Ask Lemmy

Go outside more

I just got into tying knots! It's a useful skill. You can pick it up in a couple of minutes and then improve continuously. There are a lot of books on the subject. It's cheap. You can use cord you might already have lying around the house, or you can get paracord at the hardware store, or you can go somewhere fancy like Paracord Galaxy if you want some extra special colors or patterns. It's soothing and leaves you with something tangible at the end.

Here's a monkey's fist knot I just finished! I've been giving them to friends to use as keychains.

Soldering. You don't need a huge amount of space. A desk and a box to keep stuff in. You can buy reference kits which allows you to build your own devices like headphones amplifiers. The reference kit should come with instructions and the PBC board will show which components go where. Kind of like painting with numbers.

Once your confident with it then it's also useful. Replace bad caps on monitors, motherboards, anything really.

Crochet, knitting, sewing and general ropecraft are some of the best ways to build dexterity, focus hand eye coordination, and train your brain at the same time.

It doesn't require electricity, the bar to entry is so low you can knit with two chopsticks, some twine, and a book from the library.

Added bonus of anyone who says knitting is for old biddies and women will only ever say that kind of shit when you're not holding two footlong metal spikes.

As an added bonus you get a whole physical item that you created yourself.

OpenStreetMap

Programming. You need to have a project in mind to get motivated, but it's cool being able to built an app you can run on your mobile device.

Factorio

Blender. Free and incredibly versatile 3D modelling software. Learning curve is a bit steep but YT has tons of tutorials to help you stumble along.

I second 3D modeling, it's super fun and entertaining. Blender is the software.

If you like being broke, Warhammer 40000

Ive thought about many of things but im unsure if i should try them?

You should definitely try them. What have you got to lose?

Since you're a creative sort, why not make zines? Scribus is a free layout tool you could use to build them and there are plenty of free templates available.

Indie game development. Tons of great, free (even foss), frameworks out there these days. Try ebitengine for an awesome 2d framework.

That's an extremely open ended question with countless answers...

• speedrun your favorite game
• become a youtuber and play games while streaming
• play a game with just your feet
• play a game blindfolded
• play a game randomizer
• learn to program
• program shit
• learn an instrument
• play music and post it online
• make shitposts
• learn to draw
• draw porn
• draw not porn
• write poems
• film solo comedy skits
• do multiple of these things at once

...do anything because you want to do it.

That's all I could think of while on the toilet.

Blender, 3d modeling, vfx, drawing, etc. Whatever you like. I spent like a year learning blender when I was broke, jobless, and had a lot of free time. (last year lol) I got into simracing and bought a bundle a few months ago a d hve been mostly doing that lately tho.

3D modeling.

Check out Ryan King Art on youtube. Follow along with his guides.

Not gooning.

Make music

There are many things not requiring the use of any laptop, powerful or not.

• Read books. There are billions of books out there waiting to be read. New ones, old ones, fictions, essays, in whatever 'genre' you may fancy. You can even read them for free, by borrowing them from your local public library.
• As suggested: a #2 pencil (HB, for the non-US world, but I would suggest 2B myself: a slightly fatter/darker type of lead), a few sheets of paper or a sketchbook (for portability) and start sketching. You can sketch daily life objects. If don't believe me (and why should you?) go read/look at 'Everyday matters' by Dany Gregory (he also has a YT channel, if you prefer watching moving pictures instead of turning pages but I think are way more... complete and interesting than most of his videos). You may even throw in a small and cheap set of non-pro watercolors (it will be much cheaper than artist-grade ones, and you need needs hundreds of colors either: a set of 12 is more than enough, heck even just 6 colors would be excellent), as they can help you realize you're more interested in painting than sketching. And since they're water-based, you wont get nasty smells like with oil painting, eve when doing it at home ;)
• Find some craft, DIY activity you enjoy? Younger I was into little scale models (plastic planes and tanks that I glued and painted), now I'm much more into crafting things we will use at home.
• Play chess? A great way to make people IRL: chess clubs, cafés, any places where (amateur) chess players like to meet. Unlike most video games it's not 'limited' to a few hours of fun and excitement: people have been playing chess for thousand of years and they're still playing it with the same excitement today: it's challenging and there is no end to it.. and every one can play (even little kids, and even bad players like myself) ;)
• Exercises. I do long daily walks. It changed my life at least as much as learning to read changed it when I was a child.

Ive thought about many of things but im unsure if i should try them

Why would that be? There is no harm in trying things out.

I do quite a lot of writing, knitting, gaming, crochet, website making, and game development on my old T430. Also emacs is a hobby, and I use it with all of the above, so count that in xD

• Writing: Good creative outlet, lotta fun, you can do it on a toaster if you're really strapped for PC specs. Fanfic is especially fun, and a very common way to cut your chops writing.
• Knitting: Useful! You get clothes and wash rags and bags at the end of it! Can be rough on the hands though.
• Crochet: See knitting. Harder on the hands IMO, but I also tension like I'm strangling someone, so that could be my fault.
• Gaming: Depends on the game you're playing. Retro stuff does well, and is a fun hobby in itself.
• Website making: It's fun having a blog, and if you want to feed the writing into it you could even do some basic ARG-type stuff.
• Game development: RPG Maker, Godot, and Ren'py all work well. If you can't draw there are some premade assets on itch.io to play around with, free and paid. Requires less coding than you'd expect, especially with RPGMaker/Ren'Py

Assuming you want to use the laptop for this hobby, I would suggest getting a cheap, secondhand camera, old DSLRs are like £50 with a lens and perfectly fine starting point, but you can spend as much as you want on a setup. Only recommendation I would make, is get something thats still supported today for the lens mount type, that way you know you have a constant upgrade path.

Get the camera with the right lens included for what you want to start taking, additional lenses will increase the budget significantly even at the bottom end as they can often work well with better (and more expensive) camera bodies if you decide to upgrade later on.

Then you can use Darktable & GIMP to play with the photos to your hearts content or "spend" on Light Table & Photoshop. You can do anything from basic image correction up to full blown re-imaginings of your photos. Plenty of online tutorials to walk you through the processes.

Learn Rust or another programming language. Useful to know something to expand your ability.

I write fanfiction and make YouTube videos using a program called imovie

Fuck it. Battletech.

I like writing stories.

With a little help of AI you can also try indie game dev. My advice - use it as an interactive tutorial and better search engine. You can learn a lot when AI gives you examples and then do your own thing.