Asklemmy

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?"

Self-hosting apps / homelab

Getting used enterprise gear is not prohibitively expensive, but the electric bills balloon very quickly.

Knitting. Super cheap to start, you can pick up a set of needles and some acrylic yarn for under $20. But when you start getting into nice yarns and bigger pieces, you are spending hundreds of dollars on yarn alone for a blanket or a sweater. And you want nice needles in all sizes as well as all types (double pointed, regular and circular)… more hundreds of dollars.

Moral of the story is if a friend knits you something with nice yarn, please appreciate it. Lots of effort and thought went into it.

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 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.

Mechanical keyboards. The next one is my endgame, I swear. Just one more groupbuy for those keycaps. It never truly ends.

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!

Growing cannabis (legal here in Canada)

…anyone can grow weed. Growing GOOD weed is an art.

Board games. Things get expensive once you start collecting

For me it is maybe camping.

I just tested my new sleeping bag - under 0.5kg rated to -5°C. And realised that I bought/ replaced lots of gear to higher quality gear over few years.

Coffee. I'm in a coffee producing country. It could be as cheap as grabbing a bag from the coffee institute (really good and cheap), a cloth filter and call it a day. Instead, I'm on my second espresso machine, fourth grinder, second portafilter set, and have all the doodads to make it just how I like it.

I needed a new saucepan.

I've now replaced half my kitchen.

Cycling.

You can certainly do it on an 300€ bike, but who would want that if you can pay 300€ for the helmet alone.

selfhosting/homelab. Originally started just using retired gaming PC parts to build a server. All it cost was the power to run the system. Years later and with more things/content I have, I just added a 5x 18tb hard drives and 3x 8tb. Just the 5 18tb drives was like $1500.

Fountain pens - I started with a 30 euro Parker but it seems like just one is never enough.

3d printing. I started out with a cheapish Chinese model, got annoyed by the lack of accuracy and bought a Prusa.
Then there’s the filaments, accessories, post processing stuff... I own a Dremel now for some reason!
And I’m constantly eyeing those resin 3d printers, telling myself the higher resolution is totally worth it…
The only thing saving my bank account is my low attention span and dozens of other interests :)

Farming - family has been doing it for ~5 generations. I'd say we have put in about $10 M dollars over time (adjusted for inflation).

What's that dear? It's a way of life/occupation . . . are you sure? Seems like it must be a hobby given the return we've made on it over the years. Well, if you're sure.

My wife said that farming is technically an occupation and not a hobby. I still have my doubts given how much we have thrown away on it over the years, but I don't like to disagree with her (she's usually right).

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.

Photography.

I started to really get into it back in 2015 with a Sony A6000 and a kit lens. Then you buy more, higher quality lenses. Then you buy better camera bodies with full frame sensor, then lenses that are full frame compatible. Then the various odds and end accessories. Then trips around the world to take pictures of things.

I have taken a break from photography recently, on account that having a kid doesn't allow me a lot of opportunity to edit my photos anymore. They say the best camera you have is the one that is on you. That has proven to be true while I try to be as present as possible around my daughter. I can quickly take out my phone, capture the moment and it will take care of most of the post processing edits that I can share with family later.

Tabletop RPG. I started in High school, you need only paper a pen and a set of dice, right ? All the rules can be found online anyway, right ?

But it's so much better to have the physical books. And you need more than one dice of each obviously. And this nice metal dice looks very good. I obviously need different set of dice with colors pattern that match my different characters.

Speaking of characters, I need mini. I could get the cheap basic one of course, but the lead ones looks sooo much better.

And I obviously need custom models for all my characters.

Several years later, with a disposable income and I added maps, tokens, terrains, cards, ect. Even a tablet that I use only for this. I'm now limited by the storage place available in my flat (maybe for my own good).

Bicycling for me. Started off with a cheap old bike that I tried keeping in as goid condition as possible without spending too much on it. Problem with old bikes is wear and tear so things break and new old parts are hard to cheaply. So it became a hackjob. Then got me a new one and realised riding on roads only got boring so I started experimenting with gravel and singletrack.

Guess what? Time for a new bike. And a more expensive one. Carbon. And to maintain it I needed more tools. Also new tubes as the spare ones I had didn't fit that big of tyres. Also moved to a new place and now I got a MTB arena within a few km from home. So of course I had to get me one of those. And to maintain the suspension I needed new stuff, oils and tools.

Clothing. Bags. Events. It becomes a lot after a while.

Also planning for bike nr4, a steel fatbike. Promised myself not to buy anything this year, but the year is soon over...

Did I mention bikepacking? Yeah that is another big black hole of expenses. But a fair bit of overlap with backpacking so costs are split.

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!

I have autism and ADHD, so all of them:

• Cycling
• Bicycle touring
• Skateboarding
• Vert Skateboarding
• Freestyle Skateboarding
• Retro Video Gaming
• Drawing
• Reading
• Programming and Raspberry Pi's

That's only my 30's which is the last 4 years. Hobbies for me are normally short and fierce obsessions when I start, they eventually slow down into a more 'normal' pasttime that I do sometimes to past the time.

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.

Arduino and hobby electronics. It started out as a continuous loop pad dye machine to save me having to dye fabric by hand, strictly mechanical, but then I wanted to automate adding the chemicals at the right times. Then it was keeping the dye liquor a consistent temperature. Then it was draining the trough automatically. Then I figured out I could design my own PCBs and have them fabricated. It just keeps going...

Gardening.

Containers are surprisingly expensive. And you need a lot of soil to fill them, which gets expensive too. Then it's impossible to only buy the seeds you need, when there are so many cool varieties...

Making electronic music. You can get lots of software tools for free, so I started out with those.

Then I realized how many details get lost, depending on what speaker/headphones you use, so bought myself higher quality headphones. As in, quite high-end for normies, but obviously, I'm at the lower end for music production hardware.

Now I'm considering buying a MIDI keyboard, because those software tools don't quite emulate proper piano playing. Although, you could obviously also spend money on getting different software tools. And of course, on a quadrillion plugins for these software tools, to produce different sounds.

I'm just glad that my other hobby is programming, so when my music-self gets excited about an idea, my programming-self will want to solve it.
...and then never finish what music-self wanted, but at least we're distracted from spending money.

Data hoarding and self-hosting every service under the sun.

Making pizzas.

3 months, $200 of equipment and expensive ingredients and a day's work per pizza later and I can confirm it is 100% worth it.

Playing racing games on PC.

At first, it's just a few racing games with an Xbox controller.

Then it get more complicated with the more advanced racing sim/arcade and the controller isn't enough anymore.

Then come a simple wheel and pedals set.

But now the games is way more enjoyable, then up the difficulty.

Now I need gear shifter, hand brake, better monitor, better PC.

Then not long until I need a full racing cockpit to mount everything on.

And now, after all that is just the beginning.

When I first got into VRChat to hang out with some friends, I thought maybe I could survive just playing on desktop for free. Now, a couple thousand dollars later, I own a Valve Index, extra base stations and 4 trackers for full-body tracking.

Selfhosting media

Woodworking. You start with a few tools to fix things in your house, and suddenly, you got vintage handtools worth thousands of euros and you seriously speak of installing your "shop".

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!

Houseplants.

It started with a little green in the living room and suddenly turned into a full grown, humid, highly poisonous indoor jungle that’s thirsty as fuck. And it turns out that exotic plants, fancy pots, growing lights, different types of soil for different species, fertilizers, and dozens of liters of water every day are somehow expensive…

Edit: yes, I love it

Watercolor.

Children play with $5 palettes. Apparently I pay $20 for a single color tube.

Solving the Rubik's cube

You either get into speedcubing and get high end cubes to improve your performance, at least of the official categories and a couple must haves like the Mirror cube.

And / Or

You start collecting cubes and puzzles of all kinds and shapes (yes, even non-cubical :o). You start to acquire custom cubes built by hand by artesians or niche brands.

For the love of what's good in this world, stick to that one budget MJC set of competitive cubes until you are actually 10 or 20 seconds behind the world record

Music production. You start with pirated FL Studio and sone freeware plugins and the next thing you know is you're planing your hone studio with room treatment, expensive monitors, an expensive interface, aonther evrn more expensive interface, that one vintage compressor you absolutely need, a tape machine, and then you want I synthesizer, just a small, versaitle one, and next thing you know is you're buying the second euro rack for your mod synth because there wasn't enough space in the first one, because you need that one filter, and since you got lots of free slots now, why not buy some more fx. Fx can't hurt, right? And maybe one oscillator, you always wanted a fifth one...

House plants. Sure a few mass-market plants are dirt cheap, but soon you get into unusual plants, plants with special needs, hundreds/thousands of plants, grow lights, grow racks, terrariums, automated watering systems…

Started out with a raspberry pi several years ago. Got my feet wet with entry level, beginner friendly NAS prebuilds. Hunted for recycled computer parts. Now searching for and actively acquiring enterprise gear that is making a massive dent in my wallet.

Sex toys. My collection is worth more than my car.