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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

Running.

Was supposed to be the cheapest way to get exercise. You can do it right from your front door, no gym subscriptions, no specialized equipment (some people will tell you you don't even need shoes), and it's far and away the best time-value exercise I've ever found. You can get away with like 20 minutes 3-4 times a week and be doing great.

Well, turns out I love running and I love distance running so I'm now putting up enough miles to need new shoes 2-3 times a year, a nice Garmin smart watch and heart rate monitor to track my progress, sign-ups for several long-distance races each year, shorts, socks, you get the picture.

Could I do it cheaper? Yeah. But at the end of the day it's a hobby and I like it

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.

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.

Board games. Things get expensive once you start collecting

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...

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.

Homelab (running home servers). Especially since I'm in Canada so I pay out the ass for shipping. Got into it purely out of interest for server administration, programming (computer science in general really) and the desire to experiment on my own hardware, but I'll have you know I have a total of 48 processing cores and 30 TB of storage running my personal fileserver and "private cloud!" Though not relying on the likes of Google for data storage and "cloud" services is a massive genuine benefit!

I also run BOINC and Folding@Home on the excess computing power in the winter, essentially "donating" it to science, which is perfect because my house only has electric baseboard heating anyway so I'm consuming the same amount of electricity for heating either way, and the electricity sources are mostly renewables where I live! The home office is toasty all winter, if kind of loud.

I needed a new saucepan.

I've now replaced half my kitchen.

My grandma got me 3 ducklings in 2019 for no reason. 3 ducks don't cost very much. The issue is, that she unlocked a passion. I now have 12 ducks. I want more, but I don't have the money or space.

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.

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

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!

I’m not sure it can get worse than bird watching. Completely free to start. Then you are like “man I wish I could see that bird over there” so you buy some binoculars. Then you think “dang this bird is moving too fast I still can’t identify it, maybe I should try photographing it”. Two months later you’ve spent 10k because bird photography is apparently the most intense kind of photography. Turns out photographing very tiny things that move very fast from very far away is very difficult and the lenses you need start at thousands of dollars and go up to tens of thousands of dollars. That isn’t including the camera body, which you probably want very fast autofocus on, along with bird eye tracking, which hardly comes on any cameras at all.

Yeah…

Flight simming. Started out with a cheap joystick. Now I have an expensive one, throttle quadrants, rudder pedals, a vr headset and I've built myself a button box and a flight seat. And I'm now I want a helicopter collective. Oh well..

Watercolor.

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

Motorcycle riding, done the right way.

Bought a decent street bike to start on, learn the ropes for several years, had the occasional mishhap or two which I fixed by myself. Still, cost money to fix things right?

Upgraded to a proper sport bike and realized how much fun it is, also with a new level of danger involved. Still, I wasn't an idiot into things right. Bought 100% proper gear, including a track suit, good helmet, gloves, etc. as any motorcyclist knows, you'll eventually drop your bike, which I did. Again, fixing it yourself is certainly an option, but also again, it cost money.

Then, I made the mistake of going to my first track day. They will allow you to use your own motorcycle as long as you prep it correctly and have decent tires and safety gear. This was an absolute game changer, and I was hooked harder than a heroin addict with an unlimited bank account. Unfortunately, I am neither of those two categories, and track days only get more expensive the deeper you get into them. First of all, they are not cheap to begin with. A decent track day will set you back 300 to $500 just to get on the track. Then, to really get the most out of it, you should have true racing tires with tire warmers. Then there's the matter of getting your bike to the track, race fuel, a place to hang out, etc etc etc. The list goes on and on.

3D printing. Purchased a cheap 3D printer to save money printing things instead of buying things. 5 printer print farm later, no idea why I'm doing this to myself.

I will buy a Ubiquiti edge router to move away from the consumer grade network gear, turned into just one more $500 server to complete my homelab cluster. Oh who am I kidding the homelab is never “complete”.

PLANTS, LOTS OF THEM

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

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.

Great post OP!

Selfhosting media

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.