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Does anyone else miss having this level of motivation? And that's not an isolation effect on me, I gave up on trying fun things like this for a long long time n

• treve 6y ago
  I feel ya. Every now and then I have a burst of creativity though and try to pick a project that can be completed in a day =) they're rarer now though (mid 30's)
  • robohoe 6y ago
    We need a list of projects to complete in 30 minutes or less ;)
• robohoe 6y ago
  I used to do this kind of stuff in junior high, high school, and college...back when I had the time now. Now with a day job it's time to find some time to muck around and really explore things with your curiosity and imagination. I totally see where you're coming from.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• radicaldreamer 6y ago
  I've just become a lot lazier
  • Teknoman117 6y ago
    I started playing too many video games :(
• golergka 6y ago
  It seems that with experience, you sometimes just understood that something's theoretically possible, and lose interest at that point. At least, that's how I try to rationalize my laziness.
• gfosco 6y ago
  I still have it, but almost everything else in life is fighting against letting me explore it.
• bargle0 6y ago
  I lost interest in this stuff when I got my first sysadmin job.
  • bluedino 6y ago
    Ironically, that's when I gained an interest in it. There's often time to play around when everything is running smoothly, and experimenting with Linux on old (and new) hardware looks like you're working to others.
• Teknoman117 6y ago
  I've actually had quite a bit of motivation after moving out of my old apartment. I was able to unpack all of my electronics stuff and tools again. Previous place was way too small. Actually unpacking stuff triggered a lot of desire to do stuff with it again. One of the things I found was a tube full of rom-less 8051 microcontrollers and another tube of AM85C30 Dual UARTs I probably picked up at a robotics club swap meet years ago. Ended up building a breadboard "computer" and picked up an universal programmer on eBay for like $50 (uses the open source minipro tool). (https://imgur.com/IjJ6HO6 https://imgur.com/IjJ6HO6) Also did some reverse engineering on how to do in-system programming of the BIOS chip in some 386EX based single board computer I have. I wanted to give myself an extra challenge while following the rust blog_os project.
  • myself248 6y ago
    You need some "magic baud" crystals! I'm partial to 11.0592 because it fits nicely under chips rated for 12MHz without wasting much, and a lot of parts rated for 10 will happily overclock there quite stably. This is an incredibly useful reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_oscillator_frequencies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_oscillator_frequencies
    • Teknoman117 6y ago
      Yup! I have some on hand, but the DUART only takes a single clock line and I didn't have the parts for to build the crystal driver. This particular 8051 has a built in one, but no oscillator out. Was contemplating using one of its timers. I didn't even realize the AVR supported a clock out until I bumped into it in the data sheet. Maddeningly it's not broken out on the Arduno Mega =P.
  • raducu 6y ago
    I'm in the same boat -- too little space for my electronics hobby. I did buy an 200 mhz osciloscope, soldering microscope, hot air and new soldering iron though. The only excuse to pull them out is to fix broken electronics/toys.
• forgotmypw17 6y ago
  I really missed it. From when I was 11, until I was about 20, I enjoyed doing this kind of work. When I was 20, I got into a relationship with someone who was critical of it, and I ended up succumbing to their criticism, quitting my hacking, and going into IT industry instead. I did that for about 15 years, but all along, I missed doing this kind of stuff. I kept doing it a little here and there, but my jobs would eat most of my hack juice, and I just didn't have much left for my own projects. But I had already tasted the sweet nectar, and eventually I got tired of waiting for it, and abandoned the professional world gradually but completely. I'm back to hacking now, and I could not be happier.
  • sitzkrieg 6y ago
    sounds great, how do you sustain yourself, still working?
    • forgotmypw17 6y ago
      No, I have become freegan, which means I have abandoned the currency system and live largely without touching it.
      • hak8or 6y ago
        Is, erm, is this satire? If you are genuinely able to be genuinely self sufficient without interacting with currency while still bieng able to have power to go on a computer with an internet connection, I have to say, props to you. I just hope you do not get hit with a serious medical issue. Or have a fire and then get hit with a fire Marshall tearing you a new one over your unpaid property bieng not up to code.
        • jacobush 6y ago
          They may not be US based.
        • forgotmypw17 6y ago
          Thank you for your well wishes. I do not own any property, up to code or not. I think overwork, unhappiness, and stress lead to many serious and preventable medical issues in today's world. Not satire.
• Baeocystin 6y ago
  I get where you're coming from, but at the same time... I've been there, done that. I don't mean that in a negative way- rather, it's just that I've already gotten the satisfaction I'm going to get out of projects of this nature. Same thing as when I was in to rebuilding V8 engines when I was younger. It was fun to figure out the system, and see what was possible with a few tweaks. Now that I've clearly defined where the edges are, it's on to the next thing. I don't need to repeat the same experiment forever, you know?
  • porknubbins 6y ago
    Yeah I enjoy having the sense of accomplishment and the knowledge gained but like you have trouble getting excited about repeating things. I think people who do their hobbies in a serious exploratory way are probably the minority though. I ride motorcycles struggle to understand guys who just want to go ride the same route 10 hours every weekend. I guess its a kind of emotional release rather than intellectual thrill.
• jkoudys 6y ago
  Extra hard when a 2 year old keeps cramming half-eaten fruit into everything.
• noisy_boy 6y ago
  I think in a lot of the cases it is a combination of how the jobs have sucked a lot more out of folks and having family/kids/responsibilities etc. The latter was always present but the former has just gotten worse over the years.
• person_of_color 6y ago
  There’s no ROI on doing this stuff besides the intangibles. This is a startup news website, and you’re on here because you want, or were interested in, getting rich during the ages of 18-35. Could just be me though.
  • boothby 6y ago
    It's not just you, but personally, I've never been interested in getting rich. For me, HN is a replacement for slashdot, after every second comment there was racial slur copypasta. I'm here for the technical articles and wacky projects like this. For myself, opportunities to hack on fun side-projects are rare but I cherish them. Geeking out brings me satisfaction and joy. I've put a couple of fun projects on github and every fork & star is a little hit of shameless gratification: unlike karma on these blasted social sites, it feels like I've done something tangible to bring a smile to somebody's face. Because I did! That's not an intangible, it's good for my mental health!
    • randomdude402 6y ago
      Similar here. I have no interest in contemporary startup culture, just visit for the occasional interesting technical nugget and discussion.
• lokedhs 6y ago
  In my mid-40's I still get this urge to play around with "useless" things. In most cases, I don't actually act on it, and instead spend an hour or two watching videos of or reading blogs by people who actually did it. That doesn't mean I don't spend some time on these things. I've been doing some Atari 2600 programming, and have been playing around with an emulated IBM mainframe (TK4 on Hercules). I have also been working on a new demo effect on the Atari ST. Note how the things I actually do follow through on, they're all working on emulators. It does give me the ability to take advantage of modern technology (such as Emacs) while still exploring the limits of old systems. I'd like to think that getting older means you can appreciate both the old and the new, and I think my hobby projects reflect that.
  • wiz21c 6y ago
    Hey ! I'm just doing that on Apple 2 :-) Coding with modern tool sis fun because you can go much faster to handle the technical challenges of demos. Meaning, in my case, I can reach the algorithmic (the most interesting to me) aspect much faster. For example, I've made a "bad apple" demo and I was able to quickly prototype a running version thanks to emulator, assembler, etc. Then I spend the remaining 80% of the project of figuring out the compression scheme. Today, I'm working on some 3D stuff. Spent some time on basics (line drawing, assembler, etc) and again, I've reached the point where compression is the issue ! Back in the old days, this would've taken so much longer...
• justapassenger 6y ago
  For most people I know (including me) tinkering like that dies down when you get an IT job. After spending 40h+ per week dealing with stupid computers, you rarely have enough motivation to do it again at home, as a hobby. You just want stuff to work. But the tinkering urge isn't gone. I highly recommend finding different hobby, that can satisfy that itch. Gardening, woodworking, cars, motorcycles, 3d printing, etc. You can spend many hours doing "useless" things there, and have tons of fun. For me, for example, I used to get happiness from spending 20h of my time to get Linux running on some old HW, worth $5. Now I get similar rush from spending 20h trying to build something from wood, that ends up costing me way more and looking more crappy that picking it up at the store.
  • radomir_cernoch 6y ago
    I second that. Woodworking is great for hackers.
• themodelplumber 6y ago
  It's also kind of a combination of motivation and depth. I've done some work coaching people who are seeking change like this, and you have to hack the process a bit, so that the depth-oriented part is tightly aligned with the subject and their history. Without the depth consideration tied to something really firm (so to speak), it might as well be an article about how fun a challenge it is to casually travel to deep space, for how approachable it will be given even the highest level of layman's motivation.
• tverbeure 6y ago
  I picked it up again! 2 years ago, I was fed and bored with spending my evenings and weekends doing nothing useful, so I built myself an electronics lab and now I’m in there almost every night. The last few weekends I’ve been trying to reverse engineer and hack the firmware of a 25 year old Tektronix oscilloscope. It’s a bit of a pointless exercise, and somebody asked me on Twitter “why?”, and the simple reply is “because it’s there.” But also: I’ve learned to use Ghidra and it’s given me tons of hours of tinkering.
• kristopolous 6y ago
  Dealing with garbage tech is what brings me down. Completely broken, unusable garbage software is everywhere, backed by egos, emotions, power plays, and entrenchment. That's the part I don't want to deal with. The only thing worse than having to deal with a bunch of idiots is having to deal with a bunch of things made by them. It pisses me off how broken everything is and how few people seem to take issue with it. Everything is like this. Sturgeon's law is everywhere. Once I can somehow push those things out of my life, I'm good.
  • myself248 6y ago
    This is why I save my vacation days up and take a big chunk once or twice a year, instead of frittering away fridays and mondays to have little "long weekends" throughout the year, as I did in the past. I discovered that, after 4 or 5 days of staycation, I've handled most of the crap that was hanging over my head. I've caught up on laundry, done whatever administrative stuff I had been procrastinating about, and I can finally start to relax. Which is to say, pursue leisure activities without feeling like there's something else I should be doing. Being able to unplug from the day-job allows me to disconnect from a lot of that garbage tech and its frustration factors, and dedicate long periods of concentration to in-depth tasks that might not yield immediate payback. When I only have a few hours in the evening to put towards a task, I tend towards things with short-term payback, so I don't feel like I wasted the evening. That keeps me from really hacking on stuff in my spare time.
    • blaser-waffle 6y ago
      I'm super into the 3-day weekends, but I also agree with the extra long vacation-staycation thing, where you can just "be" for a while. Like 4 days of nothin & puttering around, followed by 2 days of cleaning & finally attending to {X,Y,Z}.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    Oh man do I know the feeling. I said to my boss not that long ago something along the lines of "modern software has taught me to hate technology". I day dream about leaving my career for something else. I'd even take a significant pay cut for it.
• radomir_cernoch 6y ago
  I've struggled with keeping this kind of motivation for years. My way out involved getting an interesting job and finding a topic, which is somehow related to the work (so that your reason doesn't fight) yet not directly aimed at a practical outcome in your work (to keep the enjoyment). For me, personally, the hobby part became SAT solving. It's related to software verification and theorem proving and I feel like learning something useful - even for my family through better career prospects (responsibility box ticked). And I still get the bit-fiddling just as when hacking old microprocessors.
• jacquesm 6y ago
  Switch domains. I've done software for a living because I liked it for 35 years or so, then coasted for a bit and now have a small specialized consulting company and as much free time as I can manage goes towards music related projects. Much happier now, strongly motivated and every now and then a bit of software gets written around that theme as well.