Mine is mapping. I am a big OpenStreetMap contributor and I have mapped many towns near me that were previously completely unmapped.
For those who jump around too much like I do, remember:
"Jack of all trades,
Master of none,
But still better than
A master of one."
That has some truth for career/professional skills, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a lot of hobbies. Most people won’t achieve “true greatness” (whatever that means) in their hobbies whether they have one or hundreds, so why not just focus on doing what you enjoy?
Does raising and training ducks count? I’m really good at it. I have care down to a science and I’ve done quite a bit medically because there aren’t any vets that treat ducks around me. I’ve rehabilitated crazy injuries, performed minor surgery, treated severe malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies.
I have trained all of my birds to listen to basic commands and they know their names and respond to them.
I would name a mallard “M’Lord” just to mess with it.
Next mallard I get will be named that. Even if it’s a girl. Gotta do it for the meme
What got you into that? How long have you been doing it? What kind of ducks?
I got into chickens when my sister started 4H, and when our chickens died suddenly, my grandma got us 3 ducklings as a gift without consulting anyone. They imprinted on me immediately and I was like, “I guess this is my new obsession because I’m a mother now.”
That was 8 years ago. I started off with a Muscovy male, a muscovy female, and a mallard female. We rescued a second Muscovy female a couple years in. I moved to my own place in 2022 and brought the remaining birds with me, which were the Muscovy male and mallard female.
I ordered some more ducklings and rescued a couple birds over the course of 2022 and 2023. Right now I have:
2 female muscovies: Mama Duck and Lady. Mama Duck fights me over eggs, so I have to pull a Skyrim move and put a bucket on her head so I can take her eggs without her attacking me. Lady is very sweet and shows me her eggs and acts all happy when I compliment her best and thank her for the eggs.
A tiny male mallard and his mate who is a female mallard that looks like a male but has laid eggs. Little guy is Sonic (because he runs SO FAST) and his mate is Amy. Amy went through duck menopause about 6 months after I got her, so that’s why she looks like a male in terms of feathers. Without her ovaries producing female hormones, her feathers defaulted back to mostly male. She and Sonic were rescued from a local family who couldn’t care for them anymore.
A male Pekin that doesn’t have male traits but I’ve seen his dick a few times. His name is Salt. He is a lil chonky.
A male khaki Campbell named Pepper. He was purchased with Salt as a baby. They were on sale for 25% off and were 100000% an impulse buy. They’re besties and don’t leave each other’s sides.
A female khaki Campbell named Capri-Sun who yells a lot
A female Pekin named Judy. She’s named after judge Judy because she’s always squinting at me in a judgmental way and interrupts me with sassy quacks any time I talk to her. She’s done this since she was literally only a day old. She has a distinct quack that has a squeak to it.
A female golden layer named Cayenne who is hella chill.
A female Cayuga named Fashionista who is slowly turning from black to white with each molt of her feathers (that’s normal)
Where can we sign up for duck tales?
Wow! That is so awesome and I’m super jealous! I discovered a park semi-close to me last spring that has a bit of a Mallard population, and apparently seasonal Gadwalls. As you might imagine, they’re not super interested in most humans, but still super fun to watch.
Retro gaming, data preservation, and open-source software. I’m a maintainer of several open-source retro gaming data preservation projects so go figure lol
I grow bonsai trees.
Show some of your best favorites!
Wild! This is cool. 8 years for a tree. That’s patience and dedication.
I just become “good” compared to someone who never tried and then lose interest and try something else.
I too am a master of none.
Hedge laying. It’s a technique where you almost cut through the stems of the plants in a hedgerow in order to bend them down. This promotes the growth of new shoots and results in a very dense hedge, which historically was done to make sure animals didn’t escape or enter pastures and fields.
Is a hedgerow more economically feasible than, say, a chain-link fence or any other kind of fence, really (fences are expensive)? About the same? More expensive? What about comparative difficulty? Is it the kind of thing that takes years to grow out?
I’m not exactly sure. A chain link fence is a one time expense as opposed to a hedge which is a living, growing thing and so needs continuing upkeep. And yes, it can take a couple of years before the hedge is ready to be laid… There’s also the used space to consider, as a hedge is a lot wider than a fence.
I guess it really depends on your specific situation.
My dad built a house out in the sticks. He initially built a fence out of pallets, but it didn’t stand the test of time. Upon looking into various fence options, he realized that even the cheap ones aren’t cheap. I don’t think he’s ever considered a hedgerow, so I wondered if it might be an option. Aside from the cost, I doubt he’d have the patience for it, from the sound of it.
Urban planning and old architecture. I could spend an entire evening just walking around older neighbourhoods looking at the level of detail put into the buildings
Trying to learn languages, Linux, gaming, and music.
What is involved with town mapping - do you have some kind of Google type camera rig on your car or a GPS device that automates the process and just drive through street, or what?
You use aerial imagery and trace the buildings, roads, and other features using points on a grid.
I watched the video you linked. So it’s enhancing existing maps - I was thinking it was building the maps themselves from scratch. A long time ago I worked with a small company that created digital street maps for cities to use for utility work etc.
It can be making maps from scratch. There are a lot of places where the map has no features, mostly rural areas.
Is that your own imagery, from drone footage for example, or are you basically copying Google Earth?
It’s from Bing and Esri. It’s not copying anything, as aerial imagery is a different thing than a map. Also Bing and Esri imagery is specifically allowed to be used for OpenStreetMap purposes, likely because companies benefit from OSM data.
I know more about the Doom engine than I do interpersonal relations. Did you know you can completely destroy collision physics via writing over memory addresses if you shoot a bullet weapon at a stack of corpses?
Edit to explain: Decino has a great video explaining it in detail. Link is above, tho I’m at work and can’t watch it to double check. Poorly explained from my memory:
When you fire a hitscan attack (press button, gun shoots a bullet that instantly hits with no travel time), the engine does a number of checks for collision, range, etc. If you have a stack of actors (decorations, monsters, ammo, etc) and you fire a hitscan attack in the direction of the stack, it makes a call to check collision for each individual actor in that stack. The actors don’t have to be all on top of each other, it just matters that the hitscan line crosses over those actors.
If you have a stack of 129 or more actors and fire a hitscan weapon, the game will essentially overwrite parts of the memory address. I don’t understand a lick of that stuff myself, admittedly, I’m no programmer. If you have something around ~140ish actors in the line of fire of a hitscan attack, the Blockmap system for checking collision effectively gets erased. Projectiles pass through everything, bullets and melee do no damage, players and monsters walk through walls, and you can’t interact with things like switches. You can fix it by saving and loading, though if you’re recording demos you can’t save.
Meaning then you just pass through objects rather than collide? Or is it unable to properly calculate the incident & resulting collision vectors, meaning the resulting trajectories are nonsensical?
Everything from projectiles to monsters pass through walls, can do no damage to one another, and can’t interact with stuff like switches. I edited my comment with a poor explanation from memory, alongside a great video explaining that I can’t watch to double check my comment as I’m at work currently.
Hobbies, I have many interests each more important than the last.
i upload photos i take of plants, birds, mammals, reptiles, fungi, and bugs. The observations (photos + location + annotation) are uploaded to a public database accessible to researchers and universities.
I’ve been involved in multiple species range expansions, and i’ve documented both endangered and invasive species. Pretty fun!
The Android app is very good. The iOS app is good for uploads, but lacks a lot of browsing features like search filters and phylogenetic trees. If you are on iOS i suggest using it in a browser except for observation uploads
You can also upload audio recordings for bird and bug sounds. It’s amazing what you can learn about your local ecosystem!
I love iNaturalist. I lived out in the woods for several years and would see so many different bugs that I didn’t recognize. So when I discovered it about 2 years ago, I started taking pictures of every bug I saw and uploading them to the app to learn what they were. And then in August last year there was an unusual explosion of mushroom varieties in our yard. That’s the one area where iNaturalist is a little weak as it really struggled to give me good ID’s for a lot of them. But it should only get better with time.
I’ll see if I can find some mushroom photos to share here.Edit: one of my favorite mushroom pics I got during the mycological explosion:
With mushrooms i often rely on other citizen scientists rather than the ID robot. There are some very friendly and active mycologists who can be a big help figuring out an ID or telling you what to photograph next time to get better data
Nice! I hadn’t heard of iNaturalist. Over where I live most people use observation.org
Thanks! I will check this one out too
I have a weird obsession with fonts. I love a good, well designed font. How it looks on the screen, how it looks in print. Nothing too gaudy or showy, but a really good League Spartan or Lato Light. (Not a fan of serifs)
Other than that, normal stuff; 3D modelling, writing, etc…
My other interest that might fall “outside the norm” is that in University, if I had continued beyond my bachelors my primary focus would have been studying the Bronze Age Collapse, and that topic still fascinates me to this day.
Edit: Oh…and spreadsheets. There’s no problem in the world that can’t be fixed with a well designed spreadsheet. All problems come down to data sorting.
Oh my God I LOVE FONTS
Spartan is a bit wide for me (see that w?) but Lato with a good colorscheme is always sexy
Another thing: if you’re familiar with fonts you can have a weird pseudo-Sherlock funtime guessing how something was made.
points This book is using Georgia instead of Times New Roman. See how the 9 is low? But the page numbers are Times New Roman because the 9 isn’t low. Was paging in the author’s control?
and
font with the light blue shading thing. This club recruitment poster was made in Microsoft Word.About serif disdain… what about LaTeX’s serif? :}
Brick?
Anyway, maybe you have some insight - any idea why so many web designers prefer Light or Hairline now? Or at any rate the thinnest possible fonts? Did someone with credibility announce that thin fonts are actually easier to read, or is it just a style trend?
Not that in particular, but design often comes down to the function f(keywords the branding people like) = very same-looking things. Yay trends.
A lot of fashion companies wanted to be “simple. bold. modern but ready for the future.” Now all their logo fonts are basically the same. It’s also why everyone loves Futura.
With websites, brand people pick the keywords “calm, professional, modern, reliable” and end up with blue so much that it’s the most common website color. So I’m not surprised that the web designers in question picked something “friendly” and “modern” like some font you’d imagine would go well as white text on a matte or charcoal background.
Same reason why I see so much Comfortaa on slideshows (alphabetically near the start of the font list, and f(modern, smart) = title font)
Ayy fellow font enjoyer! I have like 50 GB of fonts, I’m a bit crazy. Honestly, Noto Sans is the greatest font out there. Looks good everywhere
I like Noto Sans. But as a Linux user it often irks me too, since every…single…language…is included in most distributions; so half of my time finding a nice font that I just installed consists of scrolling past a bajillion Noto variants.
Haha, yep. You can uninstall the other languages if you want though.
I know, I’m just really lazy!
I have almost no opinions on specific fonts. Except… I absolutely despise the $ and ¢ symbols in Apple’s San Francisco font. Since it’s the default font I have to look at it a lot.
Are the vertical lines angled? Or is that just an optical illusion?
They are very much angled and it drives me insane.
Low level coding and free open source software for me mostly.
I’ve met some people who like to map areas on OpenStreetMap and I’d be interested in trying it myself but like with contributing to anything I’m new to I’m scared of doing something wrong. I understand that with OpenStreetMap there’s a sort of discussion of changes like on Wikipedia?
When you started what resources helped you, did a friend show you? Is there a tutorial you recommend for starting off? (If you explained some of this somewhere else please feel free to link to it or tell me, I haven’t read through all the comments here yet.)
I simply started mapping single family homes. It’s really hard to map those wrong, as its just an outline with building=house. This is the video that got me started. Have fun and don’t forget to square your corners.
Not OP but…
The wiki is a vast resource on every little detail that’s being mapped. I find it a bit difficult to browse sometimes, easier to get to some pages via DDG, but this may just be me. The Beginner’s guide page I imagine might be a decent starting point.
Though I can’t say I myself started there… IMO the easiest way is to just get StreetComplete from F-Droid (or Google Play…), and wing it. That app is extremely user friendly, and literally just asks you a simple question about something in front of you, and as such allows you to fill in or verify some of the details on the map. It’s capable of a lot, but not quite everything, such as adding in new “ways” (roads, structures, anything not a single node).
When you’re not sure about something it’s asking, that’s when “winging it” should be replaced by “wikiing it”. Or looking it up any other way, since there are now decades of confused people asking questions online for your benefit!
Vespucci is the mobile app people tend to use for heavy duty editing, or just to do the stuff SC can’t. This one has a much scarier UI. It takes some getting used to and figuring out, but really isn’t so bad once you know how the app and OSM itself works. You can download it early on, but maybe just to appreciate how easy SC is, at first!
To answer your question about discussions: each “changeset” (SC manages these for you automatically, groups similar quests into the same changeset) can be commented on by any user if they noticed some issue in your edits, or want to ask for clarification. You can go to openstreetmap.org and click “History” up top to see recent changesets that affected the area within your screen. You’ll see that most won’t have a single comment, but if you’re logged in, you can see the option to start a discussion on any of them.
I’m so shit at low level programming. Don’t understand a lick of it
Philosophy and some sciences, but I’m not very knowledgeable. I know people say you don’t need to be an expert in order to enjoy things, and I agree, but then those aren’t special interests either, right? I love my music, but I know few bands. I love singing, but I lack technique. I like horror stuff, but I’m pretty picky. I’d like to be fit and practice sports, but my health is an issue. I like some beauty topics, but I’m not interested in applying them. I enjoy eating, simple food though. Some games are fun, but I mostly repeat the same ones. I like mountains and forests, but just for a day or two. I’d like to read more…
I’m really a master of none.
Yeah, I truly cannot understand how people really get into things. I don’t play poker with my friends because after an hour I’d rather do something else. I have never finished a video game. My interest in things always just seems to fizzle out. I do a bunch of stuff well enough, but I’m not even sure I want to do them.
