Tell us why we should unexpectedly come to love your hobby.
Ham radio.
On the surface, it just sounds like listening to a bunch of old farts babbling on about their enlarged prostates, and tbf, there is a bit of that if you never go any deeper than 2M/70cm voice modes.
But there’s just SOOOO much you can do.
Want to see how far you can bounce a signal off a mirror laying on the surface of the moon? Yup. You can do that.
Want to launch and communicate with your own satellite? Yup. It’s a thing.
Want to remotely control devices from hundreds of miles away without using the internet? Yup.
Want to gps track your car at all times, even when there’s no cell phone service? That’s called APRS.
Want to have a conversation with astronauts on the ISS as it flies overhead? They’ve got ham equipment on board.
You can even play with broadcasting and/or receiving “secret” tv and radio stations - that is, they’re on alternate frequencies that regular TVs and radios don’t pick up.
It just goes so deep.
Woah, woah, woah. You had me at babbling prostates…
They talk about many other illnesses too! (Not the babbling prostates, the babbling ham operators)
I just can’t afford the equipment. I thought about it back in the analog days, but back then you had to learn Morse code and I just didn’t think I was up for it.
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!
You can even play with broadcasting and/or receiving “secret” tv and radio stations - that is, they’re on alternate frequencies that regular TVs and radios don’t pick up.
Go on…
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/
There’s also old farts talking about beer, motorcycles, and bears! That’s what the guys in my area like talking about. It’s pretty fun listening to them.
I recently started studying for the Technician exam – excited to see I made a good choice!
I’ve tried to get into ham radio, but there is basically no one certified in my country, the closest place i can get certified is 270 km away… it’s not fun if you are basically speaking to yourself.
I’m not sure I understand, the whole point is to talk to people very far away.
You often have to have a liscence to operate radio equipment of that type, which required you to be certified, the person that would certify him is 270km away
Wow, that’s what cooler than I ever would have thought. Thanks for sharing!
Oh wow…
Literally ANY hobby can seem boring to most people, but it wouldn’t be a hobby if people that got into it didn’t find it interesting as all hell.
I came here to suggest something, but you obviated the need. Well done. You out-thought the experiment.
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.
Birding, you’ll be truly surprised by the variety of just birds around you. Perks: it gets you out on trails, low cost of entry (binoculars), the data you produce of birds is used for research, and you’re just observing so you don’t need to worry about harming animals.
Just don’t try to take pictures. That’s a money pit.
Not sure if you are into board games but Wingspan is pretty fun. Really got me fascinated with different birds.
Birding is pretty cool. I enjoy it.
Can you explain a bit more about producing data that helps researchers? That’s intriguing to me.
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.
Genuine question: when did birdwatching/ornithology become birding?
Birding sounds like a not so distant cousin to dogging.
This was a relatively short-term thing, but I think it counts loosely as hobbyish… in my 20s, I was determined to find the best bloody mary in town. I went to every single bar, restaurant, etc. and tried each one in turn.
Which sounds boring, I know, but I had so many great conversations and met so many interesting people.
And to answer your likely question: Surprisingly, Red Lobster, which made its own mix from real tomato juice and didn’t use some crappy bloody mary mix. This was in the 90s, so I can’t endorse their current bloody mary.
We used to do that - try to decide who had the best tortilla soup, tiramisu, burger, tacos, … Very fun!
etymology
etymology
Give us your best word origin.
Not that person but I always enjoyed helicopter, because it’s broken down into helico and pter
Helico means spinning and pter means pter
Maybe you were just deliberately baiting for this, but no!
Helicopter’s etymology actually breaks down into helico and pter. Helico being cognate with helix, and pter being “flying”, from the same root as pterodactyl (flying finger).
Great, and now I want a heliodactyl.
etymology jokes on Lemmy… ive Waited for this day for so long
Super interesting.
Does that mean that we’re pronouncing either helicopter or pterodactyl wrong? We don’t say the ‘pter’ parts the same way I think?
nah there’s no “wrong” for a common native pronunciation. but for silent p- words specifically, the /pt/ and /ps/ consonant clusters just don’t occur at the start of words in English. so the p goes silent in those words. pterodactyl, psychology. but in languages like Greek and German they do occur!
Depends on whether the o is before the p or after the r.
I thought heli is more like a screw. (Not claiming that it is, but that was my understanding)
The word is not “heli” though. It’s “helico”.
Like in the helicoprion (a shark with a spiral think on it’s mouth) or a helicograph (a tool to draw spirals).
A screw (thread) is a subset, as is a circle, but the inference is the blades are fixed in all but one rotational axis and so spin
The actual explanation of “a curve on the surface of a cylinder or cone such that its angle to a plane perpendicular to the axis is constant” doesn’t really work here
Pterodactyl - Pter Finger!
Then there’s choleodoptera and lepidoptera.
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.
Whiskey is similar. It comes from the Gaelic uisge beatha which means water of life.
Water is the main ingredient of vodka.
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.
“Poultry” though
Good point, I forgot about that.
There are other funny things going on in animal names.
A “chicken” is a young “cock”, just as a “kitten” is a young “cat”.
And a “rabbit” was a young “coney” — which rhymes with “honey”.
But folks got prudish and they didn’t want to talk about cocks and coneys in front of the kids, so words like “chicken” and “rabbit” took over.
Meanwhile over at the pig farm, how does a farmer call a hog?
They holler “Soo-ee!”, right?
They’re speaking Latin. That’s “Sui!” — the vocative form of “sus”, Latin for pig. Folks have been talking to their pigs in Latin for a long, long time.
That’s “Sui!” — the vocative form of “sus”, Latin for pig.
Everywhere I go, I see his face…
ඞ
holy shit would you look at that
So a bunny rabbit is a bunny coney?
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.
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.
Etymology is fascinating. My dad had the full version of the OED when I was a kid (compressed down so that 4 pages fit on 1 page in the volume, but it was still in 2 volumes plus a supplement). I loved it. I looked up the history of words I didn’t know all the time.
I have a circle of friends that LOVE this. It kinda gets annoying when literally every conversation turns into a discussion on linguistics. It was interesting at first, but too much of a good thing and all that.
Etymology is interesting, I agree. I also find language in general fascinating. You might consider studying some basic linguistics, either academically or via youtube. How language works is really interesting, IMHO.
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.
generation of neologisms
Ngl, I had to look up what neologism meant, but now I know that it = new words, expressions or usages.
It fascinates me how fast language is changing. When I was young verse was never used as a verb, as in “today we are versing another team”.
Or the word “meme” has completely changed meaning in less than two decades. It’s like watch evolution on fast-forward.
Verbing nouns is like rizzing language.
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
https://www.etymonline.com/ for those interested.
Self Hosting. I love optimizing my securing my life while improving my family’s privacy. Nextcloud to store and backup media, contacts, and knowledge base. Hosting a free remote VPN on OCI, remote encrypted backups to a fellow enthusiast’s server…I love that while my data is local, if my house was to burn down, the years of pictures and precious memories will still be available. I also like being able to use this tech to help people close to me, doing backups for them, sharing ISO’s, etc.
Yes! It’s a hobby that can go as deep as you want it to.
Though it doesn’t produce physical outputs like many others :/
Once you start getting deeper into computational and stored requirements the costs really start to shoot up. Networking, device management, storage management, power usage, heat & noise, orchestration…etc
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 :)
Where do you host your nextcloud?
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
hardware hacking, it feels like you are trying to solve a weird puzzle in which sometimes even the dumbest things may work, and at the end you have a device you can do whatever you want with.
i can see though why people may find it tedious.
Home Automation. It can be as simple as buying a hub and some devices. But, I went the self-hosted route using Home Assistant to give me more control of what it can do.
I have some automations that turn on a certain set of lights on when the sun sets and off when it rises. It’s pretty simple, but saves electricity because I used to leave my front porch light on 24/7.
I just set up an automation last night that sends me a discord notification when the laundry machine finishes and the same for the dryer. I can’t hear the beeping because I am always too far from the laundry room. This one has me so excited!
I’ve seen people automate gardens which seems really neat. Really, your only limit is your imagination. I also just really like having an app on my phone to toggle power to random lights and fans around my house. It helps me get out of bed because I can turn the fan off when I’m cold in bed.
My favourite one I’ve done so far: I put a motion sensor near where my cat goes every morning when she wants to look outside. This then opens the blinds enough for her to see.
This works better than a simple timer because the blinds are loud enough to wake us up sometimes and she doesn’t want to necessarily look outside every day.
That’s honestly adorable. I love it!
Shit gets so crazy, I wish I had the tenacity to self host.
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.
My people! I knew I was starting to get into it when I built some multisensors and a garage door switch controlled by esp32s. Still haven’t done too many very complex things with automations, basically situational lighting and so on.
Did you use OpenGarage?
I’m messing with domoticz, but looking to home automation as well. I got an RF link from a colleague and I’m now managing light via the socket units of 3 mutual incompatible systems and it works great. I’m thinking of combining it with zigbee and see if I can do more nice things, as range is my biggest issue now.
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 just had the Dutch system Klik aan klik uit (kaku), both the old and the new units. Those 2 versions are incompatible and this way I can use both. I used just the new system, but with adding the old units as well I can now make nicer scenes. (turn lights on in a natural ‘entering the room’ order and turn them off the other way around, mimicking leaving the same room.
I’m just messing about as well and I don’t want to use wifi, that’s why I’m half looking at zugbee. (And Ikea uses that system, so I guess it’ll be available for a while)
I was worried about drowning out my network with Wi-Fi devices but I don’t want to invest in Z-Wave or Zigbee unless Thread falls through. Here’s to hoping 🤞
Here it’s just rf433 for now. No need for more (apart from messing around with new stuff). As far as I understand Zigbee doesn’t use wifi, but it can be in the 2.4 GHz band.
I would love to get into HA more, and I have it installed and working on my RPi, but the technical aspects are overwhelming. I’m very techy but I wish HA had a “simple” mode the same way my 3D printing software does. That allowed me to become actually decent at printing at a reasonable pace.
I feel like I usually am just pressing buttons on a website. But, I admit it can be a bit confusing…
The Discord notification thing actually is actually a really cool idea. That’s where it feels like it moves from hobby into daily practical use kind of stuff.
One question I have, if you don’t mind - did the washer/dryer come with some smart functionality, or did you have to do somethin like opening them up and wiring into the electrical line for the beep speaker to sense voltage?
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.
Hypermiling. The act of getting the most gas mileage out of your car. When you get into it, there are an insane amount of factors that play into it all, from driving habits, aerodynamic car mods, engine mods, power usage, tires, wheels, suspension, etc. the rabbit hole is deep, my friend
I get so stuck on how miles per gallon compares to gas use per time. I’ve decided that driving faster is better because my car is running for less time.
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.
Film photography. With smartphones having taken over the roll of point and shoots and covering the majority of people’s photography needs, it’s quite a different experience breaking out a half century old camera. Everything is more tactile, your shots are finite, and the result is a 100% determined by your decisions. Different films produce different results, and if you get into developing your own film you get to play mad chemist in the bathroom.
There’s a learning curve, but if you’re already into photography and understand the basics it’s really not that hard. Labs still exist to develop for you if you’d rather not go down that rabbit hole. The results may surprise you!
I started to get deep into film photography but when I realized I was researching hospital grade HEPA filters so I could put a darkroom into the bedroom closet I decided I needed to take a step back.
I love film photography and the fact that I recently moved a very short distance from the Kodak film plant in NY is slowly drawing me back into it.
I wonder if the local community college has a dark room I could rent.
I mostly shoot with a DSLR (or did, the pandemic has apparently killed a lot of my enthusiasm for that particular hobby). But I have occasionally picked up a film camera just to play around. It always takes me about half the roll to stop checking the results on the display on the back of the camera…
Recently joined an on-road RC racing club.
Gets a lot deeper than I ever thought it could. The mechanics of making a car go around turns better/faster gets very in depth. Lots of trial and error. Race every 2 weeks so tons of time to experiment with adjustments between race days.
Ages range from near 80 to 10… everyone out just having a good time and helping each other for a few hours. During winter, Florida busy season, we have 50+ people racing 5-6 different classes in a public parking lot.
Started with a used off the shelf car for $75 from a club memeber 5 months ago… now building competition grade kits and put up shelves in the bedroom for all 7 of my cars. Almost all used for VERY cheap that just needed a bit of love to be competitive again.
Very true. The same I can say about RC Drifting. So much fun if you have a club!
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.
That makes sense. How did you like rock crawling, also about the small one? I’m thinking about getting into that!
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Its different, very slow. I figured it would be a little more relaxing but definitely not the case. Anxiety builds trying to figure out ways to climb without flipping repeatedly. Florida is flat and mostly sand so there’s not very much in the way of natural places to run it. I resorted to taking rocks off of construction sites to make a small course in the corner of the yard.
yoyos.
So competitions are just a guy with a yoyo?
1A, one yoyo, typically unresponsive for loose tricks
2A for two-handed, looping tricks with responsive yoyos
3A for two-handed unresponsive yoyos
4A for off string (yoyo not tethered)
5A for Freehand (string tethered to a counterweight)
AP for artistic performances, regardless of the competitive style.
bonus trivia: Steve Brown, the creator of 5A, was on an episode of Wifeswap.
My favorite thing about yoyos is that they were sort of used as a deadly weapon in the Philippines. I say sort of because they were heavily modified.
they say its the second oldest toy in history, after the doll.
I have trouble believing yoyos are older than tops or balls.
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.
There’s an episode of Netflix’s “We Are the Champions” on competitive yo-yo, if anyone wants a 30 min primer. (It’s also just good entertainment)
If you haven’t been tainted by the mechanical keyboard hobby, be aware.
I started with a TKL with Outemu blue switches just to see what the hype was about, then moved to Anne Pro 2 with Gat browns.
Ortholinear made sense so I got an XD75 followed my a Planck after getting curious about 40% boards.
Now I make my own from printed PCBs and soldering, custom programmable firmware, and my own custom key map.
I now use a split column staggered 34 key board with hand dyed keycaps and custom aftermarket switches.
I own 7 boards now and have plans for at least 2 more and a partial split for gaming.
I’m sincerely confused as to why you would want more than one keyboard. To me it sounds like owning more than one printer, but even less convenient. Can you explain it to me?
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 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.
How do you make your own key caps?
3D printing?
Oh man… short answer is yes.
BUUuuuuUuut… There are several different ways to make your own keycaps.
Silicon molds for resin pours. Sometimes even multistage pours for different parts of the cap.
3d printing/laser sintering is also an option and probably the easiest entry point into custom keycaps.
Clay/Ceramic can be sculpted to make caps.
You can order blank PCB caps in nearly every style of profile possible. You can then custom design your own legends and dye sublimate then onto the keys.
Some actual lunatic even went as far to manually load every blank Keycap into a CNC mill to carve out the letters so he could backfill it with a different material of his choice (I don’t remember the specifics).
It’s a deeeeep rabbit hole.
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 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.
3D printing. You just spend hours looking at a printer printing things by itself.
Coin collecting/numismatics.
I can’t speak for other collectors but my focus is on ancient coins, mostly Roman imperials.
The amount of history and artistry in those coins is off the charts amazing, and every single one is like a tiny window into the past. To many outsiders it seems like one of the stuffiest things to do. It does require a good bit of research which can get a bit dry at times, but nothing beats that feeling of holding literal treasure of 2000+ years old.
