Mine would be creating pen and paper ciphers for my made up secret communication needs.
I am learning lockpicking for fun. It helps me relax. I used a practice lock at first, then a cheap real lock. I've just learned that my firearms lock...yup, can be picked open in about 10 seconds. Equal parts cool and terrifying. Locks are waaay less secure than people think.
It has the same "internet hacker" stigma so I avoid talking about it.
Model trains. I don't bring it up because it's obscure, but I've definitely found there's a stigma. "Oh he's the guy who plays with trains". Screw the haters, I like to relax after work and do a bit of escapism. Eventually I got over it though and talk about it with friends, but it's not the first thing I bring up either
Ha, and judging by the avatar you play video games with trains too! I adore Satisfactory
Most hours in a game by far, I think I'm closing in on 2 thousand. I'm slowly trying to kickstart !satisfactorygame@lemmy.ml again, come and join us!
My dad has been into model trains since before I was born. We built a train layout in the early 2000s when I was in middle school or so. Working on that project helped get me into electronics as we made PCBs for signals and control circuits. Now, 20 some years later, I work in software engineering. My dad wanted to get back into working on the layout and I'm helping him with Arduino programming and Raspberry Pi stuff. He built a stepper motor controller for the turntable and then we built some turnout and light control boards that interface with DCC. We set up JMRI on a Raspberry Pi to drive trains from phones and automate stuff. I also got him into 3D printing and he's printed a ton of new scenery for the layout after buying his own Ender 3 after using mine quite a bit. We've learned various CAD/modeling programs to make 3D prints.
I also finally got to do something I always wanted to do as a kid, which is to drive the trains from a first-person view. We have gone through a bunch of different variations of putting a Raspberry Pi Zero and camera module on an HO scale railcar. We did some different designs. Our latest design uses an SG-90 micro servo to control the camera angle so you can look left and right. I also 3D printed an enclosure for a regulator, battery charger, and battery that takes track power and powers the Pi.
It's pretty fun to be able to sit on the couch with a phone, watching the view on the TV, and drive the train from the other room including operating turnouts. Haven't yet tried to drive the trains over the Internet yet but I want to, since I live a state away from my parents where the layout is.
Edit: Here's a video of the camera car in action! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls-Rg1TlDOA
Very cool! Sounds pretty much like what I have started on mine, I went the full DCC++ route, have an arduino and rpi running the whole layout, with a few other boards helping along the way. At some point I'd love to do full automation of the setup but that'll be a while. What camera did you use for the rpi and train? I'm running n scale so I'm assuming yours would be larger
We built the layout when DCC was first coming out after going to a train show. We ended up picking up one of Digitrax's first systems (Empire Builder IIRC, with DB150 base station). That's still what we use for DCC. I designed a LocoNet to serial adapter (MS100 compatible, but very cheap and simple) in college (2010 ish) and we're using that to connect it up to a Pi 3 running JMRI. Our layout is HO scale. N scale is probably too small for even a Raspberry Pi Zero with camera module, as the setup barely fits on an HO scale car.
I have set up a DCC++ Ex setup at my house for testing and experiments. Just got a loop of EZ Track on the floor with an Arduino as the base station and another Pi with JMRI that is configured similarly to the real layout.
Here is an early picture of the camera car design with the servo. I've since condensed everything on to one car with a custom 3D printed design. I want to publish it eventually but haven't had time. I even 3D printed trucks with power pickups in my latest design (just had to buy metal wheel sets to put in them). I also made a tiny Python webserver that has buttons for different servo positions so you can easily move the servo from a browser.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/456/482/672/249/884/original/398d0e7f581517cf.jpg
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/456/483/176/756/180/original/3434f015434fb542.jpg
https://mastodon.social/@CalcProgrammer1/110456485998532640
For the DCC controlled turnouts, lights, and turntable, I built up an Arduino Nano based DCC decoder from a design I found online and a DCC decoder library that is available in Arduino. Since the layout spans multiple tables, instead of putting a DCC decoder for each table/PCB I just had the one decoder echo the DCC commands as serial messages over a serial bus that spans all the tables. The other boards (turnout controllers, light controllers, and turntable controller) all just have their RX pins wired to the decoder's TX and can receive commands that way. Turnout controllers are a mix of SG90 micro servo based ones and L293D motor drivers for Tortoise switch machines. Light controllers use transistors to switch 12V outputs on and off to drive bulbs and LEDs. Turntable controller is an EasyDriver based stepper controller with some pre-programmed position offsets for each turntable track (each track position is mapped to a DCC function address).
I'm into model live steam engines, I've dreamed about a model live steam setup but never had the room (or funds) for such a build.
I've found the Kato setups to be a bit more friendly on the wallet and have great reliability. I'd recommend that, a small oval with a kato starter set
I genuinely like to engage with video games as an art form and I think some of them are among the actual best works of art there is.
It lands like absolutely nowhere. EIther people see you as a capital G gamer, but even the capital G gamers hate you because they want to enjoy product, not art
What games you like? I do like indie artsy games but my favorites are games with it's medium in mind. Things like Undertale or oneshot, Or games that blend their motif wi incredibly well like the binding of Isaac.Or just extremely good ga like ultrakill and Skullgirls.
It's a sort of you know it when you see it (play it) thing. Something along the lines of becoming more than the sum of their parts and also using the interactivity that the medium provides.
When I played TLOU I enjoyed it but I kept thinking "this might as well be a TV show and lose nothing for it". It's a well made story, presented with technical prowess in an interesting setting, then it's also a sort of well made stealth cover shooter but it just doesn't come together. That's not to denigrate the individual efforts and art made there, I'm not saying it's shit, but there's just so much potential left on the table there. If you can 1:1 translate your game into a TV Show, like TLOU, why was it ever a video game to begin with, if you come at it from an art standpoint.
I don't know if you played Gothic or S.T.A.L.K.E.R., those are quite similar in how it's a great setting, well made (well, bar eurojank), the story is serviceable at best and for stalker especially veers off into nonsense at the end but crucially neither games would work as a book, or a film, or a visual novel. You could use the setting, sure, the art design and lore and stuff is solid enough to carry lots of interesting stories and have been used as such but it'd lose such a tremendous amount of what makes it great that it just doesn't work. The first episode of Gothic (TV Show) is a man who walks into a city after pullign some beets and buying his way in. Or possibly sneaking in. Or maybe he murders someone and steals the uniform. Sure, that can be well made, but the point of Gothic is that you have all these options, go nuts. Fuck, transform into a raptor and cause mayhem then revert to human in the confusion, game will let you, but that's the sort of thing that can't be translated to other mediums well.
I'm currently playing through Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor, that certainly goes more the indie artsy route, and I love it because again, doesn't work in another medium. What makes it great is that it hits the line between the trash collection being tedious and frustrating, but still engaging enough, that it conveys the feeling the little sanidrone would have through interactivity. It sucks, but it is your only hope. And then the rest of it is also just very well made.
STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl was really cool
have you played Pathologic or Pathologic 2?
No, definitely on the list though, I hardly find time to game these days
For me it's coffee. Most people see it as a daily need. When I say my hobby is coffee they always say things like "that's not a hobby".
I am definitely a beer nerd, but quite a lot of people are interested in those conversations.
Coffee brings up associations with hot swill at diners. Craft coffee or coffee nerd brings up a barista image, so maybe that's a good start.
Fountain pens. Honestly, most people look at me more weirdly when I mention a nib's feedback than when I mention the means of production.
I read tarot cards and I'm considering doing it professionally so I can rip off the gullible petty bourgeoisie.
Yes, Sarah. All the planets in our solar system has aligned just to give you a promotion. Now give me 20 bucks.
They seem like fun story prompts honestly. Could be a blast just doing it for fun with friends.
I read cards as well. It's a lot of fun to be able to do at a gathering, and I like collecting decks because for like $20 I get an artist's variation on 78 different themes.
I also follow a guy on youtube, dude was a student at Harvard Medical School, now he's a psychologist and teaches there. He likes tarot and other divination systems too. He says that the process of trying to wrap your reality around what the cards say can force you into new perspectives, and that even the act of asking the question forces you to focus on something that you're uncertain about, which can help you identify issues in your life that are holding you back.
Downloading and occasionally playing games from the flip phone era (j2me games). They seem to be mostly forgotten. They're basically the best alternative to the ad ridden, micro-transactions galore of today's android games and there's a surprisingly high amount of very high quality games.
An emulator called j2me loader on android. The best website to download such games is dedomil.net (recommended), mobiles24.co and phoneky.com.
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Use the 240x320 resolution and the sony erricsson k800i (recommended), the Nokia N9X, the Nokia 6xxx varients for the best graphics, quality and emulation stability on j2me loader.
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For touchscreens use the 360x640 resolution.
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Neat! I have a J2ME-capable phone but I haven't really tried playing games on it much. What are some of the best ones you've found?
The doom RPG 1 and 2 série , wolfenstein rpg, orc&elves 1 and 2 (in that order ) , stranded 1 and 2, Crash Titans, Crash Mutant Island, god of war : betrayal, the block break serie, the tower Bloxx games, the sims serie, Brick Breaker série, the nights games serie , space miner, any game by digital chocolate, glue mobile, Gameloft, EA (shudder ), THQ, SEGA..and many others.
j2me looks relatively more modern? What protocols were the old-school Nokia games like Snake written in?
I didn't know much yesterday but your comment sent me into a rabbit hole so here we go : The impressive quality of j2me games is because they ran using java through a middle layer called java 2 platform, micro edition (j2me) that allowed programmer to not care about individual platforms/phones but just use the phones capabilities through APis. This didn't really work that well because there was all kind of contraints. I vaguely remember reading John carmack rant about developing the doom rpg serie for different resolutions and the sound api being garbage.
Old Nokia phones ran on serie 20. It didn't run java games. It's successor the serie 30 had the capability to run java games but only the serie 40 made all phone run java games. The serie 60 aka SymbianOS was the real deal and kept receiving updated until it's death in 2012.
Sony ericsson phones like the k800i ran the java platform 7 (each generation of phones ran a newer version, the last bein java platform 8) directly on an Rtos (real time operating systems)
Knitting - if you find the right audience, you can chat for hours, but it can also lead to blank looks or lots of assumption.
In a way, my interest in internet privacy is almost always met with uninterested "ah" IRL. Even when I dont come off as preachy, when I just try to sell it as "watching YT without ads", people often don't care.
I find pointless bugs in video games. I can spend hours trying to platform in a single spot the game doesn’t expect, like jumping from a fence to a windowsill to lamp post to a canopy to a roof.
I used to be a speedrunner and still have some of that blood in me, but I refuse to skip content in casual playthroughs. So the crazy part is if I find a way to skip an entire level, cool, time to go back and do it normally.
I make music, but it's not really music anyone would want to put on at a party, so I don't tell anyone about it. There's nothing more awkward than standing there trying to explain to someone that what they're listening to is a chord progression played with each note slightly out of phase such that rather than distinct chord changes, you just get an overall impression of it as time progresses while they screw up their face in confusion and disgust. Not that everything I make is a conceptual experiment, but that's inevitably what someone will put on if they discover my music.
Damn bro are you me?? Haha but seriously, BoC is probably my biggest influence ever and I hear quite a bit of their influence in your stuff. I hardly ever tell anyone about my music because I feel that most people just won't "get" it.
BoC are pretty good, but I've bounced off every album since MhtRtC which I listened to an obscene amount of back when it came out. I didn't hate them, just none of them grabbed me like their first.
The SH-101 is a great synth. Which I don't own, but that rubbery, wobbly analog sound is fantastic.
A lot of "Voltaic Fauna Bodies" explores the theme, though there are some other, algorithmically generated melodies and things in there, too.
I really enjoy getting the most out of a computer/mobile device that I have. I love trying out different OSes, messing with a video game to squeeze as much as performance possible etc.
I feel like this is a lost art that was huge in the late 90's. Everyone wanted to see how many fps they could get out of their toaster. Now, it's not just the users but even the developers don't care about optimization anymore.
I was learning Gregg Shorthand at some point just for the fun of it and every time I brought it up people had no idea what I was on about.
I still dabble with orthic shorthand - it's kind of like seeing language from a different perspective.
I just looked that up. It does look like some sort of linguistic research.
I'm old enough to remember when shorthand was a required course for women in secretarial schools. I always though it was black magic and very cool.
In my 60's. According to Internet sources, shorthand was taught in schools until the 1990's. It's likely that shorthand use declined as PCs became common in offices.
I think it was still taught to business students up until the mid-90's in my country. That's also how I got my hands on an old Gregg shorthand textbook. That, and typing (via a typewriter) which was the one I learned when I was in high school.
Had I had a choice, I would have chosen to learn shorthand instead.
I only know about it because of my fountain pen hobby; back in the mid 20th C, Esterbrook made fountain pens with replaceable nibs and offered a wide variety including a Gregg shorthand nib. I guess the Gregg shorthand people licensed the name for marketing. It was basically a normal non, but branded.
That's pretty cool. Basically the same as enciphering something nowadays.
Hey! Someone left an old Gregg Shorthand textbook (anniversary edition, if I remember it correctly) in our house back when I was a child, and I tried learning it. Still kinda interested in it up until now.
Tried learning it again back during the lockdown days, but it went nowhere unfortunately.
Is that how Gregg's remember which are steak bakes, and which are chicken bakes?
I play bagpipes semi-professionally. The overwhelming majority of people do not like bagpipe music, and even if they do, they don't want to hear much about my bagpiping antics. One good thing is that I will never struggle to answer the dreaded "what's one interesting fact about yourself" icebreaker.
