NTSC video & film (movie film - 35mm) restoration.
Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
441–450 of 769 posts
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
#442I 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 everyo…
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.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
#443I'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.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
#444Building 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.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
#445I'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:…
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.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
#446I 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?
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
#447Traditional 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 2…
I sometimes shoot a couple of bows I made myself.
It's a fairly easy woodworking project, and you can get a beautiful result.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
#448I 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 fi…
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.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
#449I'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-lik…
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.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
#450My 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…
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".
People new to cities look for community.