Maybe something you learned the hard way, or something you found out right before making a huge mistake.
E.g., for audiophiles: don’t buy subwoofers from speaker companies, and don’t buy speakers from subwoofer companies.
Hiking/backpacking (not exactly niche?)
- Don’t buy a ton of stuff for day hikes. You need less than you think. If you carry enough for an overnight there is a good chance you’ll be so slowed down that you’ll end up staying overnight.
- Carry the ten essentials. GPS’ run out of battery and you can end up in areas without satellite reception. Always have a compass and paper map and visualize your route before going if you are backpacking in deep. Be aware where roads and bailouts are relative to your route.
- Occasionally look behind you to get an idea of what the route back will look like if you’ll be returning the same way.
- If it doesn’t look like a trail stop, you need to backtrack to the last sure spot. Don’t plow ahead blindly thinking it will resolve itself.
- Winter hiking means less daylight and more stuff (slower). Plan accordingly.
- “Mountains generate their own weather”. Bring some light raingear and insulation even if it is warm at the trailhead. I’ve started in 80+ temps and gotten snow near summits.
- Carry hiking poles. They are invaluable for things like stream crossings. They saved me from breaking a leg stepping down boulders once.
- If the trail is blazed and you can’t see them look up and behind you for them, sometimes they are painted high up for snowpack.
- Carry traction (ice creepers) if going up into the mountains in spring/fall. Early/late snow and ice is common. In winter bring crampons.
- Always check the weather, especially for mountain hikes. Be ready to turn back or change your plans if the weather looks sketchy. Don’t get “summit fever” just because you made a special trip.
- If you are shopping for gear spend the most on boots. They will be the major deciding factor in how comfortable your hiking is. Make sure to break them in before a trip. I’ve been on a multiday mountain trip where a guy had brand new boots and his feet were bleeding by day 3.
- If winter hiking and there is a snow pack wear gaiters (or built in ones). Snow in boots = cold/wet feet = frostbite. I’ve seen too many people have to turn around because their boots were getting packed with snow and they were suffering.
- Make a list of necessary gear before your trip, then check it off the list as you pack. This helps ensure you don’t forget anything. You can even categorise the list, so you can easily see what kit is in which pockets/dry bags.
- Dry bags are incredibly useful if you hike in wet weather or ford rivers. Different coloured bags can help with categorisation, for example, you know the yellow bag is fresh clothes, the green bag is camp kit, the blue bag is water filter and chlorine tablets, the red bag is electronics, etc. This makes finding stuff a piece of piss and saves rummaging.
On 11, I’d say you also need to decide if the type of terrain you are going on really even calls for boots. Plenty of people do long trips in trail running shoes, which is usually my preference on decent trails, but on really rugged backcountry (or snowy/mountaineering) conditions, you need boots.
Also, to an extent, you don’t really break boots in as much as you break your feet into the boots, so a pair you wore all summer last year and set down for 8 months could probably still use a little ramp up to a long trip.
On 12, I’d say gaiters are really nice even if you aren’t in snowy or wet conditions. I wear them even when it’s nice so I can keep rocks, dust, etc out of my shoes.
Woodworking
Measure twice cut once is rookie numbers. Measure 10 times, cut a test piece 5 times, measure twice after each, then do your real cut.
This is a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the idea.
Also, measure after each operation to check your work as you go so you can spot mistakes as early as possible. This includes checking for square, doing test fits, and all manner of sanity checks to ensure that your operations are achieving the desired results before you repeat them on other pieces or move on to do more work on those same pieces that may already be ruined or need fixing.
For glue up, always always always dry fit first. Then plan ahead. Put all your clamps on and have them adjusted before you add glue. Once the glue is on the time is short and you need to have everything ready and waiting.
If you use a table saw, take it seriously. Always use your riving knife when possible, be mindful of the control you have over the pieces, use push sticks and sleds and jigs to improve stability and safety, always wear ppe. Check that your blade is aligned to your miter slots and your fence. Having a slight relief angle on your fence can be good, but never have it canted towards the blade. That can be dangerous. Also make a crosscut sled, they’re amazing.
Beware of dust. It causes cancer and it lingers in the air. Wear a respirator and use ventilation when possible.
Make or buy a workbench with a vise and some hold down capabilities. Being able to hold your work easily is a huge benefit.
If you are looking to improve your accuracy and precision, buy a nice hand plane and learn how set it up, sharpen it, and how to use it. They are absolute game changers. Also make or buy a shooting board for it. Also, buy a machinist’s square, a set of feeler gauges, and a nice 36in aluminum straight edge and learn to use them.
Etc
Obviously that’s a lot, and a lot of it it depends on what you’re actually trying to do, but those are all things that have helped me a lot in my journey towards making furniture, picture frames, cutting boards, etc
Another woodworker:
Huge +1 for a bench plane and a shooting board. Even in a mainly power tool shop, you can make things much more precisely square or mitered if you shoot them.
For marking cuts, use a knife not a pencil. When you use a pencil to mark your cuts, you limit yourself to guiding your tools with only your vision, not unlike a Tesla. When you score the line with a knife, you create a reference surface (one of the two sides of the cut, hopefully the one against your square) that has no thickness, and you can feel when a knife or chisel clicks against that surface. For saw cuts, you can use a chisel to pare away a little bit from the waste side to form a knife wall, which forms a little ramp that will guide a saw against your reference surface.
Wax literally everything. Wax your work surfaces, tablesaw top, jointer beds, planer bed, fences, plane soles, bikini lines, saw plates, screw threads…wax literally everything.
Learn how to do most common operations by hand. Square some rough lumber by hand with a bench plane. Chop a mortise with a chisel. Cut a tenon with a backsaw. Make dovetails by hand. Even if you’re a power tool woodworker and you’ve got a jointer and a thickness planer and a table saw and a rapidly growing number of routers, knowing how to do things by hand will help you understand just what it is you’re doing.
Do not suffer a dull tool to live. If your tool is getting dull, sharpen it. Sharpening is kinda personal, I think if cilantro tastes like soap to you you’ll prefer oilstones, if you have that tendon in your wrist you’ll like waterstones, if you can roll your tongue you’ll prefer diamond plates and if you have more money than god you’ll buy a Tormach. They’ll all sharpen a blade. Find the system you like and use it. If your tool is dull, sharpen it. Put it away sharp, don’t put it away dull.
Use your ears. You can tell a lot about what’s going on with a tool by listening to it.
Great additions! Using a marking knife is a big upgrade.
Dull tools are the death of accuracy and enjoyment alike.
Cheers
Dull tools are the death of accuracy and enjoyment alike.
Same in cooking. A sharp knife is a safe knife. If you are pushing to cut you will have an accident.
Me, “Measures 50 times and it still doesn’t fit just right” “WTF!!!??”
Lol. Been there for sure.
The worst is building something perfectly square, and then realizing the space you need to put it into is very not square.
This is why I hired someone to do my bathroom shower remodel. My house is old and has no 90 degree angles left lol. I call it the “Dr Suess House”
My original plan was to ask for top 5 tips, so you went ways above the brief after you read my mind.
Lol, yeah I got a bit carried away there.
If you use a table saw, take it seriously.
I’d like to add: don’t wear gloves, especially ones that are a little to big for your hands.
I was going to add to tablesaw too. Safety is like security: use layers. Machines have switches and their own safeties. But you know what’s better? Put that behind another switch. And unplug it when you leave the room. You shouldn’t be able to turn it on until you are ready to use it. Again like security, it always pays to be a little paranoid
VX hobbyists- I’ve noticed a lot of people start off by configuring their encabulators with the original series of kleinhoffer cam ratios, trying to get maximum deltas with the least vacuum pressure possible. It’s really better to start with dylomatic induction coefficients even if it initially seems more complicated, you’ll have an easier time later with the more commonly available j-discs.
Nice try, Big VX
I understand you are trying to simplify things, and I appreciate that we, a hobbyists, need to do this to open up the field to more people. Accessibility is a great thing, but we do need to make sure that potential Roemann examples are prevented from establishing themselves in the governors ethos. There’s a whole lot to VX, and if people are using j-discs and their induction coefficient inverts due to misalignment of the rotorcore (or, god forbid, any of the main encapsulated rails), they’re going to have a bad time. Simple is good, but paradoxically, you need to have a thorough understanding of the more complex parts of this hobby before you can simplify it. The hunchback that taught me went through seventeen flange coupling cycles before they were even allowed to touch the resonance spectroscopy imaging chamber, even at the low end of hypersonic capture waves. To this day, they are still cautious when trying to simplify the pressure transducer startup sequence- and they’re using the more modern Reeistack implementation. Safety first, people. Understand what you’re messing with, because stray glycemic bonded couplings will absolutely kill you.
Code golf:
If you think there is no way
evalcan save bytes, there isGet a heart rate sensor (wrist or chest) and train by heart rate. Most of your cardio should be heart rate zone 2 on the 5 zone scale. This builds your aerobic capacity with minimal damage and can be done almost indefinitely. Harder efforts do more damage and add recovery time so should be limited to about two a week.
If you’re going slow you’re doing it right, it will suck less, and you’re more likely to continue. Your slow speed will get faster over time.
Generally agree, but the breakdown should be 80/20, 80% easy and 20% hard. It’ll be real difficult to get faster without the 20% hard.
How do I work out my personal heart rate zone boundaries?
Many apps will estimate them for you. The general formula for max heart rate is 220-age (if you’re 30, your max is probably around 190 bpm).
From there, the zones are usually calculated as % of max HR. Zone 5 is 90-100, 4 is 80-90, 3 is 70-80, 2 is 60-70, 1 is 50-60.
For our 30yo above, zone 2 would be around 114-133 bpm. That will feel super slow but that is the point, this is something you could do for a while and it should account for about 80% of your total exercise time in a week.
I feel like if one wants to truly train based on heart rate, then I wouldn’t recommend going by an estimate like that, but just go out and do a workout designed to push the heart rate to its limit.
It’s a good starting point at least. Some folks are lower or higher. If you regularly exercise your max is probably higher than estimated. You can definitely test it with an all out workout such as Tabata intervals and use your real max. The formulas will get you close enough until you’ve tested it. You will also find different max HR for different sports; I found I can get an extra 2bpm running vs cycling, either because biking uses fewer muscles or because I was better at it that running.
If you regularly exercise your max is probably higher than estimated.
I was under the impression that the maximum heart rate is something that can not be trained. This source suggests that if anything training regularly would lower a persons max heart rate.
I just think that either one is serious enough about trying to optimize ones training efficiency, at which point the formula wouldn’t be accurate enough for me. Or one takes a more causal approach at which point doing most runs at “conversational pace” is a good enough rule of thumb.
There are a few levels of accuracy. Simplest is just using your max heart rate according to the equation (or trying to actually see how high you can get your heart rate), and basing percentages off of that.
Slightly better than that, most heart rate monitors/apps have some analytics built in that can factor in stuff like speed to approximate metabolic cost, and predict your lactate threshold. That’s the heart rate that corresponds to the workload at which your body can’t keep up with processing lactic acid (a byproduct of anaerobic metabolism). It’s an important threshold cause you want some of your workouts to be definitely below that limit, and some to be definitely above.
There are ways to actually test that limit, often involving finger pricks to get blood samples while running on a treadmill.
The most accurate way (and what elite athletes will do), is a full metabolic test involving running on a treadmill with a heart rate monitor and a mask to measure oxygen consumption/co2 expiration.
For most people who just want to be healthy, and maybe get a little faster, it’s not that important to be super accurate. The main thing is that in order to improve cardiovascularly, you basically need to activate the signaling pathways in your body that signify that you can’t take in and process as much oxygen as you’d like to be able to. That involves high intensity work that is really hard on your body (muscles, joints, cardiovascular system) and it can take a few days to recover.
If you do most of your work in that low intensity zone, you give your body time to recover from high intensity while keeping overall volume up.
If you try to go too hard every time, you never recover, and never adapt.
If you ever start playing Warhammer 40k the miniature game and plan on building your own miniatures use magnets on the weapons. A lot of models come with 2 or 3 different weapons that are good for different situations IE better anti tank, fly, infantry ect. Instead of buying the same model 3 times building and painting it you can buy one, attach small magnets to the weapons and the part of the body they attach to, then you can switch them out on the fly. I didn’t do that when I started and it gave me a lot of issues with some of the armies I played against.
A stronger spring isnt always the answer for your foam blasters to hit harder. Sometimes you can get away with adding a spacer or, depending on the blaster, increasing the length of your barrel. If you go the spacer route, don’t leave it in permanently or you could warp your spring.
I’ve found this to hold true in almost every hobby I have but particularly in technology, engineering and music playing/making: avoid hitching your wagon to one approach. It’s easy to get trapped under a pile of ‘musts’ when trying to do anything that you are skilled in, but that’s also the worst environment for innovation; and almost every innovation in your hobby of choice was borne from people pushing boundaries, not forcing themselves to fit within them.
EDIT: I added a few things… can anyone tell I have ADHD yet?
When keeping a plant alive, you need to look up how it likes to be in the wild, and try to EMULATE that best you can. Monstera deliciosa has root rot? Well in the wild their roots are very compacted, maybe that gallon sized pot needs to be downsized. They also grow on trees, give it some support, etc
Cast iron cookware: when seasoning the item you need to apply the thinnest layer of oil possible. It should look almost like you’re trying to wipe the oil away or clean it.
PC building: your local electronics recycler is an amazing place to get simple fundamental equipment. You won’t find a 5090 in the bin, but you’ll find cheap ram, any cable you need is 1$, hell, my NAS is a 22tb (after redundancy) raid array where I paid 7$ for each 2tb drive. Sure, it’s slower and clicks like hell sometimes, but it’s in a closet, and I can lose a few drives before I lose my data.
Car/motorcycle repairs: your local chain auto shop probably loans/rents specialty tools. (This is pretty well known but still) need a tool to compress your brake cylinders when changing pads? It’ll cost 10$ rather than like 80$.
Gardening: mulch. In my area the sun is an absolute killer in the day while I’m working, so laying mulch over the soil keeps it from drying as fast
Cooking: following recipes isn’t that hard for most things, the way you know that you’ve really leveled up is when you start to realize how certain flavors and textures interact, and come up with something new or, more often, start modifying and improving recipes
Terrariums: the most crucial aspect is the amount of water. It will easily make or break (or kill) your plants and design. A good drainage layer, followed by chunkyish soil, and a layer of peat moss is the way to go most times. Also, BUGS. springtails and isopods are a learning curve but are an insanely helpful group of fellas.
Language learning: I tricked myself into building a daily flashcard study habit by using gambling as an incentive. I bought a box of Magic the Gathering packs and allowed myself to open one a day only after I had finished my daily flashcard study. According to Atomic Habits it takes roughly 50 days for a habit to be set in stone as part of your daily routine. A full box of Magic packs took me to day 36. Feels like a bit of an unethical life pro-tip, but once you’re over that hump of forming the daily habit it becomes a lot easier, so find a way to hack your brain and make it feel rewarding until it becomes automatic.
flyfishing
be quieter than you think you should
And if you want to fish for trout, research the waters you intend to fish. I booked a cabin for a long fall weekend only to find out the creeks weren’t going to be stocked until the following weekend. Trout don’t survive the warm summers there and there’s no natural reproduction
A huge percentage of trout fishing is essentially farming with extra steps. Especially in the US, there are a lot of rivers and streams that get too warm for trout in the summer, so the government puts a bunch of trout in each fall and winter, and they all get either caught, or die in summer.
Lots of these rivers would have previously had native fish populations that were severely reduced by damming or whatever other ecological disaster we imposed on them.
If you’re interested in getting into bicycling check if there’s a local co-op. A good one will sell you a cheap bike and even let you pay a decent chunk of it in labor of fixing bikes (and learning to fix yours). Not only is this two hobbies for the price of a few drinks, it’s also a good way to make friends, build skills, learn good trails, and feel connected to your local community. You also can get cheap used parts. The bikes won’t be high end expensive ones, and you may decide some parts are worth paying manufacturer prices for (several used trigger shifters led to me buying new), but when all is said and done they’re usually pretty decent bikes. And you can find weird shit you may not have known was a thing.
Foraging! Don’t eat things unless you are 100% sure.
If has gills, flaky skin, and bleeds blue, then put down the knife and walk away - you’ve just killed a member of the scottish nobility
Or you could be in Arkham.
Well then
I’d say consider where things are growing, too. If you are foraging near roadsides, pipelines, powerlines, houses, or old dump sites, there are things to consider. If you are in somewhere like Appalachia, it’s shocking how common "artisanal " mining sites are when you can recognize them.
Herbicides are often used to keep growth down in those places.
Old houses often have lead paint falling into soil, and leaded gas polluted a lot of roadsides. You don’t want to eat roots/tubers or low growing leafy veggies in those places. Luckily, plants apparently don’t accumulate lead.
Mushrooms
I read they think the guy in “Into the Wild” died because he was eating a plant that interfered with vitamin absorption.
There’s two types of costume contests, cosplay contests that break things down by experience, and random Halloween contests that are basically reenactments of popularity contests in high school.
The former you’re gonna enter as a journeyman unless you built something so outrageous they gotta up the difficulty level. Make sure you have a TON of documentation and pics and explanations on how you did things. The judges are gonna wanna know how hard you worked on things and the amount of detail you put into it. If you spent 8 hours on the gold colored filigree on your bracers you damn well better mention it Typically unless you’re doing best performance, you get three poses and you’re off the stage. By the time you hit the stage the judges typically made their decisions so play to the crowd and do what looks good on film. If you are going for best performance, don’t feel pressured to use your full five minutes, or however long they give. Waaay to many people overstay their welcome, you wanna leave the people wanting more, not less. Hit your points, your high note, and if you’re still only halfway through your time, whatever. You’re not disqualified if you don’t use your time completely, and people will greatly appreciate someone moving the schedule faster than usual.
For the latter Halloween costume contests, effort means NOTHING. You could’ve thrown the damn thing together in five minutes and win, and if you spend 16 hours on it it will not improve your chances. The venue is looking for costumes that look great on the social media, is a character they love, makes them laugh, blows their mind, causes the venue to cheer, and (this is the most important bit) appears in front of whoever the hell is judging the competition. It’s 1 to 3 people who pick on the previously mentioned criteria. Each judge is gonna be a little different. Some judges listen to the crowd, some judges love horror films so every slasher villain goes on stage, some judges do NOT know what the hell a star wars is. The one thing that all judges have in common though, is that they exist in a 3 dimensional space and only have eyes in front of their head. If you’re a wall flower that doesn’t interact with people, you will not win the contest unless the judge is also sharing your wall. Build a dance circle, tip the bartender to figure out who’s judging tonight (they may or may not know) but if you wanna win, physics dictates that you appear in front of a judge as they wander the venue. That is more important than your costume.
I got seriously into speed cubing about a year ago. I don’t even know where to begin giving tips. There’s so much to learn. 🙈
At least I’ve reached my goal for 2025 and am now averaging around 30-35 seconds. I was at about 3 minutes when I was using the beginner’s method. Now using CFOP.
Need to learn more OLL algorithms though.
I regret not just learning CFOP back when I was younger, I wanted to get below 1 minute with the beginner method first for some reason and the combination of my skills and current cube tech were never quite there. 15 odd years later I can do sub 50 with beginner method, but don’t have the motivation to learn CFOP (or I probably do, I don’t have the motivation to make my cross good enough). Moral of the story, learn CFOP when you feel yourself hitting a wall with the beginner method.
I definitely hit a wall with my magnet-less cube trying to get sub-minute using beginner’s. It was just not going to happen.
Now I’m like 13 different cubes in and I got a flagship cube from Moyu which has helped me get these sub-half-minute times. The GAN 14 Pro was also quite instrumental.
But yeah, CFOP is a must if you want to get good times with reasonable ease (i.e. not brute forcing it using beginner’s).
I recommend practicing one thing at a time in order to get good at it. E.g. your cross. Sit and watch/listen to some YouTube or podcasts or something and just do white crosses for like 30 minutes at a time. You will improve very quickly, I promise. Use the fact that a cross is achievable in 8 moves or less from any scramble as a bar from which you can gauge your performance, and count the moves you make. Focus on different aspects at a time: number of moves until finished cross but take your time both with inspection and turning, only move efficiency; then try to do the cross faster but still unlimited inspection time; then finally limit your inspection time as well (if you care about competition rules).
Focusing on different things like this really helps. Same with the CFOP method. If you want to learn it, you’ll want to focus on the muscle memory of one algorithm at a time. Really grinding it until you feel like you know it. After that, try to use it in a solve. Next session, you will have forgotten it again, so repeat a little bit and refresh that muscle memory until it sticks after a while.
Also these things need to be kept fresh. Your hands will forget algs unless they continue to use them.
It’s a lot of work but a lot of fun if you enjoy improving. Nothing beats that feeling of setting a new personal best.
PS: I’m 38 now, and I started less than a year ago. It’s never too late IMO.
Haha, when I first learned beginner we were switching cores on 2-3 different no brand Chinese cubes! I’ve not gone for a signature cube yet, but basic GAN/moyu/yuxin cubes today are just so much better it’s unbelievable! Yeah, it’s probably mostly prioritising cubing Vs other things and then when I do put the time aside I get tempted by bigger cubes/megaminx puzzles. Honestly 9x9 or teraminx can be a lot less intense!
The fact we’re the same age might spur me on a bit again. Drilling algos for muscle memory I’m fine with - I probably just need to dedicate a month to the cross, it was just so so much easier when I could sit for 4-5 hours straight with no real responsibility and drill cube lol.
9x9!! I’ve not gone past my Moyu 4x4 yet. 😅 All my money so far has been on finding a great 3x3 🥲 But I have been eyeing a 5x5, so maybe I’ll give it a go! Megaminx just blows my mind, I’ve not even looked into that at all. 🫣
The fact we’re the same age might spur me on a bit again.
Yeah buddy! Let’s go. 💪
Drilling algos for muscle memory I’m fine with - I probably just need to dedicate a month to the cross, it was just so so much easier when I could sit for 4-5 hours straight with no real responsibility and drill cube lol.
I feel this. It wasn’t easy with two kids and work. Lots of late nights, and solving while in remote meetings at work; during working from home while I was supposed to be working 😅; at the office during breaks, lunch… Putting in a lot of YouTube hours on the topic. Ugh. There’s a cost other than money to a hobby, eh… 😁
Definitely! Check out AliExpress, Moyu do some really reasonably priced cubes up to ~11x11 - 13x13, starts to get really pricey at 15x15 and above (although tbh there’s not much new after a 7x7/9x9). Megaminx is fun because you can pretty much use knowledge from cubes to get you to maybe the last 3 steps you just have to rethink how you apply the algos you know!
The other interesting thing with big cubes for me was realising I’d essentially forgotten how to solve a 3x3, because I couldn’t finger trick/abuse the cube in the same way it forced me to think about which algos I wanted to apply and I realised I was solving the 3x3 on pretty much muscle memory alone 😂
Check out AliExpress
Great tip! Although I prefer to support my local cube stores to be honest.
Megaminx is fun […] you just have to rethink how you apply the algos you know!
Interesting! I’ll have to look at a tutorial for that some day. 😊
I realised I was solving the 3x3 on pretty much muscle memory alone 😂
Definitely the case for a lot of my algorithms, especially the longer ones! It’s to the point where if I don’t do them fast enough I get confused and it breaks apart and I get lost. And that’s like 10 seconds of punishment just there, or at least can be. 😅
