Talk nerdy to me :D
Music mostly. I listen to a huge spectrum of genres from prog rock to metal, r&b, acid jazz, dubstep, kpop, and more.
Propane and propane accessories.
Yeeup.
Mm hmm
I’ll tell ya wut
What and what accessories do I sell for a living?
Star Wars and history - in particular how Lucas had aspects of Nazi Germany and the Vietnam War because he was an anthropology student and knew that empires most often fell from within.
So yeah I’m still on a big Andor high right now, waiting for some novels and other books to drop after that.
Other books I can recommend:
The History and Politics of Star Wars - Death Stars and Democracy (the author is a World War I historian)
Star Wars: Battles that Changed the Galaxy
Star Wars Propaganda: A History of Persuasive Art in the Galaxy
So what’s your favorite movie/show/novel/game from the universe?
It might have been the effects of Nostalgia, but the Alphabet Squadron novels hit pretty well for me.
Movie - Episode IV/A New Hope (if I had to pick a 2nd/3rd, in no order: Episode 3 and Rogue One)
Show - Andor
Novel - oooh this is tough! The Rogue One prequel ‘Catalyst’ was fantastic, as was the Rogie One novel. ‘Lost Stars’ was another good one set in the OT timeline. There’s also Rebel Rising, about Jyn Erso’s time with Saw Guerra, and Leia: Princess of Alderaan about teenage Leia a few years before ANH showing how she gets involved with the Rebellion. And of course the OG Zahn Trilogy plus the new ones that have come out.
I did read Alphabet Squadron and thought they were good.
Game: Old school Rebellion (PC), the Jedi Knight series, of course KOTOR, Galaxies MMORPG, Galactic Battlegrounds, and I’m getting into Battlefront 2 again. I’m about to start Outlaws so we’ll see how that goes. Oh and Jedi Fallen Order, but I haven’t played Survivor yet.
pls talk about andor
Kamen Rider.
Every episode shocker pops out another animal-themed augmented human to take over the world. The 70s aesthetic, the awesome goofy fight choreography, combined with Shunsuke Kikuchi’s groovy soundtrack, works wonders for me.
The way the shocker goons turn into foam and dissolve into the ground, is always a treat.
I grew up watching it and it never lost its charm.
Retro handhelds.
My favorite is between the monster (steam deck) and the custom build (miyoo mini plus). A few friends and I geek out over them. And custom Roms, indie devs, ect…
There’s a ton of Indies onastodon as well.
Type faces (“fonts”) and typesetting. I personally like a face with a large x-height, double story open loop g, and a full range of f-ligatures. The art of lead typesetting has disappeared in favour of software solutions; TeX does a beautiful job, particularly when using Knuth’s faces. (Adobe’s InDesign also deserves an honourable mention, but it’s unfortunately proprietary and closed-source). And when using standard TrueType or OpenType faces, the difference between a page generated by either of them, and one output by Microsoft Word, for example, is noticeably staggering.
One of my favorite parts of being a math teacher is getting to write in latex all the time.
It’s such a bummer collaborating on a document because they all use Word.
I used latex once for a technical documentation.
It certainly makes handling large documents way easier than all the convoluted features word has
Yes. Using sub-files and related features makes a 100+ page document with figures and links much easier to work with.
Entrance videos for wrestlers. I hate when it’s just static text with their name.
how does this make you feel?
https://youtu.be/uaOZX1pQn3Y
Motocross.
Love watching the pros and talking all about it. Recently got a coworker into it and it’s been fun explaining all the ins and outs of the sport and, as a past rider, trying to relate track conditions/difficulties to him
Aperiodic tilings! Just a couple of years ago someone discovered a single tile (down from the set of ~20000 that was first used to prove that aperiodic tiling was even possible) that can completely cover an infinite plane without ever falling into a repeating pattern.
Neat!
The use of “aperiodic” is somewhat loose here compared to what I would expect. Like… I can instantly see several places with the same pattern just on that small sample…
Aperiodic, in this sense, doesn’t mean that there aren’t any bits that repeat. In fact, if you pick any patch of tiles of any arbitrary size, that patch will be repeated infinitely many times. What it means to be aperiodic is that if you slide the whole tiling over so that one of the patches aligns with the repeated bit, there will still be something outside the patch that doesn’t align. Compare that with, say, a repeating grid of squares, where if you slide one square onto a different square then everything lines up, all the way to infinity; it’s impossible to tell that it’s been slid over.
Several things, but for a while it’s been stand pipes. They’re everywhere, and fun to find and point out on buildings. On vacations I like to get my picture by them and my kids laugh when I stop to check them out. Eventually I want to make a parody song about them.
As in plumbing vents or piezometers?
As in wet/dry systems to get water into builds for firefighting.
A thing i love to nerd out about is kink, og how the community around it works. But thats fairly 18+ ^^"
Quasi-egalitarian Neolithic and Chalcolithic civilizations like Çatalhöyük in Turkey or the Carpathian Basin civilizations in Eastern Europe, and some/much of the Indus Valley civilizations in India
Characters. I love designing characters and doing a deep dive into who they are and why they’re designed the way they are. For example, I did one recently about a girl who is a mechanist in my Victorian modern world who works on robots and airship but likes to go to a dance club at night. She keeps her goggles from work since they’re seen as fashion in this world and wears a distinctive hair clip that was given as a gift to her from someone dear to her before the war. And, then there’s another guy I did that is basic rich kid egotistical. Looks like and ultra Chad and has the dance moves to show for it. Basically, he’s like the ultra Chad meme in this world.
Project moon
Don’t say the word ‘wild’ near me…
Radio transmitting. Its a quite large rabbit hole. Right now i upload some data of ships i receive with a small setup and earn a test crypto currency.
But you can do loads and loads of things, rtl-sdr.com is a nice cheap start.
Oh and locally running AI models. (Via GPT4All) Insane how far we are.
Locally running AI models is interesting to me - do you have any recommended links or tutorials where to start?
(I looked into radio transmitting a couple month ago but it was way too overwhelming and I settled for a different hobby lol)
ollama is the usual one, they have install instructions on their GitHub i think, and a model repository, etc
You can run something on your cpu if you don’t care about speed, or on your gpu although you can’t run any more intelligent model without a decent amount of vram
For models to use, I recommend checking out the qwen distilled versions of deepseek r1
Like i said, look into GPT4All. At least for text gen. Open source and really simple. Download, install, choose a model (for mediocre laptops 4-8B ones are a good size) and chat.
For radios, there are some cheap beginner devices as starting point. Look for the rtl-sdr blog v4 usb dongle for about 40€. You can receive ~1-1700mHz with it, which are loads of interesting frequencies. You can buy a 30€ quansheng uv k5 or uv k6 (which is the same model somehow) with custom rom for a great handheld vhf/uhf radio. You can buy a 30€ SI4732 based ATS-Mini as “world receiver” also with custom roms like hjberndt’s.
You could invest some more and get a flipper zero for around 250€ which is a neat tamagochi like IT-Swiss-Army-Knife.
Or a portapack H4M (the new cliffort heath version for the best hackrf one clone) for about 200€. Its the “big brother” of the flipper zero with fascinating capabilities like scanning surrounding ships and planes.
Dont forget proper antennas which can escalate quickly.
