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I’ve been using flutter + android studio and I’m enjoying it (as much as you can while making a mobile app). Android studio is a lot but it includes android emulators which is nice to test stuff on if you don’t feel like getting your phone.

You’ll need to install flutter (works on windows, mac, and linux), android studio (I think vscode also works?), and you can download a sample project, open it, build it, and run it. It’s a great way to see how it works. Then you can create your own project and go from there. Flutter has a lot of packages which I would recommend at looking through (if your app is simple you might not need any of these though).

Once you build and run the app on your android phone, it’s there and you can use it. You don’t need to upload it to google play or anything else (unless you want to share it).

Programming. I love making small command line programs in python or automating something. Someday I want to make a music desktop app that syncs songs to my phone.

Hot swappable mechanical keyboards. It can be pricey but there’s hot swappable keyboards on amazon for cheap, and you can get your own keycaps and switches to create a keyboard that you are really happy with. I love being able to tinker around with my keyboards and swap things out if I don’t like them.

Making a “second brain” or personal wiki. I love taking lots of notes (recipes I like, about what I learned, how to fix a software problem, etc) so I can find things easier in the future. I use Obsidian for this, it’s really fun.

Lock picking. I got into this for a bit, bought some lock picks and bad padlocks. I watched a lot of LockPickingLawyer’s videos and thought it looked fun so I tried it. I was bad at it, it’s a lot of feeling when the pins move and stop. It takes a lot of patience but it’s really fun.

Making edits to Open Street Map. If you see something wrong, you can go edit it if you make an account and use a map editor.

Raspberry Pi self hosting. I think they are hard to find right now, but it’s cool to have a small computer running Raspberry Pi OS (linux) where you can install pretty much anything on it. I run Pi-Hole on mine and it blocks so many ad and tracker domains it’s insane.

Making a game. I’m slowly trying to learn blender and unreal engine to make a game. I think it will be fun but also a nightmare.

I take notes in markdown using Obsidian. I tend to forget things that have happened (or when they happened) unless I am reminded of it, so I keep a daily journal. I also save any good recipes, how I fixed a programming bug or a software issue, just anything I learn that I want to save, or any ideas that I want to remember for later.

I can also quickly search my notes and it’s like a mini personal search engine, it’s amazing.

I used to write my journal in a private wordpress blog hosted on my computer, and I had so many random text files in so many different folders I could never find them when I needed them, so I’m really happy this program exists 😭

I like writing in markdown so I use Hugo, and when I do a git push it gets sent to github pages (which is free as long as the repo and website is public!) There’s a lot of themes so you don’t have to tinker around much if you don’t want to. But it’s pretty easy to make some css changes / additions.

I’ve been writing notes about how to do certain things in some programming languages, how to do certain things on the command line, etc. and I have all this in Obsidian for my own reference. I started a blog a few months back (a static website generator) and I don’t expect many people to come across it as the things I write about are pretty niche. But it’s something that I can put time into now so when future me needs to reference something, it’s just there (rather than haphazard notes that I will need to piece together).

Self-hosting (or hosting on github) using a static website generator like Hugo can be fun if you also like tinkering around with the blog itself. Otherwise yeah there’s Medium, WordPress, maybe even Substack?

It adds new areas, items, weapons, bosses. It’s very worth it! I think most (if not all) of the content is available on 0BC as well which is nice.

there’s also a smaller one here !ObsidianMD@kbin.social

I use obsidian too! while it’s not open source, there’s so many community plugins and all your notes are stored on your computer in markdown, so you have complete control over your notes (you aren’t locked in to using obsidian). I sync my notes with OneDrive, then I use the OneSync mobile app to get my notes synced onto my phone.

something similar to obsidian is logseq, it’s open source but it’s more geared towards bullet point notes. I used it a bit and it didn’t make sense for me (I was mostly journaling, but it looks very promising if you take notes in a bullet point format!)