What's funny is that I have installed Linux on many of my family's computers and they have NEVER ever felt the need to go back to Windows. They probably think it's just Windows but I took the trash out of it. It just works and it's amazing.

Linux has been fun this year! Mint works awesome! I feel so dirty having to log into Windows for work.

What do you mean specifically when you say you want to explore yourself more? What would that entail?

Wait are you me? Just replace guitar with piano, although I still would love to learn music well and carpentry and how to write. The things I would do if I was retired, or just didn't have to work as much or commute as far...

What are you looking to make that is not commercially available?

This all feels natural to me in structured thought and interests, and I am only scratching the surface. Looking around at others I grew up with, I thought we were all being a bit cagey or private about our interests for whatever reason, but I am starting to think I assumed wrong, and maybe I'm the odd one here.

Are you asking if you're the odd one for having interests this varied or deep, or are you asking if you're the odd one for being cagey or private about your interests?

If the former, no you're not odd at all. If the latter, I wouldn't use the word odd specifically but most people probably aren't cagey/private regarding their interests by default. I was also raised around people who had a distinct lack of curiosity, due to what sounds like similar reasons. It is a bit hard to learn as an adult how to share enthusiasm for something with other adults, especially when coming from that kind of upbringing though. I guess it just self-selects for friendships with people that really share your passions though?

I think what OP means is, are potential rabbit holes that we have noticed but not explored yet.

Like maybe you've baked a sourdough bread once and felt that it could be fun to 'learn some more' about that at some time.

I really loved Interview with the Vampire, so I was very excited for Mayfair Witches. But wow, those two are very different shows in tone, pacing and dialogue. It was very hard for me to get through Mayfair Witches, and I only finished it, hoping I'd end up liking it in the end. But I won't be tuning back in for season 2, that's for sure.

To be fair, I've never read the books. I have only ever read the Vampire Chronicles. So it may just be that I wouldn't care for the books either.

However, in the spirit of this thread - I do want to check out the source material, Lives of the Mayfair Witches at some point. Could be that I'd enjoy it, even if I didn't like the show.

You have to start smaller, and specifically, you need to plan on a minimum of fully redesigning the entire board twice, three times if you want to get it to a really good state.

You're largely guessing what will be the optimum configuration for routing. After the first work through, it will be obvious here major circuit blocks need to be routed to make the design work at all or, at least, make sense. The second time through things will fall in place much more quickly as you'll know where the major problems are and start by routing them. At this point, with a little experience and thought you'll probably see the last major issues related to things like ground loops and likely electrical noise issues that can be solved if you completely redo the design.

If you start out like this, you'll likely start thinking about your designs inside isolated little circuit blocks, like the power, analogue, digital, communications, sensors, etc. Then you can start simply redesigning these little blocks as needed while you also start saving these blocks in KiCAD and dropping them into future designs with minimal changes.

Once upon a time, I saw someone say "design is done in blocks" and I tried to start out like this, but that was ineffective for me. I needed to learn how everything fit together first and that made the blocks design methodology click.

Just as a few tips, make your traces as large as you can/defaults are way too small, make your through hole pads much larger so you can desolder stuff several times without lifting a pad, and route a ground trace through absolutely everywhere possible and connect it to as solid an infill plane as possible, use 0R connections to save yourself from mistakes in routing and add an easy location for pull up resistors. Finally, print absolutely ever design on paper with the back side inverted, and glue this to a piece of card stock like cardboard. It can be from any food packaging like a cereal box. Then use a drill or awl to make all of your holes, place your components, and check the fitments inside your project enclosure, this alone will save you MANY mistakes.

GL

Idk what tools you've tried but there are some that are pretty easy to use. I personally enjoy LibrePCB, but I think Fritzing might be easier and it even has a protoboard thing that's really cool.

One thing I'd suggest, is learning how to do the schematics stuff first (if you don't yet,) I feel like this is what helps the most in understanding these tools. I don't have an electronics background, so this was holding me back at the beginning, now I find them super intuitive.

As a side note, be careful with those acids - aside of being dangerous to handle, disposing them improperly is super destructive to the environment.

Regarding the assembly and cracking stuff, I've actually taught myself that (not RISC-V, but x86, arm, and a little mips and PPC). The way I did it, was largely practice by doing. Specifically, I tried to almost every weekend put some time into competing in CTFs. Focus on the reversing challenges, look for writeups on similar challenges, fail, and once the CTF has ended, read the writeups and try solving again. Rinse and repeat, each weekend you'll slowly get better and better.

Additionally, start messing around with an assembly debugger. For me, being able to step through instruction by instruction and watch as the values of the registers change, made everything sort of click. Start with making your own program in c, then debug the assembly, and pay attention to how your c code got converted to assembly.

There's also some decent books out there, I like NoStarch (there's a malware book and also hacking: the art of exploitation, the malware book is more reverse engineering, but both should be decent starting points for assembly).

Btw, picoctf is a good starter one that is hosted year round.

I was having similar thoughts about Nim and portability when I saw this Github project (it uses APE but it's more like a runtime for software? though I'm not sure if actual usage is easy like other frameworks/libraries etc). Though honestly I will probably sooner do something with Godot or Raylib via bindings instead, which is unfortunate because the 2D polygonal style is not well supported* unless you keep it really simple.

I'm thinking about tinkering with low-poly 3D+mostly untextured models (vertex colors, see vertex color skyboxes as an inspiration for the style/concept) to sidestep the 2D issue (as it's well-established in 3D). My mousewheel is currently broken, though. And I'm not totally happy about the idea of using Blender, though any 3D editor opens up more options (in-engine stuff is cool, but probably locked-in).

It's also difficult finding discussion about Nim on the fediverse, particularly when people don't explicitly say nim-lang. That and often Kbin doesn't properly federate Mastodon replies so potential conversations are just broken. And I haven't seen other languages that come close to the same feel, some scripting languages might be OK if their performance wasn't a problem (and often there are options to help, but it also makes me question if it also wrecks their compatibility with bindings when it's a different thing).

* = 1. Godot 4 has a still-in-PR-stage feature that can be used for art but may not perform well enough to be used for an entire project with MSAA, also still no Nim bindings. Also even then, the editors could be better (vertex colors and internal vertices).
2. I am not aware of polygonal tools for Raylib at all, started making a text format and loader but got bogged down on details. And it would be even more basic than Godot's polygons, no animation aside from just making multiple frames and swapping (or maybe some basic transform effects, but this would all need to be done manually while Godot has in-engine animation).

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

this video does an excellent introduction to the kinds of calculations done for 3D scenes

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

It's certainly a challenge, but it is very doable in a small space. If you have a patio or a balcony, you can start by making small things with just hand tools.