What hobby seems boring to most people but is actually fascinating if you dive into it?

They talk about many other illnesses too! (Not the babbling prostates, the babbling ham operators)

Money is the biggest issue. I've had my general for years... have never been able to afford a radio to use those bands at home. Ive had a magnetic loop antenna all ready to use in my garage for several years but no radio to run it. The local 2m/70cm is just old guys complaining usually. Passing traffic is fun during hurricanes... Only so many times I can enjoy trying to hit satellites that are swamped with people.

Morse is no longer required-- yay!

And with the appearance of low cost Chinese brand radios, the equipment can be cheap for 2m, particularly.

The usual go-to for new hams is the Baofeng UV-5R and similar. The cost is about $20-30. It's not the greatest radio and is kind of messy but for $20ish who cares if it gets you on the air.

Also Hamfests are a great place to pick up cheap used gear. For example I got an entry level 2m mobile rig (an old Radio Shack model) for $10 and antenna for similar.

If you want a new higher quality handheld transceiver (HT) there are options at $100 or less from Alinco and Yaesu. (Maybe Kenwood and Icom have budget options too idk)

You can get a Baofeng UV5R for about $20 and it can broadcast on ham frequencies! Just don't tell anyone I recommended that radio to you (I have 2 of them though). Morse code isn't a requirement anymore either. Time to do it!

Amateur Television aka Ham TV. It's not really secret TV of course. But, yeah, you can broadcast and receive video and audio. I haven't tried it yet but it always seemed like it would be kinda neat. https://www.hamtv.com/

I'm not sure I understand, the whole point is to talk to people very far away.

You can still suggest it. Might be a hobby no one thought it. But the reality is that to an outsider, most hobbies seem boring.

You’re John Birdman??

The Audubon app is great for tracking birds you've seen, and the observations are used for scientific studies!

Yeah man. So if you use the eBird app or website to track your birds you see (use Merlin bird id for id help) Cornell university actually maintains that and uses it. These sites and apps are highly highly recommended and almost mandatory if you find yourself doing birding often. Anyways, as you populate you list with sightings and areas you’ve found birds they can map out so much. Stuff like habitats, ranges, changes in these, population sizes, migration timings, and I’m sure there’s more I’m not thinking of. These are all important with human influenced climate change and habitat destruction.

Not that person but I always enjoyed helicopter, because it's broken down into helico and pter

Vodka.

Take the Russian word for "water," essential for survival and comfort, and convert it to the diminutive case, indicating something even more precious to you than life itself.

Words always mean things.

Gotta love cacaphony. I never thought about it until I learned the word euphony, which means "good sounding" from the Greek eu (good) and phone (sound).

You can see where this is going, right?

So the Greek kakos means bad, but is cognate with the Latin cacere (to defecate), the word from which we get the informal –if slightly outdated– euphemism "caca" for shit, crap, doodoo.

So cacaphony, sure, means "bad sounding" but also in a very real sense means "sounds like shit".

As a bonus, when I was learning Latin, I was delighted to discover the names Miranda and Amanda mean respectively, literally, good lookin' and good lovin'.

Not a specific word, but it's fascinating to me how, because of the Norman invasion in 1066, fancier words are of French origin and lower-class words are Germanic. So the animal is a cow, but we eat beef (boeuf) and the animal is a pig, but we eat pork (porc). Chicken was something even the poor ate, so it didn't change.

One which you won't be able to unlearn: "Kid" as a word for a child derives from a word "kid" which meant young goat. We're literally calling human children "goat children" and it's not even mocking.

The same thing happened in Swedish, the common word meaning "boy" or "guy" - "kille" is a shortened "killing" - young goat.

Not a single word but equestrian and horse being closely related and both decended from krsos (if you say it out loud you can hear the similar to both horse and latin equs)

Threshold.

In houses with mud floors, the stalks of wheat (thresh) were spread about as a kind of insulator and absorbative. A thresh hold was a block of wood at the entrance which stopped the thresh from getting spread through the doorway.

This grew to mean the boundary between the house and the rest of the world, to the point of symbolic ownership. When you cross a threshold you are going from one domain to another.

We now use it to mean a limit, or the how far you have to go before something changes or breaks. Kinda cool.

The other one is arrowhead. Terry Pratchett wrote a great piece on "ontic dumping", where we use one word to mean one thing then associate it with another thing and the connection is just automatically known by all.

So ->

We know what this means right. Go in this direction, look at this direction, the thing which needs attention is in this direction. There are arrow heads everywhere. On signage, on interfaces, even on the spacecraft which we have sent careening off into the universe. If other species are out there, they might interact with an object which had an arrowhead on it and would have absolutely no concept of what it means.

Why does an arrow have a head anyway? Because that's the way an arrow flies right. The pointy bit, which we call the arrowhead, moves in the direction that it's pointing. Which is bullshit, because if you hold an arrow horizontally then drop it, it goes straight down. And it only flies in that direction if you apply force at one end of the arrow and propel it in that direction.

But WHY IS IT CALLED A HEAD?

It doesn't resemble a head. There's no body. Heads don't usually "point" in the direction of travel. Yet we have taken a word that means "the bit that is important", because we've determined that a head is an important thing, and the bit of a thing whxih does the most of the thinging should be called a head.

It baffles me.

I in fact have. I've always loved language, but it was not until college that I began studying it formally.

I started learning Lakota, Japanese, and Latin on top of my English and Spanish. And while I dropped Lakota from lack of resources and Japanese because I didn't get along with the teacher, I stuck with the Latin and considered getting a minor in it. Just having Latin and Spanish to compare side-by-side was fascinating.

My main degree program was CS, though, and (dating myself here) the main problem in AI at the time was natural language processing, which means all of us in the AI specialization had to learn a lot about phonemes, read Noam Chomsky, and generally become linguistics nerds. That bubble burst my foury year, though, and left us scrambling for another problem in AI to study.

Since I didn't end up using either my Latin or my linguistic modeling professionally, I rolled those interests into the hobbies of etymology and her dark cousin, the generation of neologisms.

There are moments where I look into the history of a word, and find out that it has a direct connection to PIE. For the rest of that day, I wonder what the language sounded like or what they called it

I hear that! Admittedly, I've gotten grumpy at myself a few times for "not being able to make something practical," but I'm reminded when my wife thanks me occasionally for our home server setup (she loves Nextcloud), that it is practical and we use it all the time.

I've got my Wireguard I'm hosting on OCI (they give you 2 free VM instances), and looking to use the second instance to host SearXNG, then have Azure AD for free Active Directory, Home Assistant & Mycroft on Pi's, and otherwise, hosting local VM's via Proxmox on some older servers. I haven't gone too hard into clustering or orchestration yet, though I'm looking to replace most of those VM's with Docker instances at some point here, reduce compute reservations. Most of my power reduction has been through logical means, not yet through hardware, the costs involved keep me from leaping too hard quite yet. (Hard to drop big money on servers when rent is over half of my income) But I'll get there! I love seeing how much I can do with very little, so it at least scratches that part of the brain in the meantime :)

I host it on my own server at home :) Low latency and secure. Partially because I don't trust myself to keep things secure, so the less I can have things publicly accessible, the better I feel

That's honestly adorable. I love it!

I think it's a lot more intimidating than it is actually hard. You could get a Raspberry Pi, Alternative, or a Home Assistant Yellow. Then there guides that can get you going in minutes. It's actually a pretty good time with the latest update introducing better onboarding.

I am not trying to convince you. But, I don't want to see anyone scared out either.

t an RF link from a colleague and I’m now managing light via the socket units of

I have been waiting on Thread/Matter to be bigger and more adopted before I buy most devices. Everything I use right now is on Wi-Fi (using ESPHome). But, I am in no rush. Just having fun slowly building it out. :)

I am using a Shelly EM to monitor the power usage of two circuits, One phase of the Dryer and the whole circuit for the Washing Machine. Monitoring only one phase of a two-phase circuit makes it inaccurate. But, I just did one phase because I only care to know if it's off or on.

I used ESPHome to add it to HomeAssistant and this guide to setup the automation.

Did you use OpenGarage?

I feel like I usually am just pressing buttons on a website. But, I admit it can be a bit confusing..

My washer/dryer has no smart functionality. I explained it here but I put a device in my breaker box with a clamp on the two lines and that just sends the current to Home Assistant. I read a bunch before I ever tried it and many people have put vibration sensors in/in their dryers. But, this way seems more reliable.

I did my laundry 3 hours faster than usual today because I actually knew when it was done. Worth it to me.

Definitely stupid, that is the worst way to save fuel.

Personally, I’m not usually up for getting the best mileage out, but knowing the tips is definitely nice if I know I need to save. Not to mention, the aero mods are beneficial for performance driving too, and it’s a passive thing, which is nice.

Yeah, getting savings from being super close up to a semi-tractor trailer is not worth the risk. Stay minimum 3 seconds back (90m or 300ft at highway speeds). On the bright side, a car flattened by a truck will not use any fuel.

However, pacing with a semi (going at 105km/h or 65mph) from a safe distance behind will still net you savings from not speeding. You can set the cruise control or do whatever fuel saving acceleration pattern you have.

You gotta leave enough room to react and stick out the side just a bit so you can see in front of it just a bit but also you can stop a lot quicker than them.

I generally don't do it with Semis though, and I probably don't get as close as the people you're thinking of. If I'm on a long trip I'll ushally try to find a fifth wheel camper going roughly the speed I want and I'll set my adaptive cruise to the minimum distance. The campers throw fewer rocks.

Also if you're ever drafting make sure to keep an eye on your temperature. Most of the time it should be fine but a hot day and going uphill it could very easily overheat, especially if you've done some of the other hypermilling mods like partial grille block.

Almost certainly this is not the case, except maybe in extreme circumstances. My car, for instance, gets approximately 25 miles per gallon average, traveling at highway speeds of 80ish MPH average. If I drop to 70 MPH, I can get 30 miles per gallon.

This is because the ultimate factors in gas mileage are fairly simple. Your engine RPM will increase fuel, and the higher your speed, the higher your RPM is required to be to put you at that speed. The amount of RPM increase needed to put you at a higher speed is more than the rate of engine time running. In other words, increasing horsepower requirements is more costly than engine runtime requirements. You can leave an engine idling for an hour and use less than a trip a few miles down which may take only minutes.

That said, while going slower saves gas, the biggest part will be the acceleration/deceleration parts of it. Accelerating takes much more power in a short amount of time to get your speed up, so the faster your acceleration, the more your RPMs will spike, and the more your fuel consumption is. Deceleration too. Letting your engine coast, or leaving it in gear while not accelerating, means your engine is using little to no fuel and yet is still rolling forward. The more you can take advantage of this, the less fuel used.

In the case of high acceleration and harsh braking, you turn a lot of energy into motion, and then convert that energy to heat for the brakes. If you turn a little energy into just enough motion to get you there eventually, and then let the engine slow down until it almost stops as you arrive, you waste the least energy. Ideal real world is somewhere in the middle.

It's like the odd time I drive an automatic after decades with a manual ... always mashing the floor and popping it in neutral by accident.

I have not tried that yet. I did nitro off-road bashing years ago and have dabled in rock crawling with a little SCX-24. There's a local indoor track with a drifting course... not real fond of management otherwise I'd race in the air conditioning a lot more.

they say its the second oldest toy in history, after the doll.

I accidentally hit my kid in the head with a yo-yo. He would say it could be a deadly weapon. Still gives me shit for it.

Not OP, but personally I own 4 or 5 different keebs and I like swapping between them for different reasons. Sometimes it's just because they're different colors/lighting options and I want to switch up the look of my desk, other times it's because I want the feel of a linear switch for long bouts of typing for the feel of a blue switch for precise feedback in gaming.

I think of it like knives in a kitchen. Yes, you could just use a very nice chef's knife, but knives come in all shapes and sizes for different applications.

I think for others it's having different switches and keycaps for different feeling when typing. For me it's trying to find what I think is the most optimal typing experience and the least amount of strains on my hands while typing.

That's why I've gone from row stagger and qwerty to Ortholinear. I switched to that because it makes sense to me that your fingers move up and down better than they move laterally. Lateral movement like in a row stagger layout is more strain since you have to stretch to reach keys. Qwerty also never made sense to me since alphas aren't optimized based on location but rather purposefully unoptimized as a hold over from the typewriter days in order to slow down typists to help stop keys from jamming.

When I was on my Ortho boards I learned about layer switching that allows for keys that are further away to be moved under my fingers by activating a second layer. This was when I moved from my 60% Ortho to my 40% Ortho.

After that I got interested in ColemakDh since it fixed a lot of what is wrong with qwerty. So I decided to learn it. Then I got real into column stagger and wanted to try my hand at soldering. I ordered the parts to make a board called a Cantor Remix. I had enough parts to build 2 and did that. Building my own keyboard from basically parts and programming was a lot of fun and I got bit by the bug.

It's a dumb argument since most people don't care but I believe that something like a column staggered layout and something like Colemak or Canary should be the standard keyboard format. It's hard to relearn typing all over again as an adult so the default is an archaic row stagger that feels unnatural and a very unoptimized alpha layout. I know most people just don't care and I hyper focus on stuff so it's just something I don't bother telling most people, unless they ask of course.

I don't think everyone needs a bunch of keyboards but I'm on this weird journey to find what feels the most optimized for me. I'm deep in the rabbit hole lol.

I got started simply because I had been using the same dirty gaming keyboard for over a decade and it finally died. I knew from peripheral experience that most consumer electronic devices are e-waste so I went the custom route so that I could control the quality.

I settles on a case pretty quickly but couldn't decide on switches. I got a sampler pack but that doesn't really give you a good idea of the full typing experience so I went ahead and just bought 3 full sets of switches.

I quickly got tired of switching the out of the keyboard whenever I wanted to try a different set so I went out and got a second good but not AS good case just to serve as a test bed.

Well that meant I needed another set of keycaps. So I went looking and there was a deal I found for purchasing multiple sets.

If you are counting we are now at 3 sets of switches, 3 sets of caps, and 2 cases. I think you can see where this is headed.

What I ended up learning is that you can REALLY dial in the feel and responsiveness of a keyboard for what you want.

Do you want a commanding, powerful keyboard that feels like you are accomplishing something with every keystroke? Heavy, clicky switches with THICK PBT caps.

Do want a smooth fast speed demon for gaming/typing? Start looking into shirt throw linear switches with choc caps.

Good every day workhorse for all around use? Tactile are a great place to start?

But what case material do I choose? Metal, resin, plastic? Gasket mount pcb? Foam underlayment? What type of Keycap material do I like? PBT, ABS? maybe some resin, or metal even. How about some exotic ceramic keycaps?

How am I going to discover the combo that I like the best? You try them all and end up with a massive collection.

I got into it cause you can switch out the keys for custom keys. Plus I really like specific aesthetics so I have a pink keyboard and one in lavender where the keys look like sweet tarts candy.

I also have a keyboard specifically for my ipad.

I think every enthusiastic knitter has experienced this too, lol

This is me with embroidery. I started out making a couple of friendship bracelets in June. And then I thought, "Hey, now I have a bunch of extra floss, why don't I try to embroider something?" So I bought a couple of kits to practice, and now like 2 months later, I have a full box of floss including some fancy shit from Japan, a boatload of hoops, and piles of colored cotton. I moved from printing other people's patterns to customizing them in like, a week. I created my own monster. And now my favorite supply store has patterns for tiny embroidered felt animals so I'm starting a set of dinosaurs.

The real issue is what the fuck do I do with all this stuff I'm making. I don't want to monetize it and I'm not really good enough for that anyway, but it's gonna be a problem soon.

I'm afraid not. Tbh, my main sources of inspiration are YouTube channels. There are also many Facebook groups dedicated to scale modelling, some of which don't even count rivets! 😀