Ask HN: Share Your Eccentric Hobby

I (the OP) restore paintings! I buy oil paintings off FB marketplace being sold for £5-£25 normally or from charity shops, and restore them. AMA

I (also the OP) am refitting a small (25ft) yacht I bought for £1. Eccentric enough? What if I told you I had never sailed a yacht and it is about a 4 hour drive to get to it? AMA

I hope you are blogging about learning the painting restoration thing; the things beginners learn through practice are every bit as valuable as the things experts know.

My weird hobby as I mentioned is that I am designing cheap "art" lenses for my cameras (basically an equivalent of things like Lensbaby or the Lomography lenses) by adapting surplus optics (basic meniscus lenses and achromatic doublets) or DIY telescope eyepiece lenses, to focussing helicoids using 3D printed barrels; I have then used them for pictorialist-influenced shoots. It has sent me down all sorts of rabbit holes.

I am fitfully working on my own focussing mechanisms; I have had some success with multi-start helicoid threads but they are are a challenge in plastic, so I am currently working on a modestly-precise hybrid plastic and metal mechanism, and daydreaming about CNC-driven solutions in the future when I have the working space.

I am also contemplating a slightly more complex, faster aplanat/rapid rectilinear design but my knowledge of optics is just not good enough to select the right lenses, yet, so it may end up being bodged and only very roughly empirical; a "nice" result rather than an excellent one.

But then any precision of the result is not really the aim; cheap plastic meniscus lenses are as interesting in black and white as anything else.

I collect keyboards (computer). I somehow have collected more than 25 so far with all kinds of different configuration with respect to layouts, switches, colors etc. Not sure if its eccentric enough.

I play Pro Drums mode on Rock Band 4 on my Roland kit. It's like...85% like real drums, which is close enough to when I just want to play along to something and turn my brain off. I'm probably top 100 or so and have been playing for about a decade now. It's a blast.

Don't know if it qualifies as a hobby, but I "pursue flavor", not in chef sense but more in ready made products. Every now and then I buy 20-30: cartons of milk, volcanic wines, obviously cheeses, 100% chocolate, specialty coffee beans, niche cigars, chorizos from all over, chili sauces, lambic beers, Chinese high-mountain teas, matcha... but also can go beyond "taste" flavor, e.g. we also do that with arabic ouds (oils, this can get very expensive very fast), indian attars (mitti attar!!!), and so on. We try to sit down and "evaluate" each experience, we used to have a notebook but lately we just wing it.

Astrology. I think there is something to it (and I perfectly well understand if others don't). I've been attempting some "cold" natal readings by having an LLM giving me a person who isn't outrageously famous but has a well known enough life, giving me only their birth parameters and then letting me supply a reading to compare against the details it reveals.

I will pray whenever the clock shows 11:11. I just thought it may be a very magic number and I should pray for my family, and sometime for human peace.

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I play in a band called Rare Company. We recorded an album last year and have been playing gigs around San Francisco to promote it this year. We play acoustic originals, with a style that spans bluegrass, swing, folk and rock. I play dobro and fiddle, and it’s great fun to see people’s reactions to my “shiny slide guitar”. Check out our music and come to a show if you’re in the bay area!

Here's a recent similar thread that got a lot of traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47654062. I posted about my hobby of banknote collection on there, so won't repeat here.

I help a friend repair old radios and service equipment. He's been doing it since the 1950s. We're starting to wind down as his health curtails things.

My hobby is self-hosting.

* I have a dedicated server at the house where I run nearly a dozen services via docker compose.

* I wrote my own audio app for playing my self hosted mp3s because everything I found on the App Store was shit. I wanted something like Winamp: a simple media player followed by a playlist of thousands of items that works equally on desktop and iPhone. https://github.com/prettydiff/mp3-master-list

* I wrote my own server management dashboard utility. There are some really good existing ones but I thought I could do better, particularly around creating new web servers and proxies in seconds. Apache and NGINX busted pissed me off when creating simple ultra fast proxies, especially around web sockets, and also did not provide a dashboard. https://github.com/prettydiff/aphorio

Because I am writing more and more of what I need I can integrate features in ways others cannot. I am trying to figure out SMS protocol right now so my custom apps can text me, and others on my private cluster, app needs or calendar appointments

Does poker count?

I'm not sure if I should have gone all in with that full house or if I'd have scared the calling station with my reputation of check raising people into a walk to the ATM.

I only won a hundred and twenty five dollars -- I don't track the tips on drinks and winning hands. (You tip even for a water, coffee, or refreshing tomato juice. You can get alcohol, but I recommend if you sit down with me for a Texas Hold 'Em, you do it with a clear head.)

I was there... about four hours?

Learned a lot, and this week anytime I want, I can have a succulent Chinese meal.

(I don't think it qualifies as an "eccentric hobby", but I like Sichuan food, and it's a shame that in many cities across America, you gotta drive a bit to get a nice cumin lamb or some mapo tofu.)

I maintain an online playable version of a antique board game called Baghchal [1] which has origin stories about being native to Nepal since 3000 years. I actually launched this website on HN a decade ago.

1. www.baghchal.net