Mine is mapping. I am a big OpenStreetMap contributor and I have mapped many towns near me that were previously completely unmapped.
Philosophy and some sciences, but I’m not very knowledgeable. I know people say you don’t need to be an expert in order to enjoy things, and I agree, but then those aren’t special interests either, right? I love my music, but I know few bands. I love singing, but I lack technique. I like horror stuff, but I’m pretty picky. I’d like to be fit and practice sports, but my health is an issue. I like some beauty topics, but I’m not interested in applying them. I enjoy eating, simple food though. Some games are fun, but I mostly repeat the same ones. I like mountains and forests, but just for a day or two. I’d like to read more…
I’m really a master of none.
I grow bonsai trees.
For awhile there it was light sport aviation. I’m a CFI-SP and an LSRM-A. I’m a walking flight school, just add airplane. Been out of the game awhile but that was my specialty for much of my 20’s.
3d design & printing, electronics, cooking, in-person RPGs, woodworking, old time radio, sci fi, bookbinding, comedy… I got a million of 'em.
I also woodwork. Hand tools in the japanese style (im part Japanese). Are you a powertool user, hybrid or also hand tool?
Mostly power tools, but I’m decent with a few hand tools when necessary. Recently I mortised some door hinges with a chisel. But for the vast majority of my projects, renovating our house over 35 years, I wouldn’t have had the patience without power tools - I can barely hit a nail with a real hammer anymore lol. What kinds of projects do you do?
Tool making, and eventually furniture. Recently built a very large toolbox, chisel tray, lay out tools, marking gauges, couple plane bodies, saw vice, planing board (atedai) and saw horses.
Those sound like cool projects. Make any xmas gifts?
Does raising and training ducks count? I’m really good at it. I have care down to a science and I’ve done quite a bit medically because there aren’t any vets that treat ducks around me. I’ve rehabilitated crazy injuries, performed minor surgery, treated severe malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies.
I have trained all of my birds to listen to basic commands and they know their names and respond to them.
I would name a mallard “M’Lord” just to mess with it.
Next mallard I get will be named that. Even if it’s a girl. Gotta do it for the meme
What got you into that? How long have you been doing it? What kind of ducks?
I got into chickens when my sister started 4H, and when our chickens died suddenly, my grandma got us 3 ducklings as a gift without consulting anyone. They imprinted on me immediately and I was like, “I guess this is my new obsession because I’m a mother now.”
That was 8 years ago. I started off with a Muscovy male, a muscovy female, and a mallard female. We rescued a second Muscovy female a couple years in. I moved to my own place in 2022 and brought the remaining birds with me, which were the Muscovy male and mallard female.
I ordered some more ducklings and rescued a couple birds over the course of 2022 and 2023. Right now I have:
2 female muscovies: Mama Duck and Lady. Mama Duck fights me over eggs, so I have to pull a Skyrim move and put a bucket on her head so I can take her eggs without her attacking me. Lady is very sweet and shows me her eggs and acts all happy when I compliment her best and thank her for the eggs.
A tiny male mallard and his mate who is a female mallard that looks like a male but has laid eggs. Little guy is Sonic (because he runs SO FAST) and his mate is Amy. Amy went through duck menopause about 6 months after I got her, so that’s why she looks like a male in terms of feathers. Without her ovaries producing female hormones, her feathers defaulted back to mostly male. She and Sonic were rescued from a local family who couldn’t care for them anymore.
A male Pekin that doesn’t have male traits but I’ve seen his dick a few times. His name is Salt. He is a lil chonky.
A male khaki Campbell named Pepper. He was purchased with Salt as a baby. They were on sale for 25% off and were 100000% an impulse buy. They’re besties and don’t leave each other’s sides.
A female khaki Campbell named Capri-Sun who yells a lot
A female Pekin named Judy. She’s named after judge Judy because she’s always squinting at me in a judgmental way and interrupts me with sassy quacks any time I talk to her. She’s done this since she was literally only a day old. She has a distinct quack that has a squeak to it.
A female golden layer named Cayenne who is hella chill.
A female Cayuga named Fashionista who is slowly turning from black to white with each molt of her feathers (that’s normal)
Where can we sign up for duck tales?
I am a spring of knowledge about all of the domestic Real Housewives franchises (though I did just pick up Dubai recently).
I know all the lore behind all their relationships/alliances/enemies and off season shenanigans.
Its legitimately stupid how much I can talk about rich women who flaunt their wealth and then do trashy shit like throw wine in one another’s faces or flip tables (or scam the elderly out of their retirement funds to fund their own lifestyle).
So you’re like a modern TV sociologist.
Well thank you very much Emerald for the mapping and the great question.
For me, it’s something much more modest:- Amiga, or retro-computing in general. Not just for gaming. There’s something deeply inspiring about browsing the web or creating spreadsheets with entirely different hardware and software. Hoping to get an Alpha CPU and/ or an Atari soon.
- Dreaming of a better world.
- Amiga, or retro-computing in general. Not just for gaming. There’s something deeply inspiring about browsing the web or creating spreadsheets with entirely different hardware and software. Hoping to get an Alpha CPU and/ or an Atari soon.
Kind of similar but obscure operating systems in general are things I’m a big fan of like TempleOS, HaikuOS, AROS, and MorphOS. OSs that are more than odd Linux distros.
Something about the ARM architecture also seems really neat to me.
Do you have any neat videos or YouTubers that cover Amiga content?
Low level coding and free open source software for me mostly.
I’ve met some people who like to map areas on OpenStreetMap and I’d be interested in trying it myself but like with contributing to anything I’m new to I’m scared of doing something wrong. I understand that with OpenStreetMap there’s a sort of discussion of changes like on Wikipedia?
When you started what resources helped you, did a friend show you? Is there a tutorial you recommend for starting off? (If you explained some of this somewhere else please feel free to link to it or tell me, I haven’t read through all the comments here yet.)
I simply started mapping single family homes. It’s really hard to map those wrong, as its just an outline with building=house. This is the video that got me started. Have fun and don’t forget to square your corners.
Not OP but…
The wiki is a vast resource on every little detail that’s being mapped. I find it a bit difficult to browse sometimes, easier to get to some pages via DDG, but this may just be me. The Beginner’s guide page I imagine might be a decent starting point.
Though I can’t say I myself started there… IMO the easiest way is to just get StreetComplete from F-Droid (or Google Play…), and wing it. That app is extremely user friendly, and literally just asks you a simple question about something in front of you, and as such allows you to fill in or verify some of the details on the map. It’s capable of a lot, but not quite everything, such as adding in new “ways” (roads, structures, anything not a single node).
When you’re not sure about something it’s asking, that’s when “winging it” should be replaced by “wikiing it”. Or looking it up any other way, since there are now decades of confused people asking questions online for your benefit!
Vespucci is the mobile app people tend to use for heavy duty editing, or just to do the stuff SC can’t. This one has a much scarier UI. It takes some getting used to and figuring out, but really isn’t so bad once you know how the app and OSM itself works. You can download it early on, but maybe just to appreciate how easy SC is, at first!
To answer your question about discussions: each “changeset” (SC manages these for you automatically, groups similar quests into the same changeset) can be commented on by any user if they noticed some issue in your edits, or want to ask for clarification. You can go to openstreetmap.org and click “History” up top to see recent changesets that affected the area within your screen. You’ll see that most won’t have a single comment, but if you’re logged in, you can see the option to start a discussion on any of them.
I’m so shit at low level programming. Don’t understand a lick of it
I’m not good at it, but I like geocaching.
I just liked the trading of items.
I have a weird obsession with fonts. I love a good, well designed font. How it looks on the screen, how it looks in print. Nothing too gaudy or showy, but a really good League Spartan or Lato Light. (Not a fan of serifs)
Other than that, normal stuff; 3D modelling, writing, etc…
My other interest that might fall “outside the norm” is that in University, if I had continued beyond my bachelors my primary focus would have been studying the Bronze Age Collapse, and that topic still fascinates me to this day.
Edit: Oh…and spreadsheets. There’s no problem in the world that can’t be fixed with a well designed spreadsheet. All problems come down to data sorting.
Oh my God I LOVE FONTS
Spartan is a bit wide for me (see that w?) but Lato with a good colorscheme is always sexy
Another thing: if you’re familiar with fonts you can have a weird pseudo-Sherlock funtime guessing how something was made.
points This book is using Georgia instead of Times New Roman. See how the 9 is low? But the page numbers are Times New Roman because the 9 isn’t low. Was paging in the author’s control?
and
font with the light blue shading thing. This club recruitment poster was made in Microsoft Word.About serif disdain… what about LaTeX’s serif? :}
If you’re into Computer Modern, almost all modern tech variants (not Knuths original) are too light in print. If you look at his printed books from back in the day the letters are thicker. It’s just a consequence of using one technology instead of the printing tech the font was designed for. Same thing (but more extreme) happened to Centaur btw.
Check out the pictures of CM here: https://www.levien.com/type/cmr/gain.htmlBrick?
Anyway, maybe you have some insight - any idea why so many web designers prefer Light or Hairline now? Or at any rate the thinnest possible fonts? Did someone with credibility announce that thin fonts are actually easier to read, or is it just a style trend?
If you hate someone, teach them to spot bad keming.
Gawd, bad Keming is the worst!!!
I knew a guy who got kerned once. Know what happened to him? He’s dead!
A terrible way to die. My grandpa saw a lot of kerning in 'nam. Was never the same after.
I have almost no opinions on specific fonts. Except… I absolutely despise the $ and ¢ symbols in Apple’s San Francisco font. Since it’s the default font I have to look at it a lot.
Are the vertical lines angled? Or is that just an optical illusion?
they are
Ayy fellow font enjoyer! I have like 50 GB of fonts, I’m a bit crazy. Honestly, Noto Sans is the greatest font out there. Looks good everywhere
I like Noto Sans. But as a Linux user it often irks me too, since every…single…language…is included in most distributions; so half of my time finding a nice font that I just installed consists of scrolling past a bajillion Noto variants.
Haha, yep. You can uninstall the other languages if you want though.
I know, I’m just really lazy!
How do you map
Is there any liability? NSA, angry exes, employer, anybody finding out that you mapped your own town?
Why would someone be mad you mapped a town?
The reason I asked is because I don’t know what it entails. If it’s just installing an app and driving around, there’s probably low risk. But if it requires taking pictures of people houses or driving to private properties or parking for more than a few minutes in front of buildings, surely you can see the liability? I’m sorry I had to explain this, honestly. It feels like common sense.
Overblown/unfounded privacy concerns, perhaps?
Picking up new hobbies, investing in them far beyond what would be considered a casual interest, then getting bored or disillusioned with the community after 6-24 months.
See
- Foam dart blasters
- yo yos
- magic the gathering (This was like 15 years)
- coin collecting
- juggling
- pocket knives
- archery
- running
- Currently working on 3D printing, though that’s been more of a means to get back into foam blasters because it’s far cheaper to print your own blasters and mod parts.
And so, the circle of life is complete.
Metal guitar, comic books, epistemologies. A lot of people write off metal as just distortion and shouting but it’s a huge genre like jazz or classical without as long a history. Comics interest I stopped for awhile but got back into it and helped me learn drawing and story writing to better appreciate the artistry. Epistemologies from an interest in reading philosophy books and that was just the subtopic that always held my interest most.
And not to hang up on superficial stereotypes but metal is sophisticated too – a lot of the voicing/structure/styling is so classical-and-jazz that, with instrument switches, it can be indistinguishable. Don’t get me started on trying to claw my way through metal time signatures
Case in point: Dmitri Shostakovich - String Quartet 8 (guitar version)
I’ve had several multi-year long ones:
- As a child: Stargate SG1
- Adolescent: paraphilias
- Young adult: the care of high violence risk and cluster b psychiatric inpatients
- As I’m entering middle-adulthood: western esoteric spiritual tradition and philosophy
Young adult: the care of high violence risk and cluster b psychiatric inpatients
This is a fun one. Even more fun when you learn it by getting obsessively followed by a patient.
You might appreciate this story from my bro-in-law who is a former psych-tech. There was one really wily guy in his institution who liked to go where he wasn’t supposed to be. One time he slipped through a door that was left unattended for a few seconds, and led the techs on a merry chase through the building, finally ending up in his room, where he gleefully jumped on his bed, turned around with a big grin and shouted, “SAFETY ZONE!!!”
That’s hilarious. So they had to let him chill right?
I guess, I dunno.
Hedge laying. It’s a technique where you almost cut through the stems of the plants in a hedgerow in order to bend them down. This promotes the growth of new shoots and results in a very dense hedge, which historically was done to make sure animals didn’t escape or enter pastures and fields.
Wonderful! I’ve been hoping to learn to do this to replace my neighbor’s vinyl fence. What’s your preferred style? Do you recommend any resources for learning the skill?
I usually use the midland style because that’s the style I was originally taught by Nigel Adams and because it’s a beautiful style, if somewhat wasteful with the binders used on top. It makes for for a very dense and relatively strong hedge.
That being said there’s a lot of other styles each with their own histories and use cases.
If you want to learn there’s some books on the topic, though not all of them in English. For instance the Dutch stichting heg & landschap has a decent guide and overview of the most common styles and techniques in the Netherlands and Flanders (Heggenvlechten en haagleiden in Nederland en Vlaanderen). A very in depth one is “Europe’s field boundaries” by Georg Müller, but I suggest trying to find it in a library as it’s very expensive.
In order to actually learn the techniques the best way is to find a teacher or course near you. There’s a lot of videos on youtube and pictures in the aforementioned books, but those aren’t really a replacement for someone experienced showing you the ropes.
Is a hedgerow more economically feasible than, say, a chain-link fence or any other kind of fence, really (fences are expensive)? About the same? More expensive? What about comparative difficulty? Is it the kind of thing that takes years to grow out?
I’m not exactly sure. A chain link fence is a one time expense as opposed to a hedge which is a living, growing thing and so needs continuing upkeep. And yes, it can take a couple of years before the hedge is ready to be laid… There’s also the used space to consider, as a hedge is a lot wider than a fence.
I guess it really depends on your specific situation.
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