There is a recurring joke about how the longer you work as a programmer, the stronger the urge to quit the industry and go live in a farm. I'm not at that point yet but I do have a soft spot for making physical things with my own two hands that, no matter how crooked, I can hold proudly and say "I did this". It is no surprise then that I'm a fan of the Maker Movement, the idea of figuring out how to do stuff on your own rather than purchasing it. I've been using my free time this year to build quite a lot of stuff, and yet 3D printing is the only one I wrote about.

Today's post is an attempt at remediating that. I don't expect you to like them all, but if you're looking for a new hobby then here's a list of hobbies a nerd can enjoy.

Drawing

I have a problem with drawing: I've been doing it for long enough that I'm objectively good at it (no just "good enough", but "good") and yet without a project at hand I just... don't. I had some success with small comics I drew during particularly depressing meetings and I've been chasing that high ever since.

A friend and I are currently looking into writing a comic together, so hopefully I'll have more to tell in the coming months. I would have liked to join a comic contest as our North star, but those are hard to come by when you're an adult.

I don't want to write much more about the topic because I already did it once.

Painting

I started taking painting classes about a year ago after realizing that you can learn from videos how to add purple shadows to portraits but you can't ask why you are adding purple shadows to pink skin. My drawing skills have helped with the first steps, but becoming the next Rembrandt will still take a while.

My main shock about painting was the stark difference between me just "going with it" versus having a specific goal: I can get good results whenever I paint for fun (or, more accurately, when following the tasks my teacher gives me) but getting a precise result is still a lost cause - the least I care, the better the result. And while I understand why this happens, I don't yet have a working solution.

My current main challenge with painting is the cleanup: I still haven't processed the trauma of that one night when paint splashed everywhere and I spent the next hour on my knees chasing tiny paint spots on the floor of my rented apartment. I know I can't get better without practice, but sometimes the apprehension is just too much.

Sewing

I have a general rule: if I face the same problem three times, and the problem is salient enough that I remember all three occasions at once, then I need to figure out how to solve it for good. October found me in this specific situation when I realized that I had

• One nice shirt that's too big for me,
• One summer shirt that's too big for me, and
• One summer hoodie design that I've been wanting to have for almost twenty years.

My first idea was to learn sewing by hand. I wouldn't recommend it as a long-time strategy, but hand-making my own sweatshirt taught me a lot about why a sewing machine does what it does and when is hand stitching the faster, simpler alternative.

The next natural step was to get a sewing machine. The one in my local library is eternally on loan, but luckily second hand sewing machines in my area are surprisingly cheap. The difficult part was finding a good first project: I checked every beginner book in every library I know, and yet all of them start with projects like a skirt, a top or a dress, none of which would be very useful for me. In the end my hand-sewn sweatshirt had to be redone when the material failed to shrink as promised and having to redo all of that gave me some good practice.

Having now resized one shirt, one t-shirt, one sweatshirt and having made a summer hoodie from scratch I believe I'm ready to tackle the nice shirt. I've been toying with some stupid ideas after that, but whether they end up being fashion or cosplay I cannot say.

Music

I never really stopped playing music, but my piano skills have not evolved much in the last ten years. Fate put recently an old guitar into my hands for repair, and this gave me a good chance to give the habit a bit of a refresh - I learned how to play guitar when I was 12, and I am glad to report that I still keep the muscle memory.

The weird part was singing - I stopped playing guitar because I was really bad at singing, and yet I am now at the point of my life in which I get to understand two things:

• Singing is not that difficult once you understand that your voice and the music have to follow each other
• As long as your singing isn't atrocious, no one really cares

I tried to write an app for showing a song and its corresponding tab, but the problem is harder than I thought: the whole song doesn't fit in a phone screen, you cannot click the screen to move on (both your hands are busy), and coordinating the text and music automatically is a tough problem. I considered real-time speech detection, but I'm not sure there really is interest for that as guitar players are notoriously uninterested in formalizing their art. I'm currently sticking to the tried-and-tested hand-written booklet until I find a better solution.

Penmanship

On the summer of 2002 I stopped writing cursive - I was taking my first Math courses and realized that formulas only make sense in block letters. My block handwriting declined steadily until 2014 when I decided to do something about it, but cursive remained forgotten until last year.

It was quite shocking to realize that I no longer remembered how to write some uppercase letters, particularly one that's part of my own name. I therefore made a conscious effort to start writing cursive more often, I looked into different types of scripts, and nowadays my cursive is nicer than it ever was - I'm still not as good as some teenage girls I know, but I'm getting there.

Make-up

I have no interest in wearing make-up on my day-to-day - in fact I wish less people would do it. But during Halloween, Karneval or similar? If you think of it as "applied painting" it turns out to be a lot of fun.

I believe my skull makeup is on point (I really need to find a new tube of cracked-skin white base) and my Picasso was also not that bad, but where to go from there is harder. I tried checking in social media, but the most interesting ones are meant for the camera and fall apart the second you look away. Latex prosthetic seem promising, so I'll probably be trying that for next February.

The way forward

I have a couple ideas I want to try next year. Sculpting in wax seems fun (messy, though) and woodworking (even messier) has definitely made it through my "three problems" threshold. And if I had a backyard you can bet I'd have a project boat underway - did you know you can just download instructions to make one?

I won't pretend that I'm particularly good at most of these hobbies, but I am fine and that's what matters. Mastery is a life-long process, but making your own t-shirt takes a couple days (about a week if you want welt pockets).

So go ahead and give any of them a try. Write a comic on post-its, draw a bad portrait, play some chords on a guitar and make a wax tiki lamp. Programming is a lot of fun, but remember that specialization is for insects.

Remember this post where I complained that the music industry won't take my money? Well, it's that time of year again.

As you may remember from following me on Mastodon, I bought an Alexa, set it up in Spanish, and almost went insane due to how bad it was. So I did what every normal person would do in this case and I gifted to my mom. This Alexa slept in an Argentinean drawer for a long time, until one day I finally convinced my family to stop worrying about breaking it. Today it works mostly as a voice-activated music player for my nieces.

We have established before that I am an idiot, and because I'm an idiot I decided to set up Spotify (with a family plan) instead of Apple Music. I already have a rocky situation with Spotify, which is why I am not shocked at all to learn that, just like Amazon and Warner before them, Spotify will not take my money:

• I cannot pay for my mom's plan because my card is German and the account is not. And the device's IP is obviously in Argentina.
• I cannot use an Argentinean credit card, because I don't have one.
• I cannot use the other available methods because they require me to physically go to a store in another continent.
• I cannot pay with a gift card - even suggesting this as a possible feature will get your request closed without review.
• I can try to set the account to a German one, but as the tech support representative would put it, "you can give it a try, however that is something we are unable to guarantee that will work". Also, I fear this may cause Alexa to start speaking in German, and my mom won't be amused by that.

So once again I am trying to give a company money -- no, scratch that: I am trying to give a company money THAT'S WORTH MORE THAN THE MONEY THEY WANT (Argentinean pesos are not super hot right now), and yet they won't listen to reason. The Spotify forums are full of threads where the best answer you'll get is a "Community Legend" saying that it sucks to be you.

The most likely end of this story is that I'll wire some money over Western Union and one of my relatives will go to a store to pay the bill. My time will be wasted, I'll lose some money in the exchange, my relative's time will be also wasted, and Spotify will receive money in a currency that's devaluating at a 10% monthly rate.

Great job, Spotify.

Here's a list of short thoughts that are too long for a tweet toot but too short for a post.

On old computer hardware

I spent the last month of my life fixing the computers of my family. That meant installing Roblox on a tablet with 1Gb of RAM, fixing antivirus on Windows 7, dealing with Alexa in Spanish, and trying to find cheap ink for printers with DRM. Fun fact: HP uses DRM to forbid you from importing ink, and then stopped delivering ink to my family's city.

Modern hardware can have a long, long life, but this won't happen if software developers don't start optimizing their code even a bit. Sure, Barry Collins may not have a problem with an OS that requires 4Gb of RAM, but I feel I speak for tens of thousands of users when I say that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

On new computer hardware

I know that everyone likes to dump on Mark Zuckerberg, and with good reason: the firm formerly known as Facebook is awful and you should stay away from everything and anything they touch. Having said that, there's a reasonable chance that the moment of VR is finally here. If you are a software developer, I encourage you to at least form an informed opinion before the VR train leaves the station.

On movies

I wasn't expecting to enjoy Ready or not as much as I did. I also wasn't expecting to enjoy a second watch of Inception almost as much as the first time, but those things happened anyway. I was however expecting to enjoy Your name, so no surprises there.

I also got on a discussion about Meat Grinder, a Thai film that is so boring and incoherent that it cured me of bad movies forever. No matter how bad a film is, my brain can always relax and say "sure, it's bad, but at least it's not Meat Grinder". I hold a similar opinion about Funny Games, a movies where even the actors on the poster seem to be ashamed of themselves. At least here I have the backing of cinema critic Mark Kermode, who called it "a really annoying experience". Take that, people from my old blog who said I was the one who didn't "get it".

On books

Michael Lewis' book Liar's Poker is not as good as The Big Short, but if you read the latter without the former you are doing yourself a disservice. I wasn't expecting to become the kind of person who shudders when reading that "the head of mortgage trading at First Boston who helped create the fist CMO, lists it (...) as the most important financial innovation of the 1980s", and yet here we are.

I really, really, really like Roger Zelazny's A night in the lonesome October, which is why I'm surprised at how little I liked his earlier, award-winning book This immortal. I mean, it's not bad, but I wouldn't have tied it with Dune as Hugo Award winner of 1966 for Best Novel. I think it will end up overtaking House of Leaves in the category of books that disappointed me the most.

And finally, I can't make any progress with Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon's book Where wizards stay up late because every time I try to get back to it I get an irresistible urge to jump onto my computer and start programming. Looks like Masters of Doom will have to keep waiting.

On music

My favorite song that I discovered this year so far is Haunted by Poe. Looking for some music of her I learned about how thoroughly lawyers and the US music industry destroyed her career. This made me pretty angry until I read that her net worth is well into the millions of dollars, so I guess she came out fine after all. And since the album was written as a collaboration with her brother while he was writing "House of Leaves", I guess I did get something out of that book at the end.

I have tried this week to buy the soundtrack for The Greatest Showman for a gift and let me tell you, it's really hard.

I started naively thinking that, since the album is available on Amazon as MP3, I could just click "Buy" and be done with it. But Amazon, as it turns out, doesn't want my money. Sure, they say they will sell me the album. But once I actually try they reject my credit and debit cards with a mysterious error that, after some digging, may be related to Amazon not having the rights to that album in Germany. I say "may" because Amazon doesn't give me any usable information - all they show is this error:

We were unable to process your purchase with your current payment information. Please enter a valid payment method and an address which are both local.

Seeing that my credit card is valid, my address is local, and the buy page doesn't mention any kind of restrictions, that's my first dead end.

My second stop is Warner Music, who owns the soundtrack. This is also a waste of time: they will gladly sell me physical copies in vinyl, but digital? No luck there.

Next: Apple, the first big company to offer DRM-free music downloads and self-professed champions of user experience. We were off to a rocky start: you can only buy music using iTunes, which is not available in Linux and forces me to boot my Windows 10 PC. One hour later, courtesy of Windows 10 deciding it's a good time for an update, I am faced with this screen:

If you think this well-known and yet unresolved issue stopped me, you are mistaken - I have signed way too many contracts in languages I don't fully grasp to be afraid of what is clearly a credit card details form. Luckily, after giving my password like 6 times, converting m4a files to mp3, and almost two hours later, I am finally the proud temporary owner of this soundtrack.

So let's talk now about Spotify. I reluctantly started using it again because it's one of the few services with an offline mode for Android phones that doesn't require giving my phone number. Seeing as I still object to their collection of private data, I created a fake profile that I regularly renew with gift cards. But do you know what happens when your subscription is about to run out? The answer is "nothing": you get zero notifications, no e-mail, nothing.

What happens when my subscription runs out? First: all of my offline music is deleted, which is the one feature I'm paying for. Since I'm often in offline mode for work, that means no music for me for the rest of the day. And second: just like there is no notification about my balance running out, there is also no option in the app to give a new gift card code. I can easily give my credit card and subscribe forever, but gift cards require extra steps.

What these two infuriating stories have in common is that they are examples of the music industry working both badly and as intended. Amazon, Spotify, and Apple (up to a point) will gladly give me access to the music I'm trying to pay for, but only if I agree to set recurring payments to their walled gardens and access to my private data. Owning my music and keeping my privacy, however, is really hard.

Which brings me to my final point. There is a service with an extensive, high-quality music catalog that's easy to use, works on every platform, let's you keep your privacy, and will take your money but only if you really want to. It's called piracy. And even though it's been almost 10 years since Gabe Newell publicly pointed out how to effectively get rid of piracy for good, we are somehow still living in a world where buying a single music CD takes two hours, Windows, fluency in fictitious languages, and a computer science degree.

At least you can now order your vinyl records via e-mail. Take that, 1980s!

Like many programmers, I am a night owl. Also, as many other programmers, I have a day job that forces me to be there at 8. These two characteristics interact badly with each other.

For most programmers, this is the type of problem normally solved with coffee. But not being a coffee drinker in general (I think it's just okay) and with what I can only assume is a natural immunity to caffeine, my to-go alternative solution is music: a good pair of headphones and epic, upbeat music makes wonders for my concentration until lunch time, when all productivity dies.

2019 was a great year for me to both catch up with songs I didn't listen to in many years and to discover new ones. The following is a list of songs to which I return every week, divided into three sections: Full albums, Instrumental songs (no words), and Individual songs (with words).

Full albums

There are two full albums that I have often listened entirely during long coding sessions, and that I definitely recommend:

• For no one's surprise, Daft Punk's soundtrack for TRON: Legacy makes the list. Too bad the rest of the movie was not as good.
• I haven't seen The Exorcist yet, so I never considered this album "creepy", but if you have seen it then you might recognize the opening of Tubular Bells. I found that the song's rhytm perfectly syncs with my internal rhytm, and it is not unusual for me to realize that I need to take a break right as the album comes to an end.

Instrumental Songs

It has been common knowledge for some time now that movie music is ideal for focusing on a task - you don't want the music to pull you out of a movie, the same way I don't want my music to pull me out of my work. For this reason alone, the first three items in this list are pulled straight out of Hollywood blockbusters:

• The Pacific Rim main theme,
• The Planet Sakaar theme from Thor Ragnarok, and
• In the Hall of the Mountain King, specifically the version heard in the movie "The Social Network"

Moving onto TV, the next two songs are taken from the Japanese series "Kill la Kill": Naming Sense Gata Boshi Gokuseifuku, which I could swear I never heard in the series itself, and Nui Harime's theme.

Finally, and cheating a little bit, the theme from "The Good, the bad, and the ugly" as performed by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra is the one piece of music that got me to actually, physically buy music in many years.

Individual Songs

Individual songs are always tricky, because it takes a lot of listening to them before you learn to ignore the lyrics and let them blend in the background. That said, if you are looking for songs to listen over and over again, here's a bunch:

• The least controversial song in this list are The greatest show on Earth and Ghost Love Score, both by Nightwish. They have long instrumental-only sections, and they are epic enough to give you an extra push while working.
• Both Heldenzeit and Guten Tag by the German band "Wir sind Helden" are the perfect example of a great band that you discover long after they have disbanded. If you are a geek, the videoclip for Analogpunk (performed by the singer of "Wir sind Helden") is full of easter eggs.
• The theme of "Revolutionary Girl Utena", Rinbu Revolution, is really good. There are not that many series where seeing the opening over and over is a plus, but Utena manages it.

Honorable mentions

I feel John Butler's "Ocean" deserves a spot in this list. It didn't make it into the official selection simply because I couldn't decide which version to include. I'm partial to the live version because it's the first one I heard, but the 2012 studio version is not bad at all.