Living in the US, we miss things made with Canadian flour, especially bread, and other things like bran muffins, raisin tarts, Sunrype apple juice, Oh Henry and Coffee Crisp, ... and even Nanaimo bars. There is decent food in the US, but it's not easy to get past the nasty stuff. Cheese Whiz only comes in a tiny little jar. Fruit and vegies are marginal quality.
Crap I guess I take it for granted when I make my bran muffins with Robin Hood flour 
that any one can do it.
Just the other day we tried sour dough English muffins, not too bad with peanut butter
I have lots of pcb designs on my list to do, new Hafler dh200 ps and protection ckts ....
that any one can do it.Just the other day we tried sour dough English muffins, not too bad with peanut butter
I have lots of pcb designs on my list to do, new Hafler dh200 ps and protection ckts ....
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A bit arrived at the same point as you EdGr.
a lot of hi-fi equipment, a lot of motorbikes, a lot of objects of all kinds, today I'm reaching a point where I want to clear my head and keep strictly only what I really like.
Since I was a kid, what I like is repairing, bringing a bunch of dead parts back to life, regardless of the function, the main thing is to bring them back to life.
I am one of those who think that the most interesting and important thing is the path and not the destination and today, after more than 40 years of journey, I continue to repair but to give to the people around me or to the people who need and therefore, to answer your question, my long-term leisure will be this for me.
Knowledge and experience are the greatest treasures and worth all the riches in the world, so we might as well share them.
a lot of hi-fi equipment, a lot of motorbikes, a lot of objects of all kinds, today I'm reaching a point where I want to clear my head and keep strictly only what I really like.
Since I was a kid, what I like is repairing, bringing a bunch of dead parts back to life, regardless of the function, the main thing is to bring them back to life.
I am one of those who think that the most interesting and important thing is the path and not the destination and today, after more than 40 years of journey, I continue to repair but to give to the people around me or to the people who need and therefore, to answer your question, my long-term leisure will be this for me.
Knowledge and experience are the greatest treasures and worth all the riches in the world, so we might as well share them.
One problem with programming is the vast amount of free software available now.
I use Visual Studio and Openoffice.
I used to sell a lot of pcb design software but that got killed off by free stuff and very low priced stuff.
I dont know of many areas where stuff is just given away.
Imagine how Ford would feel if I gave away free cars ?
I found the way to get around free software was to design systems that needed hardware too.
I have to admit, I like experimenting in the kitchen. My wife seems to like the results and I never seem to remember what I did to get that taste; it's ll on the fly. I'm the rankest of amateurs for sure, to the point where I know the food equivalent of the difference between a resistor and capacitor, but not much more.
A lot of the motivation is practicality, as the costs of finished items approaches ridiculous levels. I make a nut, cranberry, blueberry, orange (sometimes banana) bread that they'd have to charge $10 a loaf for retail.
One hobby, or perhaps more correctly "bug" that I've been bitten with is the acquisition of "stuff" with the intent of selling it. That goes back to when I was 13 and found this "bottle dump" near the creek edge where - according to that book anyway - I was able to pull some valuable old bottles. That extended to insulators (which I'd shimmy up a pole for) and railroad things like locks and lanterns, as there were 3 lines nearby where I grew up.
Anywhere I've lived has been in some part a junkyard, so I've usually got the "good pile of junk" part of ingenuity covered. The eye has a keen interest for this stuff and my one of my wife's descriptors is "hawk-eye", as I'm usually the first to see something that, "could be valuable". Occasionally I'll make some money at it, but I'm mediocre at best.
My latest affliction has been collecting guitars. I went...a little overboard with maybe 25? Probably half of 'em are losers and alas, with all the money I've spent, I could have got a couple-few pretty good ones. My wife forbids me to get another and I bought one tonight for $300. Whoops. My son plays and I can get him some nicer xmas and birthday gifts this way, without going to the <chokes on coffee> expense of retail.
It's a tough "hobby" to shake; she'd rather I spend time in the garden, tilling and weeding. I tell her guitars are like your flowers; everyone's different. I'm trying to kick that in a direction of actually performing with them, but as I've struggled with playing a Bm for 30 years, it's all the dead-simple stuff - hate all those B chords. I have a lot of classicals because I like their sound - and when I see what a real player can do chord wise I think, "yeah. right". I attended an open mic last night just to get a feel and it's mostly old fellas like myself, afterward I feel "I could do this". Show up with a different guitar every time.
I have some basic power tools; table saw, drill press, sanders, jig saws. I did join one of those maker spaces for $500 last year, but only "made" one thing. It's at a local college and I felt more of a donation to their having the space; "I can cut that in half here" without driving the 15 minutes over there. Oh and there's a catch; you can only actually "make" something if you can first make a drawing of it in CAD. That's 95% of it, the make part is 5 - at least to me, for whom making a drawing in CAD is about as attractive as getting a wisdom tooth out. Far worse than general programming, as you're railed into thinking the way of CAD-fashion, as that's the way everyone has done it since ANSYS actually had those big wide tapes on the metal reels. Think you can just right click on that edge length and set it to "30"? Forget it - that's done some other way...
A lot of the motivation is practicality, as the costs of finished items approaches ridiculous levels. I make a nut, cranberry, blueberry, orange (sometimes banana) bread that they'd have to charge $10 a loaf for retail.
One hobby, or perhaps more correctly "bug" that I've been bitten with is the acquisition of "stuff" with the intent of selling it. That goes back to when I was 13 and found this "bottle dump" near the creek edge where - according to that book anyway - I was able to pull some valuable old bottles. That extended to insulators (which I'd shimmy up a pole for) and railroad things like locks and lanterns, as there were 3 lines nearby where I grew up.
Anywhere I've lived has been in some part a junkyard, so I've usually got the "good pile of junk" part of ingenuity covered. The eye has a keen interest for this stuff and my one of my wife's descriptors is "hawk-eye", as I'm usually the first to see something that, "could be valuable". Occasionally I'll make some money at it, but I'm mediocre at best.
My latest affliction has been collecting guitars. I went...a little overboard with maybe 25? Probably half of 'em are losers and alas, with all the money I've spent, I could have got a couple-few pretty good ones. My wife forbids me to get another and I bought one tonight for $300. Whoops. My son plays and I can get him some nicer xmas and birthday gifts this way, without going to the <chokes on coffee> expense of retail.
It's a tough "hobby" to shake; she'd rather I spend time in the garden, tilling and weeding. I tell her guitars are like your flowers; everyone's different. I'm trying to kick that in a direction of actually performing with them, but as I've struggled with playing a Bm for 30 years, it's all the dead-simple stuff - hate all those B chords. I have a lot of classicals because I like their sound - and when I see what a real player can do chord wise I think, "yeah. right". I attended an open mic last night just to get a feel and it's mostly old fellas like myself, afterward I feel "I could do this". Show up with a different guitar every time.
I have some basic power tools; table saw, drill press, sanders, jig saws. I did join one of those maker spaces for $500 last year, but only "made" one thing. It's at a local college and I felt more of a donation to their having the space; "I can cut that in half here" without driving the 15 minutes over there. Oh and there's a catch; you can only actually "make" something if you can first make a drawing of it in CAD. That's 95% of it, the make part is 5 - at least to me, for whom making a drawing in CAD is about as attractive as getting a wisdom tooth out. Far worse than general programming, as you're railed into thinking the way of CAD-fashion, as that's the way everyone has done it since ANSYS actually had those big wide tapes on the metal reels. Think you can just right click on that edge length and set it to "30"? Forget it - that's done some other way...
That sounds more like a hindrance to your business model than to your hobby.
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I have an app that browses and plays music on my phone, acts as a upnp control point (operating Moode) and can browse my full music library via upnp/Minimserver. I can synchronise what I have on my phone with what's on the server via an SMB share. It supports genre tags and searching. I'm actually pretty pleased with it, use it multiple times every day, and have moved from actively adding features to trying to fix bugs and improve performance. It's taken 5+ years to get to this point, so I guess that counts as long term project.
Other than that I write software to do one off utility jobs like messing with the metadata in photographs and ripped music.
When I switched to programming as a hobby I struggled to find something I thought was worth writing. Money wasn't the thing, I wanted a long term project I could pick up and set down as I wanted to, but that also had some usefulness to me. I settled on an Android music playing app and some associated Windows software. I picked it because at the time I couldn't find anything on Android I actually liked. Their UIs were poor IMO (designing UI was a big part of what I did as a living, I'm picky). Particularly that, at the time, none of them could properly handle ALBUM_ARTIST and they all just wanted to present a giganttolist of artist names rather than do something that made best use of the screen width.
I have an app that browses and plays music on my phone, acts as a upnp control point (operating Moode) and can browse my full music library via upnp/Minimserver. I can synchronise what I have on my phone with what's on the server via an SMB share. It supports genre tags and searching. I'm actually pretty pleased with it, use it multiple times every day, and have moved from actively adding features to trying to fix bugs and improve performance. It's taken 5+ years to get to this point, so I guess that counts as long term project.
Other than that I write software to do one off utility jobs like messing with the metadata in photographs and ripped music.
Not stupid at all. Absolutely gorgeous.
Live Steam Shay !!
Grew up near Roaring Camp Railroad
and drove out there often to ride the Shay.
Nothing like Narrow Gauge twisting and turning
up and through the redwood filled mountains.
On another note also a hobby of mine in the past.
Large scale outdoor , railroad type = logging narrow gauge.
Logging and associated equipment the most fun thing to model
Build a live steam, Steam Donkey and you are my hero.
Home construction projects. Took on the biggest one ever early this year. Well, the infrastructure, utilities, temp housing, started last year. Had the builder put in the empty metal buildings (they did the concrete and steel) leaving me a blank slate. The barn and shop have had some work done as I could get to it with all the commuting - we get to move out there early next year and things should accelerate.
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@WhiteDragon- Roaring Camp is where I got the bug. Went there with my parents in the late 1980's and saw the Shay and was hooked!
I was working as a machinist at McDonnell-Douglas and going to school. Went to the LA Live Steamers one Sunday and a guy had a 3/4" Hiraoka Shay. I asked him where he got the plans and he told me about the Hiraoka book. After spending all day at the LA Live Steamers, I went to the hobby shop and bought a copy of the book. Made the trucks while working at TRW before getting laid-off again.
Reason my wife calls it stupid is because as you most likely know, it takes hours to make one part. After our son went off to college, I spent many Saturdays in my shop machining parts for the Shay. One such afternoon, my wife bursted into the shop and yelled, how much longer are you going to work on your stupid train? I calmly turned off the lathe and asked what she needed me to do and she said she needed help with a Costco run. That blew that day of machining.
Even though I still can't spend all day machining, I get closer and closer to being done and hope to finish next year. After that, I'll build some track and make use of that 1/2 acre next to my house.
I was working as a machinist at McDonnell-Douglas and going to school. Went to the LA Live Steamers one Sunday and a guy had a 3/4" Hiraoka Shay. I asked him where he got the plans and he told me about the Hiraoka book. After spending all day at the LA Live Steamers, I went to the hobby shop and bought a copy of the book. Made the trucks while working at TRW before getting laid-off again.
Reason my wife calls it stupid is because as you most likely know, it takes hours to make one part. After our son went off to college, I spent many Saturdays in my shop machining parts for the Shay. One such afternoon, my wife bursted into the shop and yelled, how much longer are you going to work on your stupid train? I calmly turned off the lathe and asked what she needed me to do and she said she needed help with a Costco run. That blew that day of machining.
Even though I still can't spend all day machining, I get closer and closer to being done and hope to finish next year. After that, I'll build some track and make use of that 1/2 acre next to my house.
LOL! A job like that takes several years to complete. Guy at our club took 15 years over building his loc. I spent about 3 years building this simple electric job.
This year I added the lamp at the front. But still some painting to do like warning stripes and a number and...
It took my partner years to understand programming was something that was a technical interest and a way I got to express creativity in the same way she did with making clothes or cooking.
She isn't interested in programming or computers (it's a real turn off for her) but accepts, tolerates, supports my interest because she knows it's important to me.
Doing it That Way isn’t a necessity. You can just walk into a bank, borrow a cool million, get them to cut you the check, hand it to the real estate agent - and they hand you the keys. And I could also stay put until there is a six lane highway going through my front yard. It’s paid for, right?
The shop, the barn and the horse pasture aren’t “necessities” either. The whole project has been on the bucket list for at least 20, 30 years. A LOT of DIY is still involved here.
The shop, the barn and the horse pasture aren’t “necessities” either. The whole project has been on the bucket list for at least 20, 30 years. A LOT of DIY is still involved here.