Last February there was, in my opinion, a really uplifting thread with the same title¹. I'd like to see all the cool new things going on, and I'll steal the intro text from as89 to explain:
One where you don't care if it makes money or gets a lot of attention, but you are working on it regardless. I don't think I mean private hobbies, exactly, but projects that could or will be shared with others - you just don't care about the outcome.
https://www.shlinkedin.com
Dead Comment
Not a hobby. Makes money sometimes. I play professionally. For money. On stage.
If you play for your entire life, you can get really good at a ton of things.
I played pedal steel at a rehearsal for my country band tonight. I played piano at a rehearsal for my hot club jazz band on Monday. I played upright bass at a rehearsal for a string band last night.
Sunday I recorded a new track with my girlfriend, ambient techno (novation circuit, moog, girlfriend's esoteric warblings).
Monday I finished an EDM track.
I have a bunch of aspirational goals. I'd like to DJ at my local ecstatic dance. I'd like to front a Louis Prima style jazz band.
I've been playing trumpet and trombone every day for the last 2 months.
I don't care if I have any professional success. But hard to say all that is a hobby. Maybe I'll eventually be able to retire and just work as a musician, teaching and doing my little gigs and producing the records I engineer for other folks and running sound for the little parties we play out in the desert in Utah.
Don't care. My kids are raised, I've got a reasonable remote day job.
We'll see how it goes.
Started playing the violin in orchestra in elementary school, taught myself the double bass in middle school so I could join jazz band, then taught myself the alto sax so I could help teach my little brother. Ended up shifting my focus to DJ'ing, then picked up the guitar in my 20's and now I'm learning the piano. I own some synths, too, and produce Ambient music occasionally.
Most of it's for myself, but sometimes I'll spin in a club which is always a blast. I love volunteering with local club promoters to help them throw underground shows. I love putting together abstract concept mixes for myself and sharing them with just some family and friends. I love trying to bend some of my favorite piano pieces into some kind of abstract Ambient piece. I thought about pursuing it as a career and took some music production classes in college, but quickly realized that I really didn't want to bring money into the equation.
You could call it a hobby, but I think a better word for it is passion. There's always something new to learn; new methods of playing, new ways to build a set, new instruments to pick up, new records and artists to happen upon. It's exciting to know that I'll always be discovering and learning in an area that I love so much. There's also a strong emphasis on improvisation in most of what I do, and learning how to trust my gut without second-guessing myself is an area that's always up for improvement.
I don't need other people to hear what I do, I don't need to make a single cent doing it. I just need to be able to get lost in it. Aside from my wife and kid, there's no better feeling in the world to me than when I get that itch, that urge, that screams, "Go play RIGHT NOW," because I've learned over the years that, even if I don't know what I'm about to play, I almost always fall into that "flow" so goddamned easily and for such a long period of time whenever that urge hits. I love it so much.
I will say that as my kids got older and I got better, going out and playing for a little cash made it slightly easier to feel okay leaving the house.
Additionally, I've played with a lot of "Dad" bands, where Thursday night or whatever is how the guys get out and have a couple of drinks and socialize-- as an older guy who has raised kiddos and been through a couple hard relationships, one of the more rewarding things about this practice has been being able to have those social relationships with other guys.
And while I like your term "passion", I think that "practice" might be the better thing. In the same sense that one might be a doctor or a plumber or a lawyer. Or in the sense that we might do yoga or meditate.
I didn't start playing piano until my late 20s, and I don't think I will ever get to where I can play Brahms or anything, but that instrument by itself seems deep enough to explore for a long, long time.
My only point where I am just starting to depart from what you're saying here is that I am finding that, as I get older and find myself more and more invested in this practice I feel like I need to get myself out into the world more. Like, I just bought some genelecs last month, and I have a pair of AKG 414 coming today. Over the last couple of years I've accumulated an octatrack and asome modular synth stuff, a pedal steel guitar setuo, a double bass amp, a PA... all that's paid for itself. But as my kids have left, I also find myself spending about 2-3 hours a day playing trumpet and another couple hours messing around with recordings.
I feel like if I am going to spend that much time on stuff, I ought to at least explore how to share it with other folks.
youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVRpMo19NwYKloFhnw6QzMg soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/songshtr blog: songshtr.github.io
There is no secret. It just takes time and work to get good at an instrument or producing.
edit: clarity
> If you play for your entire life, you can get really good at a ton of things.
That's the thing. I think what ruined it was the concept that getting to the top required 10,000 hours of practice. That's prostitution, violin takes twice as much, and becoming the best at a very new skill can take only 1,000. But if you put your whole life into it, that too transforms what you can accomplish.
I’m a hobbyist singer/songwriter, and the forced creativity of having to write 14 songs in 28 days really works for me. Shameless plug, 4 songs in so far! https://fawm.org/fawmers/christmascard/
Thanks for mentioning this when I almost thought I did everything for money!
From the places I grew up, I can look at Townes or Blaze Foley or any number of folks who drank themselves to death following that line of thought. And those are the "successful" ones.
At some point I realized that the main difference between me and the dudes drinking themselves to death on the Armadillo Farm was that I didn't have to take amid-week $50 gig playing "into the mystic" and "brown eyed girl": we were all still playing the same shitty $150 gigs on Saturday afternoon.
I currently know of only 3 people using it, but I'm one of them and I believe this is something that should exist, so I don't care that I'll likely never evem break even on it. I've started a nonprofit to fund the project, but it's been mostly my own money so far. Working on it has been really fun and I learned a ton about how stuff gets done in the intersection of public and private sector - both positive and negative.
// For anyone in Slovenia interested in using it, there's an email in my profile. It's currently a closed beta, but everyone is welcome
Most of these cities have real time data, but it is from a 3rd party vendor that either tries to lock up the data or has a terrible app.
For example, the one for Steamboat Springs Colorado, a small little ski town, uses a 3rd party vendor for real time tracking information. But the app from that third party vendor is slow and frustrating. On top of that, it is a single app that supports 30+ small cities. If you search for "Steamboat Springs transit or bus" in the app store, that vendor's app doesn't even come up. As a tourist, no one has any idea that an app even exists for their public transit.
I wrote an opensource app that supports multiple real time vendors backends which I can whitelabel for different cities.
https://gotransitapp.com/
One bit of feedback on your website -- it's agonizingly slow to have to wait for the list of cities to scroll -- a bar or an arrow would be lovely.
If I put my backseat driving hat on :D my next steps would be to
a) Wait for things to take off, iron out the initial kinks, and become quietly successful, then talk to the city at a few levels higher to showcase the benefits of cohesive open data, or at least structured data - leading the conversation here might (?) be interesting, but fostering additional connectivity between different branches (while helping to frame the focal points of the technical discussion, which is critical yet often tricky) would leave a positive impression for starters, may also help with internal communication and efficiency, and will of course help everyone slowly lumber towards modernity overall.
b) Whisper "GTFS" in Google's ear ;)
I would definitely do (a) before (b) - particularly the slow-paced adoption and settlement process (maybe even quietly build the GTFS integration yourself, before making any noise) - to give the city the best fighting chance possible against involuntary infections of Chromebooks/Google Workspace/etc ;P around the time the GTFS people show up. Y'know, just in case. Good to have a position first and all that.
The reason (b) could be particularly interesting, is that - presuming there is currently poor or no integration (this suggestion is irrelevant otherwise) - running interference here successfully may (alongside improving transport info for everyone) wind up netting you an interesting position at the city (consistent, set for life, good opportunity for lateral movement and initiative-taking given your start point, etc) or a decent shot at whatever office/presence Google has in/near Slovenia (could be interesting, could be hit/miss, might not appeal at all).
It's entirely possible you're doing this because you're already in a solid position you're happy with, in which case ignore most of the above :D
And since the contract is absurdly overpriced and (unofficial info) charges for each conversion instead of simply handing over the conversion software, their GMaps data is often out of date. So currently, for at least one city, the GTFS file my system generates from scraped data is actually more accurate than the one they have and provide to Google.
One of my goals though is quite similar to what you're saying - to have the most accurate data and provide it openly enough that it takes away Google's (and anyone else's) power to come in and offer something like "we'll develop a conversion system for free if you push Chromebooks or GClassroom in your schools". Our municipalities love making deals that are "free", but actually end up costing far more in other ways and it really needs to stop.
I'm the kind of person that always buys electronics used on eBay, where you can get really powerful but 2-3 years old devices for a few hundred $. And, I find shopping for used electronics elsewhere is still terrible (how good is a 1yo i5 vs a 3yo i7?). So, I made this site to help me in that -- I started scraping eBay listings for laptops, picked out the specs and cross-referenced them to benchmarks.
True to form, I made this early in the pandemic for the fun of it (I'm not even a software dev), then realized marketing is boring and never shared it with anyone. Real life makes me busy, but there's tons of features I want to add eventually. And now I have a very interesting dataset to play around with.
Set and forget APIs that just work are kind of cool... maybe that's the moral of the story there lol
https://www.ebay.com/itm/125134793099?mkcid=1&mkrid=711-5320...
4GB RAM, 64GB SSD, and an i5-1035G is misparsed as 64GB RAM and 1035 GB SSD.
A flag button may be the most useful practical reaction to this problem. That way you can outsource the problem of faulty reports - and best case scenario even build up a following of trigger-happy users who are helpfully inclined to click the flag button in the future when the occasional glitch sneaks through.
Publishing the parser may also honestly be a good idea as well. Not the whole site, just the parser specifically - maybe with instructions on how feed in the results of small-scale scrapes (~100 pages) - so people can understand exactly what it's doing and provide feedback.
This is a very community-oriented sort of project IMHO, so by definition you'll wind up with a small following of stragglers if you hang in there; by the same token, it's possible (gain, best case scenario) that leveraging the spare cycles the community might be able to bring to the table may make it viable to maintain a level of quality that would otherwise be very hard to sustain long term.
Homebrew has basically reached the point where it's "critical infrastructure" for macOS devs, and it would really be a damn shame to see it slowly fade away just because the creator has moved onto other things.
Homebrew is critical infrastructure, which is exactly why it shouldn't change dramatically.
Now, if GP has lost interest in the project, or doesn't have the time to keep it running satisfactorily, I'd definitely agree with you - but I didn't get that impression from his post.
There are better alternatives, even, that are a quick and painless install process away. For example, nixpkgs is competitive with it, and does not include the Google phone-home supercookie tracking spyware that is on by default without consent in every Homebrew installation, and works great on macOS.
Homebrew could disappear tomorrow and nothing extremely bad would happen. That can't be said for the power grid or water system. Tossing around the term "critical infrastructure" for things that are important but very sub-critical is hyperbole that waters down the (important) term to meaninglessness.
I use Homebrew every day. Thank you for the the incredible work in keeping things ticking along. And congrats on still enjoying it!
I've been running siftrss for about five years now. It lets you enter an RSS feed, add a filter, and get a new RSS feed excluding the stuff you specify. I made it to scratch my own itch.
Originally it wasn't going to be public but I thought, "eh what the heck, it's only a bit more effort to put a simple interface on it." Since then more than 100k feeds have been created and donations have paid for the minimal hosting costs.
I do get feature requests from time to time,and I would like to fulfill them eventually, but for the most part I rarely work on it. I'd love to have richer, more powerful filters with boolean logic along with feed combining, rewriting of tags, proxies, all sorts of things... but I've been a software engineer long enough to know that the greater complexity would mean more people emailing me their demands and blaming me for their (mis)use of the tool. It just wouldn't be fun anymore. It'd be another chore.
I've thought about trying to monetize it but 1) it seems unlikely that it'd ever amount to anything substantial, 2) probably wouldn't be worth the effort, and 3) kind of feels against the spirit of RSS.
I guess in some sense it has succeeded, but in reality it succeeded on day one when I was able to use it myself.
Regarding the OP, I'm building LinkLonk to test out a different mechanism for cultivating trust among strangers and for discovering interesting stuff along the way. I wouldn't say I don't care whether it gets attention. That's the whole point of the experiment - to find out if it is a viable alternative to the AI driven feed. I am prepared though to maintain it for years and not looking to "fail fast".
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This time I wanted to make a full-on project with professionally-done models, art, music etc. It's a reverse of the 4X formula - rather than starting as a small country and becoming a vast empire over the course of the game you start off heading a vast empire that's on the brink of collapse and you've got to try and prevent that from happening as long as you can.
I've never run a project with this kind of scope - I've been on them but when you're actually making the decisions it's a real change in perspective.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1830290/Fall_of_an_Empire...
Neat. Reminds me of some of the scenarios in the old Simcity where you became mayor of a big city with _issues_ and had to turn the ship around.
The other part is the macro-level stuff that you see more of when you're zoomed out. I did the landscape using Quadspinner Gaea to simulate erosion based on a heightmap I drew with the basic shapes I wanted. Gaea lets me do a colour map based on terrain features, which I added on top of the small detail, and an 8K normal map which I blend with the detail normals based on the distance to the camera. The normal map adds a lot of little hills and valleys that are normally invisible since they're only small variations in the height map.
As it appears to be targeted only for Windows, I will not be able to try it (on Mac). But the premise sounds good and pretty unique!
Best of luck with it.
Come to think of it, there's really no reason I can't release it on Mac since it's Unreal Engine, apart from me not owning a new model that can run it. If the game's a success (hopefully!) it would definitely be worth getting one so I can build for it.
You have set the release date to Nov, 2022 - when did you start working on it i.e. how much time is needed for a game like this?
Also, how much expirience have you had with UE or any other game engine before starting this project?
Do you do everything by yourself (art, music etc.) or do you buy / use free stuff from someone else?
November is the release date because if I don't set one I'll be more likely to get sidetracked, so I wanted to be concrete about it.
I didn't have that much experience with UE, I'd played around a bit in school and uni but I didn't make anything substantial with it, and I did the same in Unity. Everything is custom-made for the game except for a save game system, since UE's save game stuff works well for smaller-scale projects but kind of breaks down when you've got to save hundreds of cities, armies, etc.
I did the environment and static assets by myself, but I'm no good at illustration or music and I got some great artists to do that instead of me.
Lots of riders are elderly and find themselves sitting on the curb, feet in the gutter, as they wait for transit. Studies suggest that perceived wait time increases by 30%+ when riders are forced to stand while they wait. There's no cheaper way to shave several minutes off of perceived trip time, for every trip.
Inspired by https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam....
Antipathy towards the homeless ends up harming other citizens: "If we add a bench there, the homeless could sit/sleep there, and we'd have to look at them". The result is lack of benches, or ones that are incredibly user-hostile.
I've been through so many places where it's nearly impossible to find a place to sit for free. You just walk and walk and walk, until you're ready to spend 4-6$ to sit inside a business.
Benches have no economic value. You just sit there for free - you loiter - for as long as you want with no expectation of buying anything. Yet they provide undeniable value to their users.
I've made a habit of mapping benches on Open Street Map. Have you considered adding yours there, or updating the bus stops accordingly? StreetComplete lets you do it easily.
Now that you've made me think about this, I can only place one bus stop with a half covered "perch" within a few kilometres of my house. All of the others are just a sign in the grass verge, or a wind exposed perspex cover in a couple of cases. Sadly, it hadn't even occurred to me how unhelpful that it is for many of the people that rely on busses.