Welcome back for another installment of Saturday Hobbies.  I write this as I drive down the road in the back of a car on a rainy Saturday.  So the last couple of Saturday Hobbies have been a bit … productive.  This weekend we are playing online game, nothing productive about that!  There are quite a few options in the online gaming world but we are going to take a look at three of them, World of Warcraft, Eve Online, and Ultima Online.  Read more

Happy Saturday!  So a fun activity for your free time is to join in working on some sort of open source project.  There are a large number of projects out there that can use a hand.  The place to start is to swing on over to sourceforge.net and search for a project you might be interested in using.  Source Forge is full of projects in all sorts of stages of development and all types of uses. 

Most of the projects will let you get a current version of the source from the CVS and you can make changes.  If you make any useful changes you can generally pass them back on to the group.  Some projects are organised enough that they have specific lists of things that need to be done so you can (and should) follow those lists. 

Happy Coding.

Ok, this one is for the serious nerds only. Competitive Programing is a rather entertaining thing to in your free time that can even earn you some money. Here is what you do, you go down to topcoder.com and register for a free account. Then you have a few options, you can compete in their Algorithm competitions, which are timed programing exercises. Or you can compete in their software design or development competitions, in which you not surprisingly develop and design software. The best part about topcoder is that the winner gets paid so it is not only fun but profitable.

Ahh Saturday, best day of the week, no work today, no work tomorrow.  But you have to have a hobby.  So what do nerds do for fun?  Well one idea you might try is Geocaching, it has been around for a while now (since 2000) but it is really picking up these days.  That coupled with the dropping cost of a decent GPS make geocaching a great weekend hobby.  So what is Geocaching you might ask? I say, hold on I will get to it, geez.  Geocaching is a sport where people hide things all over the place and you use a GPS and a set of coordinates to find them.  Now at first glance this sounds silly but it is terrific fun, you get out of your chair, that you probably spent most of the week in, you get out in the sun, and you get to have some nerdy fun with a GPS.  Try it sometime, get a GPS, it doesn’t matter what kind, a tom tom or a garmin or a puck for your pocket pc, and head over to http://geocaching.com.  Punch in your area code and see all the caches in your area.  Chances are if you have Internet and are thus in a populated enough area there will be a few if not a few dozen geocaches near by. 

If you do geocache already or if you give it a shot leave a comment about your first experience.