Mine is mapping. I am a big OpenStreetMap contributor and I have mapped many towns near me that were previously completely unmapped.
Retro gaming, data preservation, and open-source software. I’m a maintainer of several open-source retro gaming data preservation projects so go figure lol
For those who jump around too much like I do, remember:
"Jack of all trades,
Master of none,
But still better than
A master of one."
That has some truth for career/professional skills, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a lot of hobbies. Most people won’t achieve “true greatness” (whatever that means) in their hobbies whether they have one or hundreds, so why not just focus on doing what you enjoy?
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?
Wow! That is so awesome and I’m super jealous! I discovered a park semi-close to me last spring that has a bit of a Mallard population, and apparently seasonal Gadwalls. As you might imagine, they’re not super interested in most humans, but still super fun to watch.
I just become “good” compared to someone who never tried and then lose interest and try something else.
I too am a master of none.
Same here
What is involved with town mapping - do you have some kind of Google type camera rig on your car or a GPS device that automates the process and just drive through street, or what?
You use aerial imagery and trace the buildings, roads, and other features using points on a grid.
I watched the video you linked. So it’s enhancing existing maps - I was thinking it was building the maps themselves from scratch. A long time ago I worked with a small company that created digital street maps for cities to use for utility work etc.
It can be making maps from scratch. There are a lot of places where the map has no features, mostly rural areas.
Is that your own imagery, from drone footage for example, or are you basically copying Google Earth?
It’s from Bing and Esri. It’s not copying anything, as aerial imagery is a different thing than a map. Also Bing and Esri imagery is specifically allowed to be used for OpenStreetMap purposes, likely because companies benefit from OSM data.
Puzzles.
And everything is a puzzle to a degree. I love to collect information in my head and use it to solve other things. I used to try to solve them for the cosmos or for the world but I didn’t get paid very well to do that and I’d rather just solve little ones.Be it literal puzzles, trivia, cooking is often a puzzle of balancing flavors and combining them in unique ways. Software and computers are just puzzles on finding how the functions work and solving through it until you find that part that doesn’t solve right.
I make my own furniture pieces occasionally or garden. All of it is just puzzle solving for what my soil can grow, what do I need for the household or what can be done with the odds and end items I have left.
It’s fun to repurpose items, fix broken things and build new stuff and I bet it’s how lots of other people who can’t focus on things feel as well. It’s just another puzzle.
Trying to learn languages, Linux, gaming, and music.
I grow bonsai trees.
Show some of your best favorites!
Wild! This is cool. 8 years for a tree. That’s patience and dedication.
Mine is Free software. If I can avoid it, then I avoid nonfree software. This brings me a lot of problems but also a lot of joy.
Urban planning and old architecture. I could spend an entire evening just walking around older neighbourhoods looking at the level of detail put into the buildings
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.
My dad built a house out in the sticks. He initially built a fence out of pallets, but it didn’t stand the test of time. Upon looking into various fence options, he realized that even the cheap ones aren’t cheap. I don’t think he’s ever considered a hedgerow, so I wondered if it might be an option. Aside from the cost, I doubt he’d have the patience for it, from the sound of it.
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Hobbies, I have many interests each more important than the last.
i upload photos i take of plants, birds, mammals, reptiles, fungi, and bugs. The observations (photos + location + annotation) are uploaded to a public database accessible to researchers and universities.
I’ve been involved in multiple species range expansions, and i’ve documented both endangered and invasive species. Pretty fun!
The Android app is very good. The iOS app is good for uploads, but lacks a lot of browsing features like search filters and phylogenetic trees. If you are on iOS i suggest using it in a browser except for observation uploads
You can also upload audio recordings for bird and bug sounds. It’s amazing what you can learn about your local ecosystem!
iNaturalist
Thx a lot, I did not know about tis website.
I love iNaturalist. I lived out in the woods for several years and would see so many different bugs that I didn’t recognize. So when I discovered it about 2 years ago, I started taking pictures of every bug I saw and uploading them to the app to learn what they were. And then in August last year there was an unusual explosion of mushroom varieties in our yard. That’s the one area where iNaturalist is a little weak as it really struggled to give me good ID’s for a lot of them. But it should only get better with time.
I’ll see if I can find some mushroom photos to share here.Edit: one of my favorite mushroom pics I got during the mycological explosion:
With mushrooms i often rely on other citizen scientists rather than the ID robot. There are some very friendly and active mycologists who can be a big help figuring out an ID or telling you what to photograph next time to get better data
Nice! I hadn’t heard of iNaturalist. Over where I live most people use observation.org
Thanks! I will check this one out too
Low level C programming.
And also I know a lot about breaking video DRM.
And also I know a lot about breaking video DRM
Teach me :P
I know more about the Doom engine than I do interpersonal relations. Did you know you can completely destroy collision physics via writing over memory addresses if you shoot a bullet weapon at a stack of corpses?
Edit to explain: Decino has a great video explaining it in detail. Link is above, tho I’m at work and can’t watch it to double check. Poorly explained from my memory:
When you fire a hitscan attack (press button, gun shoots a bullet that instantly hits with no travel time), the engine does a number of checks for collision, range, etc. If you have a stack of actors (decorations, monsters, ammo, etc) and you fire a hitscan attack in the direction of the stack, it makes a call to check collision for each individual actor in that stack. The actors don’t have to be all on top of each other, it just matters that the hitscan line crosses over those actors.
If you have a stack of 129 or more actors and fire a hitscan weapon, the game will essentially overwrite parts of the memory address. I don’t understand a lick of that stuff myself, admittedly, I’m no programmer. If you have something around ~140ish actors in the line of fire of a hitscan attack, the Blockmap system for checking collision effectively gets erased. Projectiles pass through everything, bullets and melee do no damage, players and monsters walk through walls, and you can’t interact with things like switches. You can fix it by saving and loading, though if you’re recording demos you can’t save.
