Oh hey! I collect somewhat vintage computing stuff as well! Mainly Thinkpads. What I found the most challenging would be finding replacement parts, especially batteries. How do you go about yours?
Batteries are easy to get thanks to Cameron Sino! They make brand new batteries for old devices from cameras to PDAs.
As for parts, depends! Some you can easily find broken/untested units for cheap to grab parts off of. Others like my daily driver, the Sony Clié PEG-UX50(It even flips around to hide the keyboard!), is rarer since it was top of the top of the line, and therefore wicked expensive ($700! Today that’s worth $1,200!) Working units can be found but command high prices, and it needs a special dingus cradle for charging. Without the cradle, you can’t charge as it doesn’t take USB power.
A lot of the time, untested units usually just need a new battery and they kick right back on. Every untested device I’ve bought was much cheaper than working, and one fresh battery later it starts right up.
Ah nah, Personal Digital Assistants! They’re basically Smartphones with half the smart and none of the phone. Pocketable computers that do a lot of what modern phones can do - but worse because it’s 20+ year old tech.
Boardgaming, kind of sort of. I think the other family households have some boardgames in their houses, like the usual ones that most people have, but I’ve got a boardgame and ttrpg collection that I’ve sunk thousands of dollars into worth of games and shelving for. It’s just on a different level.
LARP, and costuming/crafting for it. Amusingly, even among larpers I get a few weird looks when I explain my husband made my clothing, and I made his crossbow.
I met a woman on FB years ago. She’s super effeminate, and tiny, and no one would ever guess that she forges swords in her backyard on the weekends, and I absolute love her.
Music. My parents weirdly never listened to music. When I was a kid, the most they would listen to was a Queen greatest hits album and another greatest hits from this 80s band from my country. But like, only on road trips.
I don’t know why, but ever since I was very young I loved music. One of the first birthday presents I remember choosing myself was a copy of Dookie (Green Day). I didn’t know what it was, but I loved the cover. Less than a month later we were back to the record store and I bought this brand new album by a band I had never heard before, In Rainbows by Radiohead. And that was it. I was hooked forever. Music was to become the most constant and important part of my life.
I spent years finding and listening to music. Trying to understand the history and development. Music really was my main hobby in high-school, like listening to music.
Nowadays I also play guitar and produce a bit, but I still listen to music as a hobby.
And my parents still don’t listen to music at all lmao. Even after enduring years and years of me hogging the AUX cable and forcing them to listen to everything from Wu Tang Clan to Burzum and Sufjan Stevens and Nirvana… but I love them. The most they would say is “wow this is very heavy” as I blasted black metal lol
I feel the same way. When I was a kid, my parents had a pretty small collection of tapes of religious music, and that’s the only stuff they would listen to. Once I got my first internet connection around the age of 12, a whole new world opened up.
Today, I listen to music all the time, while working, while driving. It was so weird (and depressing) to go on a trip in my sister’s car who doesn’t listen to music.
As someone who used to be into cubing, I find it immensely amusing that it’s one of the few hobbies where the Chinese off-brand is actually better than the original name brand. My main cube was a Moyu Weilong GTS2M.
It was LARPing, but then I got clever. Once my wife was pregnant, it was only a matter of time. Now my kids have grown up in the hobby, and they love it as much as their old man.
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