It eats too much time (and money).
Hydroponics, how heavy a 10 gallon tote is filled with water. With about 8 gallons of water in it, it’s about 67 lbs. Thankfully I don’t need to move my basic deep water culture setup and it’s stable. It’s been a great learning experience, but moving forward if I expand I’m going with the nutrient film technique.
Photosensitive polymer resin is nasty stuff, and stereolithography 3D printing requires a lot more safety considerations than FDM printing does! No regrets though, it’s still a lot of fun
My boss pushed us to research and acquire a resin printer a couple years ago. My coworker pushed the high-budget Form Labs direction due to his poor experience with resin printing in college. I had zero experience with resin (mostly only used Prusa FDM at that time) and pushed toward the relatively low budget Anycubic Photon direction, from the standpoint of “this is really not what we need to be doing with our budget, and this doesn’t make sense for our use case, so I’ll try to waste less money.”
Now that my coworker’s been gone for over a year, my boss thinks no one uses it because we don’t know how. I know how, but FDM is just so much more approachable. I can swap filaments, click print, and walk away in about two minutes and trust that I’ll come back to a usable part.
Changing out resin is its own special hell, and good luck if you have a print fail and have to clean off the bottom of the tray. I didn’t get to a point of trusting prints to finish. Even when it does finish, you still have to wash and cure, and every part I ever made in resin seemed to be dimensionally unstable. Even the sample parts a Form Labs rep sent us were badly warped in shipping. The Photon hasn’t been used in well over a year. CEO wants us to get rid of it, and I agree. Boss isn’t letting go.
Meanwhile we just got two P2S printers that are cranking out parts like a champ. I would rather take a leisurely stroll across Eastern Ukraine than print with resin ever again.
I absolutely hate gunk on my hands, so I stuck with FDM.
IIT: lots of wisdom
What the consumables are. As a noob, you don’t look at a metal bike cassette and think “that’s going to wear out”. Or at a metal 3d printer nozzle. Or at paint brushes (I keep ruining expensive ones! 😭).
Hey! Long time artist here who paints all kinds of things, from metal lawn art to actual paintings. Rule number one- wash your bushes out in cool water, not hot or warm, as hot water can loosen the glue that holds the bristles in. Second get a small tub of brush restorer. A little goes a long way. Once the brush is dry, add a little brush restorer and reshape the tip and bristles. You can use sharp sizzors to clip and stray brush hairs that won’t stay in place. And keep paining!
I just do miniature painting, so it’s the really tiny detail brushes, keep ruining the tips trying to get into little corners.
Might have a look at the brush restorer.
For fine tip miniature work I have also put cheap hair gel on the brush tip to hold the piont. Milage may vary based on bushtype and technique.
Typewriters - mostly just buying/using them, haven’t delved too much into the actual restoration/cleaning part just yet:
- There’s a Discord that has a lot of information and a nice, welcoming community.
- Typewriter Database is a very handy tool to help you identify your typewriter model and year based on the serial number.
- The case can get messed up depending what you clean with, so do your research well so that you don’t accidentally strip the paint.
- Estate/garage sales are great for finding typewriters.
- When buying a typewriter, bring a piece of paper with you and test it out: type with every key, use the shift and caps lock, try the red and black inks, backspace, tab, set a few tabs and then tab through each one, reach the end of the line and see if the bell rings, etc. Don’t let social anxiety get in the way of you testing a product before buying, especially if it’s costing a pretty penny.
- Speaking of price, I’m not sure how it is everywhere, but where I am you can get a good typewriter for under $100, even under $50, fairly consistently. I just went on OfferUp and I was able to find a few at around $50 that I would purchase myself tonight if I wasn’t already strapped for cash.
- The few typewriters I would spend over $100 on if I had the money (all in working condition, even better if it has a case): Royal Model 10 with the glass side, Olivetti Lettera 33, and the Hermes Baby.
Needlework is hard on rhe hands. I wear compression gloves and wrist braces when cross stitxhing to minimize the impact on my hands. I need to talk to a doctor about my hands but i try to take good care of them even when playing games i wear a brace.
For coding, I wish I had known that I will need to basically relearn the entire thing every 2-4 years due to frameworks and language design changes.
This is why I only use languages and libraries that are “finished.” C, Pascal, Euphoria to name a few.
Absolutely isn’t true though, unless you only learned JavaScript for some reason and god help you if that is what you call programming
Yep. Redesign the entire library every few weeks because you discovered a better architecture.
Tell me you’re a front end programmer, without telling me you’re a front end programmer.
I had to do FE for a freelance work, I learned Angular built the thing and delivered, a few year later I wanted to do some other stuff went to check Angular documentation and it had changed completely, plus no one else was using it because everyone had migrated to React.
Yea, its a big reason why I try to avoid FE like the plauge! As soon as you learn what everyone is using, everyone is using something else, or its going through a major rework that changes everything.
The legality
- It’s always more expensive than I thought
- It’s always more physically demanding than I thought
- There’s never a local hobby/support group for it
… Sums up pretty much every hobby I have tried/am trying
There’s never a local hobby/support group for it
This is the hardest part…
About me when it comes to all of my hobbies: I like to collect things.
Buying more expensive and better gear will not make you better at it. I not even going to tell you what the hobby is because this applies to so many of them. If you can do your hobby with the gear you have and you think “oh man I wish I had that, I could do awesome things” - it’s only worth it if you spend a whole lot of time on your hobby. If you’re like me and you only spend a couple hours a week or month on your hobby, it’s usually not worth it. Unless it’s something that let’s you do stuff faster. Because then you can do more in the few hours you have. I’m sure there are other exceptions to the rule, but in general, before you buy some shit, think to yourself “Do I really need this? Or do I just want it?”
Is your hobby guitar lol i’m curious
It is not, but it’s music related. But I also have outdoors hobbies. And electronics hobbies.
I’m into playing guitar, bass and electronic music production, and IMO while there is definitely a “collecting instead of practicing/writing” issue to look out for, the right gear makes a pretty big difference. e.g. you do need a guitar with a good neck (not warped, good frets), you do need a guitar that’s not too heavy for you, you do need software (or hardware, if that’s your thing) with a workflow that works for you.
Currently struggling with the software part. Could well be that I’m just in a hole in general, but I was definitely more productive when I was making Game Boy chiptune with a simple tracker than I am with standard DAWs. At the same time, I’m very reluctant to enter into the rabbit hole of groove boxes, hardware sequencers etc.
Oh for sure, completely agree with all of that, but there is a point of diminishing returns. Like you definitely need functional equipment. And it’s nice to have nicer equipment. But buying yet another guitar doesn’t make you better at the guitar, and you can probably get better by practicing more often with what you have.
Don’t get me started on music software. I could spend $10,000 a week on plugins that I would never use because they all look so awesome.
Sequencing on something like LSDJ is great because you are locked into this tiny little ecosystem and you have to get creative.
Definitely applies to climbing. Technically more expensive shoes may help with certain climbs, it certainly won’t help a beginner.
Not sure what hobby this is, but honestly it goes for almost every one of my hobbies. Especially photography. I could probably just get good with my Canon EOS 40D for digital and my Canon EOS 300 for analog photography. But collecting new gear is so satisfying. There’s always something new to improve. “If only I had X, then I could really do Y well”. Though I at least feel like I’ve somewhat contained myself. I haven’t bought any new camera or lens that was more than like 500 bucks, and honestly with what I have now I don’t really feel the need to upgrade.
This does NOT go for watercolor painting! While you certainly dont need a lot of colors and brushes. The quality of both is paramount for progress and a decent outcome! Paper is even worse. You need a lot and of the expensive stuff. Acrylic paintig is not as bad but still…
“Meh, I’ll upgrade the server RAM when I need it, zswap is working fine” <- clueless idiot from last year
That my knees were going to go to shit, and carrying a backpack through the mountains needs good knees. Fuck, I miss those trips.
Find a good physical therapist. There are some good ones out there, I promise. But you might need to travel and/or pay out of pocket. And the best source for good PT recs is friends in the same sport - so make friends with some ultra runners and ask them.
Hit the gym and do yoga. A big part of a lot of knee pain is instability in the low back and hips.
Read up on psychosomatic pain, and integrate exercises into PT and gym time.
You get a much wider margin of error brewing 5 gallons in a bucket instead of starting with 1 gallon as a trial.
When I first made mead I just did a 1 gallon batch to see how it worked but that doesn’t really leave you with enough of a must to do proper gravity measurements without losing half your yield.
Selfhosting.
Should have never done it.
But it also helpened me with my jobSome useful self-hosting advice:
- Unless you work in IT, you can always start easy. Multiple brands offer solutions that are already configured, receive updates, and are properly managed. For example, ZimaBoard comes by default with CasaOS, a very user-friendly interface to cover all of your basic self-hosting needs.
- You can also install CasaOS, Yunohost and other simple self-hosting solutions on any device, and it’s not too complicated even if you never did anything of the kind before.
- If you mainly want to replace cloud storage, there’s a multitude of brilliant commercial NAS offerings by Synology, QNAP, ASUStor and others. The devices do all the complicated parts all by themselves, and even talk to your router to properly set the networking. They commonly come with all sorts of mobile apps and suites allowing you to easily manage everything on the go. They can even be used to self-host anything, just like a normal server!
- As your home server is most likely to be based on Linux (most certainly Debian and its derivative, Ubuntu), knowing Debian/Ubuntu and Linux in general will help to ease its setup and maintenance.
- If you have somewhat powerful hardware and want to host many things at once, Proxmox is a godsend. It has a fully functional GUI to manage everything (just don’t be scared of many buttons and interface elements, you’ll only need like 3 of them at first), it can manage resources very efficiently, reducing the server load, and it makes containerization and virtualization a breeze, so you don’t have to think much about it.
