I had to set it in bridge mode to a router it can’t reach. I want to release it, but haven’t had the time to water - resistance test it or make assembly instructions
- esp32-S3 voice assistant satellite attached to an IR blaster, I2S mic, and PCM5102 to control and send audio to my old Yamaha RX-496RDS to control it via IR and can play audio (local or Spotify) via music assistant. Pretty much an Alexa echo attached to my speaker system. PCB link which I am planning on releasing.
- My unfinished Flight Stick with custom electronics, fully custom 3D printable housing, etc… It is almost done, but needs like 2 more small iterations, but we moved and started doing a full-strip renovation, so my 3D printer is no longer set up because it is too dusty inside, and I don’t want to spend another $100 doing a PCB test iteration to use a better ADC with less components. Eventually as firmware practice, I want to rewrite the firmware in Rust or something.
I also have tons of new project ideas that I don’t have time for.
My other hobbies
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weightlifting, again completely dropped off due to every free moment renovating
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Running a home server with replacement services for everything I need
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Running (my motivation has been 0 recently…)
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cooking. I try to do a few new recipes per month
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gardening. With the renovation, I just grew a few courgettes, tomatoes, and squash this year
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video games (more of a de-stresser nowadays than a hobby, most recently casual rocket league with friends is fun, hadn’t played since 2018 or so)
i took up drawing this year and enjoy it a lot, i’m not good at it quite yet but it is cheap to start, fun, you can do it pretty much anywhere, and it’s given me a nice confidence boost tbh because i was always convinced it was something i could never do. i like that i’m always learning something new with it too, and progressing in a visible way. i’m not looking at it with the aim of making money though, it’s for fun & good for my brain. highly recommend.
Lifting weights, motorcycle, programming at home for fun and not profit.
Lifting weights is awesome. You can do it with friends, but I tend to go solo. It’s meditative and humbling. At the same time, it’s an absolute ego boost to start seeing your progress and comparing with others.
Motorcycling is a ton of fun, but quite expensive. Buying a bike is a gut punch, then all the over priced gear. You can be thrifty about it using Facebook marketplace but you’re gonna be out quite a bit of money.
I’m a software engineer at work, but I honestly enjoy programming. I have a discord bot or two that I wrote just for my discord channel with some buddies. I also run 4 raspberry pi’s at home that require occasional IT work to do their various tasks. It’s low risk and rewarding and helps keep me a little sharper at my day job.
3d printing. !3dprinting@lemmy.world
homebrewing !homebrewing@sopuli.xyz
baking !bready@lemmy.world
drooling over big thighs !thiccmoe@ani.social
I was with you up until big thighs. …though I will say I don’t mind them, I wouldn’t call it a hobby.
Toats down with brewing, baking and 3d printing fo sho though.
Haha, yeah. Understandable. It’s more of a joke line, lol.
games, specifically far cry 2, 3 & 4 and overwatch. And punk shows, getting beaten up in a mosh while very drunk is truly refreshing/entertaining
Warning - do not make your creative/fun hobby the one that also makes you money. I’ve met several people who were into woodworking as a hobby, started doing it on commission for family, friends, referrals, etc, and it quickly became a job rather than a fun hobby. The timelines and demands that come with doing commissions killed it for them, they still occasionally do woodworking as gifts/favors, but very explicitly just for family and close friends without timelines, and only charge for materials
The funds go in, the fun goes out.
I am strongly considering hanging a shingle as a furniture maker. A few stars have to align first but it’ll probably happen in 2025.
Your warning is valid. I was a project manager for a custom building/rapid prototyping shop before the pandemic, I’m used to customers, deadlines and budgets. Compared to what I’m doing now, I think I’d rather be in command of a workshop again.
I’m an electronics hobbyist. I have a whole big tacklebox full of components, wires, microcontrollers etc, I’m an amateur radio operator, I build gaming PCs, etc. Kind of difficult to make money with this hobby, but it’s often a good mind exercise and you can be creative building things. I also save myself money by fixing things around the house with my tools.
I’m a woodworker. I built a cutting board this weekend, a walnut/maple brick pattern. Turned out pretty good. Keeping a woodworking hobby from devolving into tool collecting can be a trick.
I’m a guitarist, have been since I was 11. Can be a fairly cheap way to burn some time, get an inexpensive guitar, a few picks, etc. Occasionally get to show off at a bonfire when someone breaks out an acoustic.
I grow a small vegetable garden, and I can some of what I produce. Pizza sauce and jelly mostly. Mint jelly is surprisingly nice to have around the house and it’s not that difficult to make. And mint plants are eternal. The biggest struggle to growing mint is to keep it from escaping containment.
Keeping a woodworking hobby from devolving into tool collecting can be a trick.
This can be true of most hobbies, lol. Amusingly, three others of yours fall into that pattern.
Electronics? If only I had a bigger power supply, higher speed/more channel scope, hot air station, logic analyzer, etc. Guitars? I have friends and coworkers who play. No one only owns one guitar, pedal, amp combo. Gardening? I have quite the setup in my basement to get seeds going, but I live in zone 6 and need to compensate some for the short growing season. Cooking can also be it’s own equipment rabbit hole.
Beyond that: Cameras? Choosing which brand of body to use, sensor size, lens collection, tripods/flash/accessories. If you play a tabletop game do you really play a tabletop game or are you looking for an excuse to make and paint minis? 3D printers can be just as much about messing with the printer as actually printing things.
I think it’s important to recognize the pattern so you can consciously decide if you want to fall into it or avoid it. For some people, the collecting around the hobby is even better than doing the hobby.
With electronics, that is only the tip of the iceburg before you get into trinocular microscopes which the absolute cheapest are almost 300€ nowadays 😉 then assembled PCB prototypes where every iteration can be 200-500€ depending on size. Or you could get into spending hundreds on hotplates and reflow ovens to do it yourself.
But wouldn’t it be faster and cheaper in the long run to be able to fabricate the simple PCBs yourself? There goes 1000€ on a small CNC 😂 rabbit hole goes deeeeep.
Hobbies that are creative for me are cooking/baking/canning. Which reminds me, I need to get apples for apple butter.
I’m in the researching stage of my next hobbies: pigeon fancying/racing and ham radio. This spring is going to be a wild one at my place!
I hope the ham radio is small so the birds can carry it.
Maybe possible! Coincidently it’s the same article that got me reading about ham again:
Photography, cryptography, anamorphosis art, regular art, writing, and hiking. Looking for people who also enjoy these.
I am a filthy hobby hopper and I spend most of my disposable income on these.
- Tinkering with retro game handhelds and sometimes playing them
- Tinkering with bikes and sometimes riding them
- Tinkering with DIY watches and sometimes using them to tell time
- Also bird photography
Drawing, videogames, and swimming.
Engaging with the fediverse at the moment
