I've been very hyperfixated on my model railroad recently. I got halfway decent at woodworking, pretty good with a drill and some brackets and wood and right now I'm building soldering and electronics skills. I've also been doing some locomotive repairs and getting pretty good disassembling, diagnosing and repairing them!

Most recently I've been focused on electronics and building a nice collection of components. I'm strongly considering spinning up a side gig selling some pre-made circuits that for whatever reason just arent available right now despite being fairly desirable and fairly simple to solder up if you're willing to do a bit of reading and warm up the soldering iron

Woodworking. Physical activity, relaxing, and can save money.

I just started sewing and it feels like a thing I could devote all my time and energy to

Does anyone want to get into a long ass discussion about either Battletech or Naval History?

I have been self-hosting Zusam for sharing photos of kids with the family. After a bit of a chat with the dev I forked the web app and started smashing in new features and customising it to work more how I want it to work, to be my vision instead of his. It's a heavier webapp than Zusam's very light one but it works well I reckon. It just sits over Zusam kind of like how alternate UIs work in Lemmy.

That's been my determined focus the last week or so, but I'm probably about to stop for 6 months because that's how I roll.

ADHD won't let me 😭

Mycology, shibari rope, and music theory

Computers! After ~15 years as a professional software developer, I have gotten so burnt out, but this week I had so much fun coding for myself. I made a website: sloptrough.art, its not much but it's very gratifying to have hosted it on my own hardware with raw html & JavaScript. I'm using proxmox, a hypervisor, to run OpenBSD which is running apache server. As OSs go, OpenBSD is paradoxically complex and unintuitive (command-line first, by enthusiasts for enthusiasts) yet also user-friendly and approachable (there are breadcrumbs down a path of well-written manual pages; I haven't had to google at all).

Also, woodworking: i turned a pallet into garden storage to help clean up the patio

I'm playing around with some lidar data obtained from shuttle missions. The visualisations of landscapes are dope.

I've gotten back into the original nerdy interest: reading! Right now, I'm reading The Three Musketeers, and it is so much more entertaining than sitting around and scrolling.

I mean, I've been super hyped about Avatar Seven Havens since I first heard about it. So I am kinda impatiently waiting for the final episodes of book 1.

I personally love the fact that they added India tones to the show to really give off a more distinct vibe from the previous 2 shows in the series. Also really like the art style and music choice. Story has me pumped to see how they manage to keep things going. Especially as we very slowly learn about Korra.

So yeah, I'm kinda invested in the show, if you couldn't already tell.

Reticulum/Nomad net.

Reticulum is a network that can run over regular internet, bare WiFi, long range radio, even a serial cable. No central server, secure by default, works on slow/unreliable lines.

NomadNet is an app that runs on it that is reminiscent of the pre-netscape internet days. Text sites, no javascript. If you dig in deep enough, you can make your own games/chat bots/host offline Wikipedia and display images using ascii style art or even half tone text blocks.

Right now it's knitting and electronics - working on a deep blue shawl with sparkling beads in the pattern of a star chart, and wiring and coding up a pair of motion-reactive light-up pole dancing heels for my wife, fun stuff ❤️

Not answering the question but I feel its more about simple things than nerdy things. Things that do not have large cost or to hard to get. The exception being when the chase is what gives the enjoyment like collecting.

Getting more into the BSDs.

I have OpenBSD as a desktop on a laptop I have and it's great.

Also wanting to get back into retrocomputing.

Linux and Beatmaking. Finally just me and my PC again! Love it!

Gaming. Went back and 100%ed a few games like Neon White, Exit 8, Omori, and Space Marine and my god did it feel good. I think this is what got me out of my depressive episode/alcoholism. Hopefully this time I won't relapse.

Those big wooden jigsaw puzzles with intricate little pieces. Lets me get away from all the screens for a while

Audio fx envelopes (not the sustain/decay kinds or whatever)

What if you could aurally watch something change from one thing to the parametric opposite over time?

Keyframes are insane

Emulation. I set up ShadPS4 on my Linux machine and i've been playing around with that. I've also been playing with RPCS3. Also fuck AI, but it's cool finally being able to play P.T. on my PC. I don't like vibe coding but there's something poetic about folks using AI tools from a billion dollar company to decompile and port games made by another billion dollar company.

I got angry about a really poorly designed website, so now I'm learning web development to try to make a better one, and show how easily it could be improved.

I'll likely fail at this task, but the learning is fun and never wasted.

Whilst not "Nerdy", I had to make a spreadsheet of my DVD collection as I have too many to remember 🤣 I'm just shy of 400, possibly closer as some are boxsets.

I've purchased a few doubles before I made it.

Rc cars! Wroom wroom! Found my ancient rc car I had as a child and have started taking it apart and assembling it again, while slowly getting into the hobby again.

37 Atmospheres.