I mean like awareness that, just under the surface, there are deep explorations waiting for the right time and place to emerge; things you’ve set aside or placed on the back burner but will tackle eventually/many you already have tackled.
Are you deeply self aware of these interests like some kind of list? If so, are these interests deeply connected in your mind to your past explorations and interests like some kind of road map or branching tree structure of thought?
I kinda do, yeah. But I’m not sure if I’m referring to the same kind of thing as you.
I really want to:
- Do standup comedy
- Make and play music
- Publish some sci fi books
Trouble is, any time I start to engage in any of this work, it feels so good that it scares me. I don’t know what it is, but I’m unable to do things I truly, deeply enjoy without getting freaked out and overwhelmed.
Stuff I kinda like but mostly just feel like an idiot doing, like smoking pot, playing video games, and dicking around here, I can do all day.
What about it makes you freaked out or overwhelmed?
Maybe circuit board design.
I’ve hand etched a few basic boards in the past, but I’d like to do a few “properly” using some CAD tool and have them professionally fabbed.
So far each time I’ve tried, I have failed to wrap my brain around the CAD workflow and after a few weeks I give up in frustration and move on to something different.
You have to start smaller, and specifically, you need to plan on a minimum of fully redesigning the entire board twice, three times if you want to get it to a really good state.
You’re largely guessing what will be the optimum configuration for routing. After the first work through, it will be obvious here major circuit blocks need to be routed to make the design work at all or, at least, make sense. The second time through things will fall in place much more quickly as you’ll know where the major problems are and start by routing them. At this point, with a little experience and thought you’ll probably see the last major issues related to things like ground loops and likely electrical noise issues that can be solved if you completely redo the design.
If you start out like this, you’ll likely start thinking about your designs inside isolated little circuit blocks, like the power, analogue, digital, communications, sensors, etc. Then you can start simply redesigning these little blocks as needed while you also start saving these blocks in KiCAD and dropping them into future designs with minimal changes.
Once upon a time, I saw someone say “design is done in blocks” and I tried to start out like this, but that was ineffective for me. I needed to learn how everything fit together first and that made the blocks design methodology click.
Just as a few tips, make your traces as large as you can/defaults are way too small, make your through hole pads much larger so you can desolder stuff several times without lifting a pad, and route a ground trace through absolutely everywhere possible and connect it to as solid an infill plane as possible, use 0R connections to save yourself from mistakes in routing and add an easy location for pull up resistors. Finally, print absolutely ever design on paper with the back side inverted, and glue this to a piece of card stock like cardboard. It can be from any food packaging like a cereal box. Then use a drill or awl to make all of your holes, place your components, and check the fitments inside your project enclosure, this alone will save you MANY mistakes.
GL
Thank you. I’ll keep that advice in mind when I get brave enough to try again.
Idk what tools you’ve tried but there are some that are pretty easy to use. I personally enjoy LibrePCB, but I think Fritzing might be easier and it even has a protoboard thing that’s really cool.
One thing I’d suggest, is learning how to do the schematics stuff first (if you don’t yet,) I feel like this is what helps the most in understanding these tools. I don’t have an electronics background, so this was holding me back at the beginning, now I find them super intuitive.
As a side note, be careful with those acids - aside of being dangerous to handle, disposing them improperly is super destructive to the environment.
The schematics are no problem for me, I’ve been drawing those by hand since the '80s.
It’s the steps between that and generating the Gerbers that mess up my mind.
I identify interesting rabbit holes as I go, and I do eventually pursue some of them when the timing is right. It’s not really subconscious though, conscious me is making those decisions.
Reverse Engineering Software.
It’s been on my bucket lists for ages, but I never found the time. I’ve stuck my thumb into numerous tech pies, but I’ve never finished a crack me. I’ve done binary patching to skip bunches of code to call other code, but that’s not quite the same.
Metal casting.
I have some steel and aluminum cans and a 3-D Printer. I’m good at blender, FreeCAD, and tweaking prints, but I haven’t setup a foundry to make some solid metal parts. Yet. But I’m pretty sure I want to.
Warhammer miniature painting is a hobby I intend to pick up when I retire in 20 years.
Sorta related, I’ve made a conscious decision not to get into programming. I know myself, I couldn’t possibly dabble. If I cracked open that box, I would deep dive so hard that it would consume my life, I would have no self control. That’s not the kind of life I want to live. I try actively not to learn too much about the inner workings of software when I use it, for fear of falling down the rabbit hole.
I find new hobbies that involve sitting at my computer constantly. I get really into one for a while, and spend a few hundred on a cool piece of equipment. I usually get board and move on to something else by the time the equipment arrives…
I mean, probably Linux at some point. I’ve dipped my toes in as a complete novice, but I expect I’ll take the full dive eventually.
What’s funny is that I have installed Linux on many of my family’s computers and they have NEVER ever felt the need to go back to Windows. They probably think it’s just Windows but I took the trash out of it. It just works and it’s amazing.
Distro recs? I’m like @The_Picard_Maneuver insofar as it’s something I think I’ll get around to one day, but I’m not in IT and want something super stable.
Usually the most common recommendation for new users is Linux Mint.
Linux has been fun this year! Mint works awesome! I feel so dirty having to log into Windows for work.
I feel like I’ll probably watch that Mayfair Witches show starring Alexandra Daddario at some point, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Oh yeah. Music is one of em. Never learnt how to read sheets or much of anything about music theory. I mean, I only just learnt how time signatures work. I play the guitar sort of okay, and have a decent ear. But everything I’ve learnt has been by feel, and I really want to properly learn theory. I want to know how the circle of fifths works, how polyrythms work, etc. like, I have a feeling of how they work but I couldn’t really talk about it at length and I’d have a hard time figuring out why a section of a song sounded interesting. I dropped that desire some years ago, but with every new artist I discover I’m trying to break down how the music works in my head and often come up short.
Carpentry is another. Ever since I started playing guitar I wanted to build my own guitar from scratch. Then I took some industrial design classes in college and it cemented my interest in it. During lockdown I bought some tools but got distracted with other fleeting interests. Once I have enough space for a workshop, I’ll get on that.
Lastly, storywriting. Whatever I write, it feels like it’d be at home in a technical manual. Regardless of what language I write in, it feels stilted and sterile. I’ve been working on this one lately though. I’m DM’ing a campaign with a ton of homebrew and wrote and designed a 70 pages long handbook for my players. The ones that took the time to read it really liked the flavour and worldbuilding I did, so, progress.
Edit: forgot one, mead, and spirits in general. Made one batch years ago, with apple juice, cinnamon, and cloves. It was good after about 2 years. I still have a 2L bottle in my closet. At this point I think I should just bin it. For a time a friend and I were talking about making large batches of it and selling it on the DL as party drinks. Pineapple mead, mango mead, etc.
I have a number of interests that I’m not actively, or even lazily, pursuing right now, mostly because I’m already filled up with way too much stuff that I’m into and not really looking into properly.
Many are directly related to programming. x86-64 and RISC-V Assembly, understanding the dark arts of how graphics programming works (this video does an excellent introduction to the kinds of calculations done for 3D scenes), the bare minimum to make USB bootable “operating systems”, properly understanding Justine’s “actually portable executables” and replicating them with a different language like Nim or V (she’s a real programming genius), getting into game and software cracking (all I know is that you need a disassembler first, then most of the work is renaming stuff into human readability and organizing the code)… All of this just related to programming! I know that the 3D stuff is what I think about most often, given my 3D printing shenanigans and fiddling with Blender.
Related to my 3D printing, I keep looking into, then leaving for later, ways to make proper silicone molds, or 3D print reusable molds in order to create large quantities of tiles for square or hex games, plus modular terrain features. Printing them is easy, creating molds not so much. My limited experience with trying to press 3D printed shapes on a dough had less than ideal results, mostly due to the dough sticking to the damn print, even after applying oil and vaseline all over it. Might try applying varnish to the print before applying vaseline and try again sometime in the future.
I also think frequently think about stuff like making bricks out of molten plastic mixed with sand. This thing is easy in theory: no need to separate the many different types of plastic, just shred it all, dump in a big cauldron, heat it up to 200º Celsius, mix in some sand, press the resulting paste into the desired form or mold, wait for it to cool. The problem is that I can’t quite figure a way to make it work without spending 10k USD in heavy equipment. Then I think whether I should directly contact the local recycling center and ask whether they know someone who does these bricks, or if I should start a business with that, the latter option being super risky given my lack of funds for such a venture.
I was having similar thoughts about Nim and portability when I saw this Github project (it uses APE but it’s more like a runtime for software? though I’m not sure if actual usage is easy like other frameworks/libraries etc). Though honestly I will probably sooner do something with Godot or Raylib via bindings instead, which is unfortunate because the 2D polygonal style is not well supported* unless you keep it really simple.
I’m thinking about tinkering with low-poly 3D+mostly untextured models (vertex colors, see vertex color skyboxes as an inspiration for the style/concept) to sidestep the 2D issue (as it’s well-established in 3D). My mousewheel is currently broken, though. And I’m not totally happy about the idea of using Blender, though any 3D editor opens up more options (in-engine stuff is cool, but probably locked-in).
It’s also difficult finding discussion about Nim on the fediverse, particularly when people don’t explicitly say nim-lang. That and often Kbin doesn’t properly federate Mastodon replies so potential conversations are just broken. And I haven’t seen other languages that come close to the same feel, some scripting languages might be OK if their performance wasn’t a problem (and often there are options to help, but it also makes me question if it also wrecks their compatibility with bindings when it’s a different thing).
* = 1. Godot 4 has a still-in-PR-stage feature that can be used for art but may not perform well enough to be used for an entire project with MSAA, also still no Nim bindings. Also even then, the editors could be better (vertex colors and internal vertices).
2. I am not aware of polygonal tools for Raylib at all, started making a text format and loader but got bogged down on details. And it would be even more basic than Godot’s polygons, no animation aside from just making multiple frames and swapping (or maybe some basic transform effects, but this would all need to be done manually while Godot has in-engine animation).Regarding the assembly and cracking stuff, I’ve actually taught myself that (not RISC-V, but x86, arm, and a little mips and PPC). The way I did it, was largely practice by doing. Specifically, I tried to almost every weekend put some time into competing in CTFs. Focus on the reversing challenges, look for writeups on similar challenges, fail, and once the CTF has ended, read the writeups and try solving again. Rinse and repeat, each weekend you’ll slowly get better and better.
Additionally, start messing around with an assembly debugger. For me, being able to step through instruction by instruction and watch as the values of the registers change, made everything sort of click. Start with making your own program in c, then debug the assembly, and pay attention to how your c code got converted to assembly.
There’s also some decent books out there, I like NoStarch (there’s a malware book and also hacking: the art of exploitation, the malware book is more reverse engineering, but both should be decent starting points for assembly).
Btw, picoctf is a good starter one that is hosted year round.
The way I did it, was largely practice by doing.
For me, being able to step through instruction by instruction and watch as the values of the registers change, made everything sort of click.
This is exactly how assembly and reversing started to make sense for me as well. I just had to dive in for the words I was reading to start really making any sense.
I also agree on CTFs being a great entry point to getting those reps in. If you’re up for a challenge the Mandiant Flare-On CTF is a doozy. All the old CTF binaries are still up on the Flare-On site for anyone to grab and work through. The CTF is usually in the fall, September-ish I think? Definitely before Thanksgiving in the US, and the SANS Holiday Hack stuff.
cars to paint to engines to electronics hardware programming to cycling to fab/maker junk and other chains of interests
I took a deep dive into cars when I was about to start driving. I wanted something unique. That lead me to car mod culture. Some random magazine article claimed paint was the one thing most hotrodders saw as the impossible dark art in the hobby. So that is the first thing I learned, and owned a body shop… twice as little more than a dumb kid. I got into airbrush, graphics, and prototyping composites with fiberglass over clay too.
Eventually, I worked in machine shops even spending a short while porting heads and intakes for nostalgia dragsters, and built several motors. I knew carburetors really well, but put off learning electronics on a deeper level. When I had the misfortune of breaking my neck on a bicycle ride to work, (because what use is a supercharged motor in a car with a fat guy that can’t modify his own inner engine), I started playing with electronics. I had no idea how complicated that dive would really be.
Since then I have gotten deeper and deeper with Arduino, KiCAD, breadboard computers, Forth, Micropython, and etching PCBs. There are many aspects that I want to expand within these, but there are deep dives that are completely outside but related. Eventually I will dive into radio, and FPGAs.
I have similar chains of interests in cooking, astronomy, CAD design, CFD, self hosting, welding/metalworking/machining, and cycling, although the last one is limited. I know eventually I will dive into metal casting, ceramics, and will likely get a sewing machine and learn that too.
This all feels natural to me in structured thought and interests, and I am only scratching the surface. Looking around at others I grew up with, I thought we were all being a bit cagey or private about our interests for whatever reason, but I am starting to think I assumed wrong, and maybe I’m the odd one here. Not that I’m special or unique, more that I grew up within the social isolation of a conservative religious cult like group where there is no value placed on curiosity. So I lack a frame of reference. So, am I the odd one?
This all feels natural to me in structured thought and interests, and I am only scratching the surface. Looking around at others I grew up with, I thought we were all being a bit cagey or private about our interests for whatever reason, but I am starting to think I assumed wrong, and maybe I’m the odd one here.
Are you asking if you’re the odd one for having interests this varied or deep, or are you asking if you’re the odd one for being cagey or private about your interests?
If the former, no you’re not odd at all. If the latter, I wouldn’t use the word odd specifically but most people probably aren’t cagey/private regarding their interests by default. I was also raised around people who had a distinct lack of curiosity, due to what sounds like similar reasons. It is a bit hard to learn as an adult how to share enthusiasm for something with other adults, especially when coming from that kind of upbringing though. I guess it just self-selects for friendships with people that really share your passions though?
