this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2026

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What do you wish you'd have known before you started your hobby(s)? (piefed.world)

submitted 11 hours ago by toomanypancakes@piefed.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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[–] klymilark@herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol 7 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

Emacs makes a better row counter than basically anything else.

Restoring old business laptops will usually get you a better laptop than buying a budget new one that costs the same.

[–] mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Restoring old business laptops will usually get you a better laptop than buying a budget new one that costs the same.

Retired business machines are also fantastic for “server in a bedroom closet” types of setups. When IT retires an entire department’s desktops, they’re forced to list them for sale, because the bean counters want to see that they got something back from them. IT doesn’t care how much they sell for, and are just listing them to get them out of the way. And since they’re listing like 50 of them at a time, the listings end up competing with each other to lower the price. No gamer is selling their two year old battle station unless they need the money, which means they’ll be looking to get top dollar for it… But the bored Help Desk 1 worker got assigned the task of selling them because nobody else wanted to do it, sees it as busywork, and knows they won’t personally see a single cent of the resale price. So they don’t care what the final price is.

The machines are usually very lightly used. Typically only used for running MS Office, answering emails, and browsing Facebook. This can be true even for the top-of-the-line laptops… Because the CEO will throw a fit if he notices his laptop is older or cheaper than the graphic artists’ laptops are… Even though the graphic artists need a dedicated GPU and lots of RAM for their CAD, video editing, etc… While the CEO only uses it to answer like three emails a week. So the C-suite tends to get upgrades to the newest model every year, even though they don’t need it. And last year’s model gets listed for sale.

[–] klymilark@herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol 1 points 5 hours ago

Oh, absolutely! My primary laptop is a t430 that I got for $50, got the charger for $7, a replacement CPU and RAM for $50 each. Runs better than my partner's budget PC from a couple years ago. Still needs a new battery, but those aren't too expensive either. It's at 20-25% of the manufacturer capacity now.

I'm pretty sure my server was one of those, though. 1tb HDD, 16GB ram, no idea the other specs, but it was $100. Said it was new, but I 100% do not believe that because the RAM/HDD alone would cost $100 new

[–] treadful@lemmy.zip 2 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

Emacs makes a better row counter than basically anything else.

You mean like wc -l?

[–] klymilark@herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

No, for knitting xD At this point I do an org-mode list of every row in the pattern with checkboxes, then tick them off as I do them. Way nicer, especially for patterns you have to reference multiple parts at the same time for

[–] treadful@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Wait, you're serious? You use emacs for knitting patterns? Fascinating.

I have no real interesting in knitting, but I would be interested in seeing this workflow.

[–] klymilark@herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

A screenshot of the first chunk of a knitting pattern in the Orgzly app, pattern to follow in a code block The screenshot is in orgzly, but this is the actual file that I use. The source looks basically identical:

1. [X] CO160 (tail on right)
2. [X] b5vE, WT
3. [X] b3vE, WT
4. [X] b3vE, WT
5. [X] b4vE, WT
6. [X] 2, FW
7. [X] Field 1 [31/31]
   1. [X] 40, WT
   2. [X] 21, WT
   3. [X] 2, WT
   4. [X] 4, WT
   5. [X] 6, WT
   6. [X] 8, WT
   7. [X] 10, WT
   8. [X] 12, WT
   9. [X] 14, WT
   10. [X] 16, WT
   11. [X] 18, WT
   12. [X] 20, WT
   13. [X] 22, WT
   14. [X] 23, WT
   15. [X] 24, WT
   16. [X] 26, WT
   17. [X] 28, WT
   18. [X] 30, WT
   19. [X] 32, WT
   20. [X] 34, WT
   21. [X] 36, WT
   22. [X] 34, WT
   23. [X] 32, WT
   24. [X] 29, WT
   25. [X] 26, WT
   26. [X] 23, WT
   27. [X] 20, WT
   28. [X] 17, WT
   29. [X] 15, WT
   30. [X] 13, WT
   31. [X] 26, WT

Just hit C-c C-c when the row's done to mark it. It took me about 30 minutes to get the file set up, mostly because there are 45 sections like the "Field 1", most patterns would just go straight through to whatever the final row is. Plus the pattern's split into 3 columns, and a PDF, which is notoriously painful to convert to anything.

But yeah, no fancy configs, just basic org-mode functionality. I don't code much at all, I just use org-mode because it's been the best PKM tool I've found for myself.

If anyone's curious about the pattern, it's the Phoenix Wing Shawl by Nadine Schwingler on Ravelry

[–] steeznson@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago

Not sure if they meant column counter since you can easily get that too with Ctrl+x = if your cursor is over a character.

Line counts appear at the bottom of the emacs window by default but has a limit where it stops incrementing somewhere in the 10,000s. Also would be slower to return a value since it needs to open the file to get the count, unlike wc -l which is virtually instantaneous.