Edit: so it turns out that every hobby can be expensive if you do it long enough.
Also I love how you talk about your hobby as some addicts.
Electronics / microcontrollers.
Took just a few months to go from, “I can make a wifi connected weather station for like $20 in components!?” to “oscilloscopes cost how much?”
Has there already grown a noteworthy Arduino/ESP Community on Lemmy?
I bought myself a raspberry pi for my birthday a few years ago.
I now have thousands of dollars in hardware sitting in a server rack in my office. Whoops.
Self-hosting apps / homelab
Getting used enterprise gear is not prohibitively expensive, but the electric bills balloon very quickly.
I currently bought an old desktop from a friend that I use as my Homeserver.
- I bought 3 HDDs for storage
- I rent a VPS
- I rented Proton to host mail for my domain, but switched to netcup groupware because that sucked.
- Some domains
- Electricity
Wow I thought it was way more.
One time costs: ~500€ Monthly costs: ~15€ Plus electricity, but I have solar. I assume it’s about 150€/year
But I’m a cheap selfhosted, but eventually, I will have a huge ass Enterprise Level Rack in my basement.
Mechanical keyboards. The next one is my endgame, I swear. Just one more groupbuy for those keycaps. It never truly ends.
I never got the appeal of mechanical keyboards. If you actually have to type all day, a proper flat keyboard like in the old MacBooks ('09-ish) is way nicer and costs much less.
Coffee.
I blame James Hoffman entirely.
Within a year I went from:
Drinking instant coffee at home, but really enjoying “proper coffee”
To
Buying a cafetiere (~£15) + preground coffee
To
Buying a Nespresso (~£60 on offer) + pods
To
Buying a budget espresso machine (~£120) + preground coffee
To
Wasting my money on a cheap manual coffee grinder (~£50) + beans
To
Immediately replacing it with an entry level Sage grinder (~£170)
To
Buying an entry Level “proper” espresso machine (~£700)
It took me a good 2-3 weeks of practicing and dialling in before pulling a good shot of coffee that I’d actually want to drink, but by that point it was also about learning a new skill, learning how different aspects of the process affect the end result and learning how to make all sorts of different espresso-based drinks.
My girlfriend thought I was nuts at first, but a year or so later even she agrees it was worth the investment. I still for the life of me can’t get the hang of latte art though.
The problem is now though that I’m a waaaay more critical of coffee from coffee shops, because I spent a long time making bad coffee whilst learning!
I can’t believe I answered “board games” to this before. Yes, espresso wins it over. I just got an espresso machine for my 10th anniversary (price too high for me to be willing to admit). And here I have a wishlist of $500+ in “devices” for it.
Like you, I’m about 3 weeks in and just now getting my burr grind just right for that perfect 26s shot. Luckily my vendor was giving out a free badass scale. It keeps telling me how bad my shot is.
I still for the life of me can’t get the hang of latte art though.
Ditto. I just got my first “correct emulsified foam” today. Usually I end up with hot milk with hot whipped milk on top.
Similar but different : tea! You go from cheap bagged tea to going down the rabbit hole of loose leaf variations, temp control kettles, brewing vessels and brewing styles.
Even low-grade Dragonwell is eyeopeningly expensive. And nothing tastes quite like it.
It tastes a ground up $20 bill soaked in hot water ;)
This is not the first post where I feel it but I love it so much that we have a lot of people on Lemmy that can talk about things not related to computers!
Except the selfhost crowd here.
Growing cannabis (legal here in Canada)
…anyone can grow weed. Growing GOOD weed is an art.
I unintentionally grow weed because I made some tincture for grandma.
Now it just grows on my garden and I can’t get rid of it.
One of it’s many nicknames is ditchweed for a reason. It’s a weed like any other. The US spends millions per year burning it out of ditches on the side of the road all around the country.
I’d be happy to burn it for them!
A little bit at a time!
Traditional painting and illustration! While I now know that I never needed to spend more than $250 for professional-grade tools, I’ve spent about $18,000. As for sales in 3.5 years, they don’t account for more than $800. For that I mostly blame Instagram where it’s not possible to grow anymore organically and get an audience & potential customers. So I moved to the federated open source PixelFed now, if anyone’s interested in my book-style illustration: https://pixelfed.social/EugeniaLoli
Also, as a word of advice for anyone who wants to also do illustration and don’t want to do the same mistakes that I did. All you need is:
- The Lukas 24 watercolor palette of student grade ($18). It’s good enough and these days most paintings are scanned, so even if not all colors are lightfast, it’s not a big deal. Few people only buy originals, most go for prints. If you’re going to go selling originals, consider the Daniel Smith primaries set of 6 colors for $40.
- A set of brushes of different sizes, including a flat brush and round brushes including a long thin one to do details, $15
- Pencil, eraser, sharpener, $15
- A set of gouache. Best bang for the buck for professional quality is DaVinci brand ($10 per large tube), or if you want to go cheap, the Himi Miya set for $25. If you go for the cheaper stuff, it’s still advised to get a better quality white tube, so it’s truly opaque (the cheap stuff aren’t opaque enough). So go for Holbein or DaVinci white for $10-$15.
- Soft core colored pencils, set of 48+. $15 (you will mostly need the muted colors to enhance the painting with harder edges)
- Grey, sepia, black ink pens, and manga ink brush pens (for some types of paintings only), $40
- 100% cotton paper for watercolor $25, or any watercolor paper for gouache $10 (gouache works on any, watercolor is more nuanced).
- Brush watercolor markers, e.g. Tombows or Ecoline – in case you want to do such type of illustration too, $30 for a few muted colors.
- Masking fluid for watercolors, $10
- White gel pen and white Posca pen (0.7mm) for white highlights, $15
- Faber Castell white pencil soft pastel, $4
- Caran d’ache Luminance white colored pencil, $4 (the cheaper colored pencils above again don’t include a strong white)
- Caran d’ache Neocolor II white crayon, $4
- A ruler, to help you sketch.
I included various mediums above in white color because highlights are king in illustration, and each provides a different look and feel, depending on the painting. Happy painting!
Playing music. Started on a shitty hand-me-down acoustic guitar. Got a better guitar. Got an electric. Got a better amp. Got a couple of pedals. Got a better amp. Got like 6 more amps, some cabs, 5 more guitars, a huge pedalboard, a cello, a keyboard, an audio interface, attenuators, mics, etc etc.
You gotta understand… I need all this stuff. There are subtle differences that you’ve never noticed before but will probably hear once I do an a/b comparison for you, and I absolutely must get an AC15 next to round out the collection instead of buckling down and recording something.
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3D printing. Purchased a cheap 3D printer to save money printing things instead of buying things. 5 printer print farm later, no idea why I’m doing this to myself.
I will buy a Ubiquiti edge router to move away from the consumer grade network gear, turned into just one more $500 server to complete my homelab cluster. Oh who am I kidding the homelab is never “complete”.
Data hoarding and self-hosting every service under the sun.
Mechanical keyboards. Picked up a keychron for cheap. Decided it was too loud, decided to change the switches. Then the keycaps. Now I’m ordering barebones keyboards and artisan custom keycaps. This shit is an addiction.
Selfhosting media
I am probably too late to this… But here goes.
Every damn time I get into something, I over do it.
I spent $13k on my kitchen stove, this one keeps giving, but that is $13,000.00 USD! Just for my kitchen stove. My range hood because it is required with my high output stove was $3k, and then let’s talk makeup air to replace what is taken out by it.
Or what about woodworking? Yep, I wanted to do it, and still do. I have a half completed work bench, and some basic tools… That will be about $2k…
Let’s buy a boat! Yep 29 years old, runs great… Break out another thousand…
But most recently, Plex… You know, let’s get rid of subscriptions… Yeah, this year alone I have put $900 or so into that. Yep I sure saved money on canceling Netflix!
