Growing spicy peppers. I grew "super hots" for the first time this year and now I need to find a good place to dump their bodies. My God, they don't just give away the "super hot" title all willy nilly. I drove my family out of the house simply cutting up ghost peppers to be dehydrated (outside).
You can cut their burn if you put them with a rival flavor. Make some homemade spicy dijon mustard or something with them. But yeah, keep the windows open.
I planned to use them in sweet things but the prep work caused so much trouble that I don't think they are worth the trouble to do next year. Regardless, hope my family will at least try to enjoy the spicy treats I cook up come Christmas. I've got some heinous candy and chocolate idea in mind. That said, there are a lot of hot pepper I enjoy a ton. Those super hots are just too wild for me it seems.
Cool! My buddy back home does a bit of that. He let me watch and help as he pulled the racks (or whatever the word is) which we centrifuged a few days later.
I wordsmith for my living and also for my compulsion. To get away from that I also stress low cost computer bits to see what they can do. I love tinkering to get every ounce of processing power from an 8-bit microcontroller, which costs anything from a few cents to a couple of dollars, and get great satisfaction when it transforms into a multi-tasking beast. I've also recently acquired a Raspberry Pi4 and am seeing if it can realistically become my "daily driver" PC. Why? I suppose I can rationalise it and say it's because I feel less guilty if I blow it up from overclocking it to the max as it costs $100 instead of $1,000 for a genuine PC. Really, it's just because -- there is no why. Having said all of that, I'm now also making money from an AI engine I programmed, so that's also become my day job too. So I might have to resort to Monty Python's "And now for something completely different!" shortly before I melt down from lack of a break from the usual grind.
Tap dancing (self taught, so am not very good but it's good craic) and typewriters (my fave is my 1941 Hermes - it sounds scrumptious). Just realising there seems to be a noisy theme in my choices...
I'm unsure if it's really that niche at this point with the popularity of DNA tests attracting new users and hobbyists, but I guess I'd say genealogy is the most niche of my hobbies. I guess I might go so far as to say that it's a bit niche for me personally because I find that I am pretty young compared to the large majority of people I come across on sites like Ancestry. It seems to me that most people in my age range only get the DNA test done and more or less disappear after receiving their results (or only come back to look at updates to their results).
My niche interest is marijuana. It's legal where I am and anyone of age can buy it in the little pot shops. I haven't been a pothead my whole life, but there are so many different kinds that do different things. I've done some research into this and found different ones to suite what I'm looking for. A friend created a kind for me, but I only had the seeds. Had to grow it myself. It's kind of amazing that it was the only plant I've ever had that didn't die on me. I've found the right marijuana can replace other drugs needed for things like pain, alertness, sleeping... And smoking (or edibles made from) marijuana has become quite normalized around me. I guess I'm kind of into it the way some people are into wines. Not much of a drinker myself, but I do love to light up.
When I was in school I had an interest in postage stamp collecting (known as Philately to the serious collector).
And not a bad character name either: "The name's Phil, Phil Ately. Gimme a rum and Coke. Shaken, not stirred."
Interesting! I have a friend in Baltimore named Michael Quitt. He also restores vintage fountain pens. That community can't be that large, so perhaps you've heard of him.
I suppose you could call interest in "single wheel trailers" (aka "monowheel" trailers) a niche interest. I've found exactly one web site dedicated to the subject: http://www.singlewheel.com/ Here's an article I did on some research of the subject, posted on my web site: http://dragonwing.biz/sears%20swt.htm
Guns, I guess. Rimfire, centerfire rifle and handgun, shotgun, and muzzleloader. Thankfully, the gun club I belong to re-opened in June, after trying and failing to get an opinion from the governor's office as to whether they were subject to the Covid restrictions. It's four miles from my house, so I spend as much time there as weather and my ability to find ammunition or ammunition components (I load my own, mostly) allow.
Hmm, no, that's too far in my past. Yes, I started on the 6502 on an Apple IIe, but I've moved on since to microcontrollers (mostly Atmel and Cypress). The 6502 is achingly slow in comparison to even the simplest of current microcontrollers and is quite inefficient in its architecture with all of its shortcuts and workarounds that were needed as the layout was hand-drawn. It has only 56 instructions and no in-built peripherals. To top that off, it is a 40-pin chip operating at 5V and most instructions took multiple clock cycles to execute (between 2-3MHz clock). Compare that with an ATTINY261A 8-bit AVR RISC microcontroller with 123 instructions and a whole lot of peripherals built in: 2KB flash memory, 128B EEPROM, 128B SRAM, 16 general purpose I/O lines, 32 general purpose working registers, an 8-bit timer/counter with compare modes, an 8-bit high speed timer/counter, a universal serial interface (USI), internal and external Interrupts, an 11-channel 10-bit A/D converter, programmable watchdog timer with internal oscillator, and four software selectable power saving modes and multiple clock modes (including internal RC oscillator). Also, the device operates between 1.8-5.5 volts and up to 20MHz/MIPS. This comes in a package of only 20 pins (half the pin count of the 6502). It retails for under $2. The 6502 is an interesting piece of history, but I believe that's where it belongs. So, why are you writing code for it?
Retro computer programming - I'm writing a game for the BBC Master (which actually uses a 65C12). 32 registers? Pfft, real men work with an accumulator and an X and Y register. I'll get back into ARM programming soon, but I didn't progress past the 33MHz ARM3.
I'm right now organizing candy wrappers to make little art pieces. Not very good ones, more than likely, but it makes me happy.
I'm of the opinion that once we go ARM, it's best to program using a compiler rather than assembler. There are very few use cases for assembler over a compiler for the more complex CPUs. Granted, compilers tend to be less memory efficient than bare metal assembly, but once you start talking about megabytes of RAM, it's not an issue.
Gentle Mod Blue: If y'all want to get into an in-depth computer... hardware? software? Whatever the heck rabbit hole you're excavating now, give it a thread. Arigatou gozaimasu! (Thank you)
