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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Selfhosting media

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.

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!

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…

My humble used office desktop turned NAS quickly became a dual-processor, 64GB ECC machine with more storage and processing power than I'll probably ever need.

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".

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...

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!

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

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

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.

Literally any hobby I have seriously messed with.

Although- racecars was never cheap.

My homelab started off pretty cheap. But, at this point, I am quite certain I have a few thousand bucks worth of hardware. Shit- I have two thousand bucks in just HDDs, SSDs/NVMes...

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.

I've had amazing luck with hobbys that should be expensive, but weren't.

Me & some friends have a small computer museum. We collect minicomputers & workstations. (Stuff used in science & academia.) We have computers dating back to the early 60s. But we started in the mid 90s, when NO ONE was interested. So we got everything for free. (Well... for the cost of renting large trucks.)

I'm a photographer. My DSLR is old, from just when DSLR's were getting "good enough" at a reasonable price. I bought it used when it was already "obsolete". And then someone gave me an exotic industrial camera they had at work which was "broken". It was too broken for industrial use, but works fine for studio use. I had to build some hardware & write all the software to use it, but... the results are fantastic. It blows away my DSLR. (But uses the same lenses!)

My library has probably cost a lot, but that's spread out over 40 years, so I don't notice it. (Also, I worked in a used bookstore for a bit, and that's a good way to get a lot of books CHEEEEEEEAP. Employee discount? Yes. Discount on books in the back that are slightly damaged and unsellable? YES.) And I've occasionally sold a rare book, so that offsets things.

Etc.

(Note: my home computer collection spans ten full-height racks. A few of those are on loan from the museum, but most are mine. Spent close to nothing on that. Somehow.)

3d printing.

Started out with a cheap printer, mostly to supply my friends with miniatures and terrain. They loved the stuff I printed for them, so gave me money for my effort, which went into upgrading my printer and buying more supplies and buying a new printer so I could print better, bigger things for them.

Then, so enamored by what 3d printing could do, they bought their own 3d printers.

and now no one talks to me cause I no longer have any use and i'm stuck with a printer I havent even removed from the box and assembled for 3 years, and another printer that only stays around because every 2-3 months something comes up where I can design and print a part to fix something around the house.

Surprised there’s no reef tank people here. Imagine spending $5000 on a 20 gallon fish tank - BEFORE spending any money on corals.

Ya it CAN be done for $50, but nobody does that.

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...

Pc gaming. I started off with a refurbished HP omen, but now I'm wanting something more. I'm aiming for a custom built and that has led me to the discovery of companies like Digital Storm, System 76, and Falcon Northwest.

Torrenting and data hoarding are also hobbies of mine. Every so often I'll buy an external hard drive once I max out the storage on a current one. One hard drive failed a while back and now I'm looking for data recovery companies, but their services are a bit pricey.

For me, it's board games. I figured a few good board games could last a while. I'm sure you are (incorrectly) guessing the next step, that I just bought too many.

No, I bought Kingdom Death: Monster. And now I want the expansion packs, which combine to nearly $3000.

I started music when I was like 7/8, my parents encouraged me to do so. And here we are, 20 years later, my dad told me cocaine would’ve probably been way cheaper.

I think audio, headphones, amps, all this stuff. Microphones, recorders, physical mixing gear. If I would go in that direction, I would need a seperate room and loots of money

Audio equipment. Started as someone who collected a bunch of budget king IEMs and have been slowly creeping my way up in cost ;-;

Reloading.

I thought, I can buy a Hornady press, use range brass, and same some cash!

And, well, kind of. But mostly no. Yes, buying primers, bullets, and powder, and using range brass is indeed cheaper than buying boxes or cases of ammunition on a per bullet basis. Sure, a set of dies can get expensive ($200+ for match-grade dies if you do, e.g. long range shooting competitions). Oh, and you need to clean your brass, preferably in a wet tumbler, and then dry your brass, and also get a trim station to trim to length, and possibly a primer pocket swager if you've picked up military brass with crimped primer pockets... And a scale, you gotta have a good scale so that you know exactly how much powder you're using (seriously; you need a good scale, you cannot skip this), and you need a chronography to measure speeds to develop the most accurate loads...

...And then you start getting into progressive reloading presses that are intended for really high volume shooting that start at around $2000, and top out at around $10k, plus things like annealing stations so that your neck tension is always consistent after you've crimped the case, and powder tricklers for when volumetric powder dispensers aren't accurate enough...

But the real expense hits when you're shooting 10x as much because now ammunition is "cheap".

BRB, gonna spend $400 on 8# of Varget powder and $300 on 1000 Hornady ELD-M .224 bullets.

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.

Magic the Gathering..

Getting fed up strimming our 4 acre, very steep field.

I looked at remote control mowers. At the time they were all well over £6k, so I thought I'd try building one. Well, I've done it and it works well, but it's taken three years and cost over a grand so far in parts.

3D modelling. It's impossible to get into 3D modelling and not get eventually sucked into 3D Printing... Which as other people have explained on the thread, is it's own money sinker.

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.

Simple, I read. And with the internet I never have to worry about buying books.