Edit: so it turns out that every hobby can be expensive if you do it long enough.
Also I love how you talk about your hobby as some addicts.
Edit: so it turns out that every hobby can be expensive if you do it long enough.
Also I love how you talk about your hobby as some addicts.
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.
It doesn’t have to be that expensive if you keep it modest though. I have an old Dell Optiplex (I think from 2012?) that I run a fair amount of stuff on. Things like Jellyfin (with Sonarr/Radarr/etc), a finance tracking web app, Home Assistant, a wiki, and some other miscellaneous stuff. I don’t have a ton of storage though. Currently just the 512gb SSD that the OS is on. I have a couple 8TB HDDs that I want to get setup but they’re a little loud for being in my bedroom.
The big thing I notice is that it can really struggle to encode media if it’s not in the right format. It doesn’t have much of a GPU though so that doesn’t help. And more modern hardware would be much better too, but this is fine for my needs at the moment.