making

When I was a kid in the 1980s, it was quite common for “My friends” books to make their rounds on the schoolyard. These books consisted of two page questionnaires for your buddies to fill out so you could remember them all. One of the more common questions was “What are your hobbies” and I can’t remember when I started putting “learning” in there but I sure did. Rather early in my life I noticed that learning new things was a lot of fun for me! Reading up on things in my parents’ lexicon collection, trying my hand at various forms of crafting and getting better at them, and of course also learning everything I could about all the technology all around me felt amazing1. And that never stopped, rather the opposite: Nothing gives me more dopamine these days than going down a shiny new rabbit hole, absorbing new knowledge like a sponge does water, and then putting it to use right away to work towards acquiring a new skill or solving a problem. Lifelong learning, broadening my understanding of the world and acquiring new skills to then use to make or do something myself2 are a huge part of who I am. ...

Update from 2023-02-02 To answer the most common question I’ve gotten after publishing this right away: No, I do not plan on selling these. This is something I did for fun and out of love, I’m not interested in making money off of it, and I frankly already have my hands full enough as is without adding a custom button business to the mix as well. I’ve provided this write-up to give you an idea of how to do it yourself, and I hope you’ll enjoy it. ...

I attended RC3 from December 27th until December 30th. While it was (once again) only a virtual edition of the Chaos Communication Congress, at least this time around I managed to have a similar experience to 36c3, as in, I spent the last two days mostly hanging out with a bunch of fellow geeks in a fun location (a jitsi conference that also included a camera pointing at an aquarium full of fish) and nerding out while tinkering around with electronics. ...

Since my partner loves spicy food, earlier this year I got us a chili growing kit. What was meant as an experiment has since become a full blown pepper growing operation that has taken over my livingroom window sills and half the balcony and already yielded its first fruits. And because whenever I try something new I also tend to do way too much research on it, while getting the plants started the normal way in soil (and then promptly running into the first issues with fungus gnats) I started to look deeper into hydroponics. ...