The 21st Block: The serial hobbyist
If you’re still upset with Facebook’s new layout, buckle up!
If you’re still upset with Facebook’s new layout, buckle up!
Olga Vasileva for Wikipedia: Wikipedia is getting a new look for the first time in 10 years.
Ingrid Lunden for TechCrunch: Linkedin launches stories, Zoom, BlueJeans and Teams video integrations as part of redesign.
Daniyal Malik for Digital Information World: Why users hate ‘redesigns’ – even if they are almost perfect.
Kim Lyons for The Verge: Twitter looks into why its photo preview favours white faces over Black faces.
The serial hobbyist
I started a new hobby this week. I hope it’s not a fleeting one, as I’m quite prone to be obsessed with something new, only for the interest to fizzle out within the year. I’ve heard that the ideal number of hobbies is three: one to keep you healthy, one as a creative outlet, and one to make you money (or at least save you money).
Can anyone make time for it? ⌛
According to a 2019 survey commissioned by the British Heart Foundation, the average Brit has three hobbies and spends an average of 10 days and 5 hours on their hobbies each year – although the average shelf-life of each hobby is just 16 months.
The extra hours of at-home downtime these past few months have helped me find the time and passion for my other hobbies. I could list them all, but the ones I’m most proud of are cooking, powerlifting, learning French (if you think of it as a hobby), balcony gardening, journaling in shorthand, playing the piano, and improving my touch-typing speed on a Dvorak keyboard layout (I want it to match my QWERTY speed of 90-95 wpm).
Can anyone afford it? 💰
According to the BHF survey, the average Brit spends the most on these hobbies: DIY (£797.82), gardening (£738.88), reading (£658.94), cooking (£627.59) and gym (£439.51).
I’m sure cooking doesn’t cost as much as eating out, so I’ve saved money there. My edible balcony garden further supplies me with some ingredients. And instead of getting a gym membership, I set up a home gym that cost what’s equivalent to a 5-year gym membership. And five years later I’m still using it – even more so this year.
So let’s talk about my latest hobby, the priciest of the bunch: DIY tech. It can be expensive, I’m mindful of that. I’m also mindful of not making unnecessary things because I don’t like unnecessary things.
So I ordered my first Arduino Uno starter kit and an Arduino-compatible Grove modules kit for RM200. It’s not a lot of money, it’s equivalent to a weekend out, which I have not done in a long time, so it’s money ‘saved’ from being lockdown-compliant.
Can anyone do it? 💡
DIY tech maker Naomi Wu, whose work I have been following for a while, has always signed off her Youtube videos, where she documents her projects, with “If I can do it, anyone can do it.” And I finally took her word for it. Although we’ve exchanged tweets and DMs several times, it’s often about ethics in tech journalism (which has led to her being outed, deplatformed and detained by the Chinese government) and never about DIY tech.
I don’t know what made me finally bite the bullet; I think it’s just the thought of an impending second wave of COVID-19 (or is it the third one now in Malaysia?), but I was also reminiscing my time in lower secondary school where I studied Kemahiran Hidup Bersepadu (integrated living skills).
I looked high and low for my KHB booklet that I had kept since I was 15 (and that had moved homes with me at least nine times since). It’s a palm-sized book with a ‘quick menu’ to everything from sewing, cooking and gardening to soldering, plumbing, woodwork and even basic accounting. It has come in handy a bazillion times, especially as a homeowner. But I couldn’t find it. It dawned on me that I’m now all on my own. And suddenly I wished I have my KHB teacher on speed-dial. Just in case.
I couldn’t remember his name so I turned to Facebook:
Can my school mates help me. What is the name of our KHB teacher […] He was infamously brilliant at teaching life skills. That subject is so underrated! I also want to know how many of you have learned something from those three years of KHB classes and have applied it in real life and also do you think of him sometimes when you have to make your own burger or unclog a toilet or start a business or your own veggie patch or fix a light bulb especially during this time of corona because I do.
The first reply came in with his name: Cikgu Osman. The series of replies that came after were from my schoolmates talking about what they’ve learned from our KHB teachers and how appreciative they were of them. I hope Mr Os is happy.
I don’t think it’s necessary that our hobbies make us healthy, creative or (save) money. I think it’s nice to find simple joys in these trying times. I don’t have any home repairs I needed to do; I just wanted to turn on an LED. As I was working on it, I started to think about how it’s quite symbolic of DIY tech culture – the lightbulb turning on, signifying inspiration.
What I read, watch and listen to…
I’m reading about how Australian hacker mangopdf (Alex Hope) used former PM Tony Abbott’s Instagram post to obtain the latter’s phone and passport numbers.
I’m playing Spot the Troll, a self-explanatory online quiz. Tell me how you did.
I’m watching the 2020 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. An annual spectator event for me. My favourite winners this year are the governments of India and Pakistan who jointly won the Peace Prize for “having their diplomats surreptitiously ring each other’s doorbells in the middle of the night, and then run away before anyone had a chance to answer the door.”
Chart of the week
From the paper, ‘Tracking historical changes in trustworthiness using machine learning analyses of facial cues in paintings,’ published in Nature Communications.
Some dismissed the study as phrenology, but the authors weren’t measuring face shape to assign trustworthy traits, instead, they measured trustworthiness of facial expressions chosen by painters/subjects. Nevertheless, evolutionary psychology often still leaves an icky taste in my mouth, mainly for its reductionism. In the words of Kim A Wagner, professor of global and imperial history at the QMUL: “Evolutionary psychology truly is the phrenology and craniometry of our age...” Anyway, historian Mateusz Fafinski wrote a Twitter thread breaking down why this study is an “absolute disregard of qualitative methods of analysis, historical and art historical expertise.”