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.
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My niche hobby was late night coming home drunk pizza baking.
While resting the dough is a normal part of the process, falling asleep is not good.So now I just need to let the dough rest… rest… zzzzzZ
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. 😅
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.
If you are dungeon mastering I would recommend avoiding the Quantum Ogre as much as possible. The idea here is to use the same encounter depending on whatever decision the party chooses. This is tempting because this reduces prep work and can reuse information. However, if the decision doesn’t have any consequence why make the players make this decision? TTRPG are about collaborative story telling so decisions so matter and if they don’t why am I even playing. If you want to reduce your prep maybe have the same monsters but at least change the terrain or starting criteria.
If there is decision lead clues about what might be different between the options if it is important decision. These clues might not be obvious but that is what skills checks are for. Make decisions worthwhile so players feel engaged
Man, this one is loaded. I use variants on the quantum.ogre all the time, and am widely considered to be an excellent dm. It’s not about the ogre, it’s about whether choices have an impact on the story. They can still do that even if minor parts of the set dressing - like whether or not you’ll fight an ogre around the corner because you the DM spent ages prepping that encounter - are relatively constant
It’s not about the ogre, it’s about whether choices have an impact on the story.
This is exactly my point is that by relying on it constantly there is no actual real choice and its just lying about railroading the players. If I have the choice about going to clear out the undead in the forbidden temple or clear out the bandits on the outskirts of town and behind the scenes its the same dungeon map I will never know nor will I care. But if I go to kill the undead at the forbidden temple and end up at the bandit camp why make this choice? I love being able to re-use material like this, (In fact I had a dungeon that was an extra-dimensional space where the players got to choose between monsters and demons which used the same map). Same thing if a group of assassins is coming to attack the party and they are deciding between going shopping or the spa. The assassins will find them either way at whatever place they are doing. This is a great use. But if I heard rumor about these assassins and attempt to hide from them but no matter what I do they will always find me that is removing choice.
I think its more of an advanced technique that given as some beginner friendly advice. Its easy to use it all the time to reduce agency instead of using it sparingly.
The same basic encounter can have different effects in different contexts.
Maybe clearing the bandits is how you find a stolen artifact that helps you clear the forbidden temple. Fighting the same enemy in a back alley has different consequences from doing it in the busy street. The ogre down path A might be mechanically identical to the one down path B, but they’re from rival tribes.
It can definitely be used incorrectly, but there are lots of ways for that non-choice to really be a meaningful choice.
When doing snot techniques, 2 studs = 5 plates.
Yep, plus the bathroom tile/plates can be easily cleaned with sponges once you’re finished measuring the rocket length.
Oh, I didn’t know that conversion, helpful.
Closest I got to a hobby is reading a shit ton of books. Highly recommend listening to an audiobook while you read a physical copy, cannot stress enough how much this helps me focus.
I do both reading and listening here and there but never thought to combine the two. Will give it a shot
I tried this on the train while commuting a few times and one time I missed my stop and had to take another train back because I was hyperfocused in the story lol. If I do this I must boost the speed on the audiobook quite a bit so it matches my reading speed, otherwise I get impatient waiting for the audio to catch up. If I listen to only audio I mostly listen to normal speed to not miss stuff though
Hobby: Chess
Tips: Ill state a few mistakes here that I see beginners do a lot (mistakes that I also made as a beginner and had to learn to not do and why not to do them).
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Don’t give check just because you can give check. Beginners love to just check you with zero follow up. Its like it creates a sense of purpose for their moves but without a proper follow up it is a waste of a move.
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Consider the fact that I can make moves and formulate my own plans. Half the game is what you play and the other half is what your opponent plays. If you only consider your moves/plans, I, and any chess player beyond a beginner, will easily beat you.
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Every move has a purpose. If you make a move and I ask you why you made that move and you cannot provide a reasonable reason, then you either wasted a move or got lucky and just happened to guess a good move.
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Dont try to learn opening theory as a beginner. You should learn the three main opening principiles (develop you pieces, get your king to safety, and control the center of the board) and some very common lines to play but after that you should move on to the middle game and end game. Revisit opening theory once you understand the game at a deeper level. It will make it easier for you.
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You paid money and spent time travelling to tournament. You have over an hour on the clock and you oppenent just made a move. Stop and think for a moment. Dont rush your moves and try to play instantly all the time. You waste time, money, and the day since you played like shit (whats the point?).
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(Last) Do NOT have an ego or underestimate your opponent. Especially of they are a little kid. There are two types of kid chess players: the ones who learned how to play 5 minutes ago and the ones that humble you. Very little in between there. There are two types of (non-kid) chess players: those who think a 10yr old kid by default sucks at chess, and those who have played enough kids to realize what the fuck is up. It is funny to watch the former turn into the ladder. Those kids at tournaments are such wild cards
Do you have any good learning resources for number 4?
That depends on exactly what you are looking for and what level of play you are at. A general source that I do like for these sorts of topics is Chess-Networks series “Beginner to Chess Master”. I think its well put together and easy to understand/digest for beginners. Its free (youtube) which is also nice. Of course you can find many more like these on youtube. I just like Chess-Network for this type of series a lot.
If you want to get into openings I recommend getting a set of openings for yourself for white and black.
White: 1. d4 and then London System is easy to play and works most times to get a good setup. Super easy way to have you prepared almost 50% of the time. I personally don’t play it though, I’m an 1. e4 player.
Black:
Don’t start with Sicialian. It’s good but it’ll take a long time to learn enough lines to handle whatever the opponent throws at you since they almost decide which variation you play.
Against 1. d4… King’s Indian defence allows you a straight forward path to casting and develop 2 pieces. Then strike in the center. For a more spicy option there’s the Benoni which has traps for people who blindly go London System.
Against 1. e4… French defence is pretty straight forward since you end up doing the same stuff every game. Attack the pawn on d4. You could also go for 1. … e5 but since it’s the most common move you can get opening knowledge advantage way faster by playing French or Scandinavian. You’ll have to know both if you decide to play 1. e4 at some point and play Italian or Ruy Lopez which IMO are more fun to play.
After learning the main move order for the first 4 or 5 moves then watch some videos on each of your defence. Remote chess academy is a very fun channel on YouTube for learning openings.
Good at tactics?
Try some gambits. You sacrifice a pawn and come out guns blazing. If people don’t know the gambit you’re playing they’ll have to spend a lot of time calculating. You force them to thread the needle or at the minimum lose a piece.
If you want to know how it looks like check out some games with Paul Morphy. He’s winning against players that would 2200+ FIDE rating with the King’s gambit. That opening develops wicked fast but has the King naked.
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When you start crochet, nobody tells where every loop ends up in: Every loop basically counts as a single line segment, and you just draw a grid out of them. The thing about grids is there is the ‘fencepost error’.
What people should know from the start is that if you make a 10x10 grid, you generally start going from bottom left to right, pulling 10 loops horizontally, then 1 up, then 1 back to the left. People just say “chain 12” though, which is confusing to noobs. From there on out you stop doing chains, and do crochets, which means inserting the hook wherever you want to draw lines from and alternating between adding horizontal and vertical line segments. When you stretch a crocheted fabric, each crochet can move yarn from the horizontal loop to the vertical one or back, to stretch one way and shrink the other. But the foundation chain was made with subsequent horizontal bits and will not stretch! (and chainless foundation rows exist but are not even mentioned to noobs)
So beginners will be confused by the fencepost error which requires mixing in the occasional ‘chain’ at the end of rows of ‘crochets’. Since you pull new loops out of identical looking crochets 90% of the time, but then have to deal with different looking ones on the edge its easy to mistake a vertical bit for horizontal or vice versa and accidentally increase or decrease unintentionally.
So many ruined projects and people giving up on the hobby just cause everybody is making tutorials and nobody is explaining the logic.
If you have to count beats in your head, you’re already failing as a DJ. Knowing when to drop the next tune should come naturally.
Read some music theory if you have to, and definitely spend time listening more closely to your tunes. Try to think about how your music is structured as you’re listening to it. Identify the intro, chorus, verses, bridge(s), etc.
With enough critical listening (and practice on the decks), you’ll no longer have to count beats to know where you are in the song and when to start the mix. It’ll eventually become second nature for you.
One of the biggest things that most amateur filmmakers or video makers make is not getting sufficient tone.
Before shooting, record a fairly long stretch of just the ambient sound in the area where you’re filming so that when you are editing, it can be laid under the audio tracks and help to smooth out the jumps in audio from different clips.
This makes a lot of sense and I wouldn’t have thought about it.
Could you offer any tips about recording ambient tone? Just like some omnidirectional mics in the space for 5-10 minutes? Or just the same mics you use for performers or the field recording (eg shotgun mics)?
I’ve always just used the same ones that I use for performers because I’m poor.
If possible, make sure there’s no recognizable voices or anything like that because the tone will be repeated through the scene, so any voices are going to repeat as well. So when you’re doing it, tell your actors/crew to be quiet.
Get 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.
How do I work out my personal heart rate zone boundaries?
Buy a smartwatch and let it figure it out for you. Samsung watches are great for fitness.
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.
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.
Edit: if you determine through training that your max is different, adjust it accordingly.
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.
I have read sources in the past that suggest endurance exercise can slow the decline in max HR. If I find them again I will share here.
In my own experience, I have not lost a single bpm in a decade of tracking.
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.
Hobbyist race car builder/mechanic, sometimes you need cheap tools to break, bend, grind or cut to do one job.
I have a spanner that has been lovingly butchered to remove one sensor on a steering rack on one model of car. Its a common failure point and replacing it either means custom specialty tool or complete steering rack removal and wheel allignment.
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.
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.
