131–140 of 769 posts
I am trying to build microphone capsules in my garage. Trying to go below 14dB (Primo EM272 level), under 1". It is difficult but rewarding. I do not expect any financial benefits from it, even if I make it under 10mm, because it is very time-consuming. Big players already have massive factories doing 10,000x of what I am doing. This is the most niche tech-related hobby I have currently.
I've been playing exclusively CRPGs for the last 12 months or so, which was kinda a niche genre before the success of BG3. There are tons of way to beat those games and optimizing how you build your party and characters (what players call "min-maxing") while following a highly narrative story is a lot of fun. Most of them are quite old and often on sales for like 5 bucks on Steam, for which you get hundreds of hours…
I was convinced that a party of all Ninjas and Samurai would be unstoppable, but I never could make it work. I recall leveling up to a point where a high enough character would get 3 attacks per turn, and then when hit counterattack twice. Multiply this by the whole party.
But realistically, at some point this flurry of attacks every round just fell over because you need better magic users for enemies with certain weaknesses. My memory is fuzzy, but it also may have related to the increasingly large hordes of enemies which would dilute the effects of so many attacks.
I’m a paraglider pilot and powered paraglider recently. Totally recommended, you get to connect with nature in a meaningful way. Also people who practice this kind of sports are nice. From a tech perspective there are a lot of data generated on each flight you can create your own way to capture that data or use already existing apps.
I got into HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) fencing last year through a club in my little town. Olympic/sport fencing is fun, but imagine (safely) swinging a 4lbs. steel longsword with two hands at your opponent instead. It's a ton of fun, a great workout (I burn ~1500 calories per class), and competitive so it keeps my interest. Then there's the whole nerd layer of reading all the original sources from the 15…
Edit: before you think these arts are immune to tech, I once had a student who built a (truly awful) sword fighting "robot" to help train deflecting strikes. Not quite up to par with Dune's robot swordmasters.
The software wont be sexy, but will help the non profits and the people they serve
I’m obsessed with powerlifting. Not only because big numbers get bigger but also the physical changes that occur with a healthy dose of lifting each week. It’s also easy to track lifting stats and there are tons of analysis tools out there if data analysis is something you enjoy. Also, I’m trying to learn guitar - right now following the Justinguitar.com lessons
I've written a blog post about it [1] though there have been a few updates since I've written that.
I honestly think it might be a fun thing for me to keep doing, whether or not I'm successful with my search. I think there is a lot of old software that is just sitting on old hard drives that is waiting to be preserved.
[1] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Technical/2026/03-March/The-Q...
My 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…
Sounds like a really cool idea. How do you organize the meetup and promote it to people if it ends up being random people? Do you set it up on meetup.com and have a theme at the minimum? I've been to a lot of meetups and it's definitely hit or miss and obviously depends on the sociability of the people that show up. The better ones I've attended are generally ones where people aren't trying to network for work purpos…
I have literally never been to any kind of organized gathering where this wasn't the objective of most of the people there. Family and children's events excluded (sometimes).
I’m obsessed with powerlifting. Not only because big numbers get bigger but also the physical changes that occur with a healthy dose of lifting each week. It’s also easy to track lifting stats and there are tons of analysis tools out there if data analysis is something you enjoy. Also, I’m trying to learn guitar - right now following the Justinguitar.com lessons
one of my favorite parts of powerlifting, opposed to hiit or other fitness lifting, is the lack in physical change. i feel like i look the same but can point to numbers that show im much stronger
Put it down over winter but just picking it back up. Bat detection/identification with ultrasonic recordings. It's been fun building the data pipeline to manage the ~30GB+ of WAV files generated every night, run through some identification processes (currently using https://github.com/rdz-oss/BattyBirdNET-Analyzer ) and build a UI (mostly vibe coded lol) to help with replay, cataloging, etc. I'm using an AudioMoth cu…