If you spend a lot of time at the command line, then spaces in filenames are REALLY annoying. If you don't, it doesn't matter.

I've had amazing luck with hobbys that should be expensive, but weren't.

Me & some friends have a small computer museum. We collect minicomputers & workstations. (Stuff used in science & academia.) We have computers dating back to the early 60s. But we started in the mid 90s, when NO ONE was interested. So we got everything for free. (Well... for the cost of renting large trucks.)

I'm a photographer. My DSLR is old, from just when DSLR's were getting "good enough" at a reasonable price. I bought it used when it was already "obsolete". And then someone gave me an exotic industrial camera they had at work which was "broken". It was too broken for industrial use, but works fine for studio use. I had to build some hardware & write all the software to use it, but... the results are fantastic. It blows away my DSLR. (But uses the same lenses!)

My library has probably cost a lot, but that's spread out over 40 years, so I don't notice it. (Also, I worked in a used bookstore for a bit, and that's a good way to get a lot of books CHEEEEEEEAP. Employee discount? Yes. Discount on books in the back that are slightly damaged and unsellable? YES.) And I've occasionally sold a rare book, so that offsets things.

Etc.

(Note: my home computer collection spans ten full-height racks. A few of those are on loan from the museum, but most are mine. Spent close to nothing on that. Somehow.)

I finally had an opportunity to photograph the neighborhood hawk last weekend. I've been trying to photograph this guy for YEARS, but he always takes off before I can go get my camera.

Trisolarans.

Weird. I've programmed tek vector graphics terminals, and I'd never heard about this before today.

Actually, what's really cool is the giant vector displays a few companies made in the 60s:

Worked with a murderer who was living under a fake name, back in the 90s. But he was actually fine.

There were probably terrible people at that job, but I don't remember... Oh, the first actual real, live creationist I ever met was at that job.

I do a lot of photography for a museum. In documenting historic artifacts (as in journalism) you're not supposed to do any post processing. Not that I'd use a phone camera for those photos, but it's an issue as those features creep into more serious cameras.

This ranks high: Dorothy & The Lion from the 1902 live production of The Wizard of Oz:

This was a long time ago, so I don't remember the exact details, but...

A couple went as a pair of penguins. And they had a half-dozen friends dress up as National Geographic photographers, following them around.

(Oh, this was probably when March of the Penguins had just been released.)

Most superhero movies should just be roller coasters. Or maybe one roller coaster for Marvel, and one for DC, and you get a different hat depending on the exact hero.

Primarily mastodon. Really enjoying that.

Facebook for relatives & friends from the real world.

Flyers & silkscreened posters by friends.

I ran a "midrange" Sun at home for about ten years. The electric bill was painful, but I never had to turn on the heat in the winter.

Our computer museum has our monthly open house on saturday. We're going to be working on our PDP-12:

Freelance heating engineer.

I kept turtles back in the 90s. I had a fantastic setup: a blocked off room, with a kiddie pool in it, with ramps leading in & out of the pool.

In 1990 I was running a very tiny Unix clone at home (Coherent on a 286 PC w/ 1 meg ram) and... I don't remember if I couldn't get a standard reader to compile on that or what the problem was, but anyways - I wrote an email/usenet reader for my own use.

33 years later, I'm still using it to read my email every day.

Also, I think I've had my pasta strainer since the 90s.

Cisco 2600 router.

My ex-wife was a medical nightmare, so I got really used to be around ambulances, ERs, etc. As a result of that, I'm calm in (some) emergencies. I'm the guy on the phone calmly explaining the situation to 911 while I watch a pool of blood slowly creep towards my feet.

Also, I can splice bezier curves together seamlessly, while typing in the x,y coordinates by hand.

As a hobby. I set up a tek-4015 running geometric fractals (trees, snowflakes, etc.) in an art gallery type installation once, about 20 years ago.

Was at the Salvadoran bakery a block from my place yesterday, and an old woman in line behind me paid for my food. I'm not sure if she thought I was homeless or if she thought I was a lost soul that needed to be helped towards the light... (The woman in line ahead of me had just told me god loved me a few minutes before.)

Either way. Always happy to get free empanadas! Took them home, made Turkish coffee. Favorite brunch.

Religion is used as a scam by many people. It is also used in other ways by other people.

It's mostly linux now (except for most of the actual networking gear) but it wasn't 20 years ago, so the internet is certainly "possible" without linux.

I think leftists ranting about not voting for Biden in the general election at the moment are just blowing off steam, and when election day comes, everyone on the left will remember 2016 and vote blue.

TCP/IP was... part of the BSD project? PDP-11 or VAX?

Our museum mostly collects minis from science & academia, so it leans REALLY heavily DEC.

Melt-Banana at the Knitting Factory, 2007. Melt-Banana is my favorite band in the world, and this isn't the best audio, but it REALLY captures the feel of the live performance. (I was at this show. I'm the guy with dreads in the front row directly in front of the cameraman.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00XVt4PeRuQ

Nina Hagen, 1985. Favorite performance by my favorite singer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESo38-Kcwno

Aretha Franklin, Amsterdam 1968:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S1_skidDFI

I've been using Unix in one form or another since the mid 80s, so that's pretty deeply ingrained by now.

I was strongly biased towards Solaris & OpenBSD for many years (Solaris on nice Sun hardware, OpenBSD on small machines) but both began to annoy me a little bit recently, so I switched to Void linux. (Also, there was ONE feature of Linux that I REALLY wanted - extended attributes (name=val) in the filesystem. Love those.)

I'm fascinated by Multics & Control Data's NOS (70s mainframe OS's), but that's for historic study, not actual use.

It's incredibly weird that roughly the same story was adapted, the same year, into two movies, one serious and one comedy, and... they're both masterpieces.

An email of all html is an unwanted email 99% of the time. Occasionally, I save it, and open in lynx. (When a web site emails a security code.)

Attachments are more of a hassle, because I frequently need those. Save to a temp file, "munpack file", examine extracted files.

When I was in my 20s, definitely Principia Discordia.

Now... maybe Brecht's Threepenny Opera?

Or Zamyatin's We.

I collect old computers (mostly high-end 90s servers: Sun & SGI, but also some older things like that decwriter & tektronics graphics terminal) and I help run a computer museum, so I frequently have things on loan from the museum - either stuff I'm working on, or photographing.

I had this on loan from the museum a few years ago to get V7 Unix (circa 1979) running on it:

Retrocomputing, film & art crowds.

I've been posting a lot of silent film stuff recently.

Have you seen the early 90s Finnish Hobbit?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gzWA4Euzck

I carry a Droid 4 (because I like the keyboard) which was running Android 4. Which was absolutely unusable for the web, but alright for ssh, xmpp, and as a camera.

A few weeks ago I replaced android on it with Linux (Maemo Leste) which is... great but also very rough.

I mostly use my phone as a wifi remote to control my computer. That's working much better now than under android.

But the camera doesn't work. Ugh.

TeX / LaTex documentation is infuriating. It's either "use your university's package to make a document that looks like this:" -or- program in alien assembly language.

I like postscript for graphic design, but not so much for typesetting. For a flyer or poster, PS is great.

Windows NT ACLs come from VMS.

The Unix world has traditionally not liked ACLs because Multics had them, and Unix was an ultra-minimalist response to Multics.

On The Silver Globe, because it's the most epically manic film ever made. Sort of a Lords of The Flies revert-to-primitivism story, set on another planet with the descendants of a failed colonization attempt.

For context, previous favorite films: Stalker, Ran, and The Passion of Joan of Arc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBFRiSlcBAg

(Who said you should watch my favorite movie?)

Has a favorite Bauhaus professor.

In 2009 I bought a lot of 10 late 90s Sun servers (1997 machines upgraded a few years later with better CPUs) for $300. Original list price about $2.5 million. After fixing a few problems and swapping parts to max out half the machines, I kept a few as my compute servers, and traded the rest for SGIs. An Onyx for the museum, and a small (one 6' rack) Origin-2000 for myself.

Was visiting my dad, and among other things he said there was something wrong with his computer, and could I fix it? He gave a very quick description of the problem.

So we show up, they're making dinner, everyone's sitting around chatting. I sneak into the office, turn on the computer, fix it, turn it off. Sneak back.

Then I suggest they show me the problem, so we can get it sorted out before eating. We go into the office, and just before they turn the PC on, I stop them. I put both hands on the monitor, close me eyes, and say: "BE HEALED!". Then I tell them to continue.

Lo and behold, the computer is working fine now!

Ha ha.