I really missed it. From when I was 11, until I was about 20, I enjoyed doing this kind of work.

When I was 20, I got into a relationship with someone who was critical of it, and I ended up succumbing to their criticism, quitting my hacking, and going into IT industry instead.

I did that for about 15 years, but all along, I missed doing this kind of stuff. I kept doing it a little here and there, but my jobs would eat most of my hack juice, and I just didn't have much left for my own projects.

But I had already tasted the sweet nectar, and eventually I got tired of waiting for it, and abandoned the professional world gradually but completely.

I'm back to hacking now, and I could not be happier.

In my mid-40's I still get this urge to play around with "useless" things. In most cases, I don't actually act on it, and instead spend an hour or two watching videos of or reading blogs by people who actually did it.

That doesn't mean I don't spend some time on these things. I've been doing some Atari 2600 programming, and have been playing around with an emulated IBM mainframe (TK4 on Hercules). I have also been working on a new demo effect on the Atari ST.

Note how the things I actually do follow through on, they're all working on emulators. It does give me the ability to take advantage of modern technology (such as Emacs) while still exploring the limits of old systems.

I'd like to think that getting older means you can appreciate both the old and the new, and I think my hobby projects reflect that.

I get where you're coming from, but at the same time... I've been there, done that. I don't mean that in a negative way- rather, it's just that I've already gotten the satisfaction I'm going to get out of projects of this nature. Same thing as when I was in to rebuilding V8 engines when I was younger. It was fun to figure out the system, and see what was possible with a few tweaks. Now that I've clearly defined where the edges are, it's on to the next thing. I don't need to repeat the same experiment forever, you know?

I've actually had quite a bit of motivation after moving out of my old apartment. I was able to unpack all of my electronics stuff and tools again. Previous place was way too small. Actually unpacking stuff triggered a lot of desire to do stuff with it again.

One of the things I found was a tube full of rom-less 8051 microcontrollers and another tube of AM85C30 Dual UARTs I probably picked up at a robotics club swap meet years ago. Ended up building a breadboard "computer" and picked up an universal programmer on eBay for like $50 (uses the open source minipro tool). (https://imgur.com/IjJ6HO6)

Also did some reverse engineering on how to do in-system programming of the BIOS chip in some 386EX based single board computer I have. I wanted to give myself an extra challenge while following the rust blog_os project.

I used to do this kind of stuff in junior high, high school, and college...back when I had the time now. Now with a day job it's time to find some time to muck around and really explore things with your curiosity and imagination. I totally see where you're coming from.

For most people I know (including me) tinkering like that dies down when you get an IT job. After spending 40h+ per week dealing with stupid computers, you rarely have enough motivation to do it again at home, as a hobby. You just want stuff to work.

But the tinkering urge isn't gone. I highly recommend finding different hobby, that can satisfy that itch. Gardening, woodworking, cars, motorcycles, 3d printing, etc. You can spend many hours doing "useless" things there, and have tons of fun.

For me, for example, I used to get happiness from spending 20h of my time to get Linux running on some old HW, worth $5. Now I get similar rush from spending 20h trying to build something from wood, that ends up costing me way more and looking more crappy that picking it up at the store.

It seems that with experience, you sometimes just understood that something's theoretically possible, and lose interest at that point. At least, that's how I try to rationalize my laziness.

I picked it up again!

2 years ago, I was fed and bored with spending my evenings and weekends doing nothing useful, so I built myself an electronics lab and now I’m in there almost every night.

The last few weekends I’ve been trying to reverse engineer and hack the firmware of a 25 year old Tektronix oscilloscope.

It’s a bit of a pointless exercise, and somebody asked me on Twitter “why?”, and the simple reply is “because it’s there.”

But also: I’ve learned to use Ghidra and it’s given me tons of hours of tinkering.

I lost interest in this stuff when I got my first sysadmin job.

Dealing with garbage tech is what brings me down. Completely broken, unusable garbage software is everywhere, backed by egos, emotions, power plays, and entrenchment. That's the part I don't want to deal with. The only thing worse than having to deal with a bunch of idiots is having to deal with a bunch of things made by them. It pisses me off how broken everything is and how few people seem to take issue with it.

Everything is like this. Sturgeon's law is everywhere.

Once I can somehow push those things out of my life, I'm good.

Extra hard when a 2 year old keeps cramming half-eaten fruit into everything.

I think in a lot of the cases it is a combination of how the jobs have sucked a lot more out of folks and having family/kids/responsibilities etc. The latter was always present but the former has just gotten worse over the years.

I still have it, but almost everything else in life is fighting against letting me explore it.

I've just become a lot lazier

Switch domains. I've done software for a living because I liked it for 35 years or so, then coasted for a bit and now have a small specialized consulting company and as much free time as I can manage goes towards music related projects. Much happier now, strongly motivated and every now and then a bit of software gets written around that theme as well.

I've struggled with keeping this kind of motivation for years. My way out involved getting an interesting job and finding a topic, which is somehow related to the work (so that your reason doesn't fight) yet not directly aimed at a practical outcome in your work (to keep the enjoyment).

For me, personally, the hobby part became SAT solving. It's related to software verification and theorem proving and I feel like learning something useful - even for my family through better career prospects (responsibility box ticked). And I still get the bit-fiddling just as when hacking old microprocessors.

It's also kind of a combination of motivation and depth. I've done some work coaching people who are seeking change like this, and you have to hack the process a bit, so that the depth-oriented part is tightly aligned with the subject and their history.

Without the depth consideration tied to something really firm (so to speak), it might as well be an article about how fun a challenge it is to casually travel to deep space, for how approachable it will be given even the highest level of layman's motivation.

I feel ya. Every now and then I have a burst of creativity though and try to pick a project that can be completed in a day =) they're rarer now though (mid 30's)

There’s no ROI on doing this stuff besides the intangibles. This is a startup news website, and you’re on here because you want, or were interested in, getting rich during the ages of 18-35.

Could just be me though.