Jailbroke iPhones for $20 a pop in highschool. Blew it all on fireworks.
Flipped broken consoles before the market got too saturated to profit. Blew it all on video games.
Currently breeding fish. Blowing it all on more fish.
I'm bad at saving money.
Sounds like a good life to be honest. I'm probably just romanticizing the days I was a little too young to remember, but I wish I were one of those self-taught programmers, hackers, tinkerers. Everything's opaque and user-friendly and/or optimized to the point of illegibility now.
You still can fix your fridge, stove, washing machine when it breaks down with a web search and some patience !
But cars seems to be quite out of reach for anything except the most simple.
Personally I have not had my own appliances like those, but I'll keep that in mind for when I get my own place and my own appliances to fix :)
Good luck finding your place!
You're never too old to start learning that stuff.
For networking, there's a ton of resources on selfhosting and homelabbing, and big communities here on lemmy and elsewhere. It can be as expensive a hobby as you want, you can stretch an old laptop pretty far, get really cheap stuff from the cloud, or build a data closet in your house/apartment.
If you wanted to learn more about software, Rust has a ton of high quality official documentation available and would be really valuable knowledge for a career.
For the raw hardware tinkering getting the $30 essentials set from ifixit will get you into 90% of consumer devices, and even as a professional I'm usually watching a 5 minute youtube video before dissassembling anything, and that's really all you need.
I want to go into a career in networking and maybe some scripting/programming. Maybe over the winter break I'll use one old laptop we have for a tiny cybersecurity home lab. I'll put Metasploitable on it and open it up to my home network and go at it with my main Linux box. Is that what you meant by selfhosting and homelabbing?
I did learn Python by doing some tinkering with discord.py, similarly to what you were saying about Rust. That was pretty simple; I get the feeling that Python was designed to be learned. I'm glad I learned that in high school.
For taking hardware apart, my family does have an ancient Apple laptop no one uses anymore, but I heard Apple makes it a huge pain to get into those. What about old Android smartphones? Are those dissectable and fixable like old consoles would've been?
MacBooks actually aren't too bad to get into, but doing anything once you get the bottom off is another story- there isn't much that isn't soldered down.
I actually regret pointing out rust- it's what I've been looking at learning myself, and I think it's a poor choice for a first language, just because you can learn the basic stuff in something like python and have far less time spent fighting the compiler and needing to understand memory. Still a cool language, though.
Metasploitable is more or less what I meant, yeah. I would recommend, if you have a spare machine, install proxmox/esxi so you can virtualize a whole environment around it and learn about working with those things. You sound like you probably have linux experience, but being able to say that you can work on a server purely through the terminal is big, even if you only touch network equipment in your first role you will perform much better if you can ssh into a box and do anything you need to do.
It sounds like you already have enough to start applying for junior positions, I was in basically the same knowledge state when I got my first it job earlier this year. It took me months of hardcore job hunting to get a position, but if you have a real passion for stuff and show that you are a tinkerer and excited to learn more, that is what people are looking for. There have been a lot of lay offs in the industry so you may be competing with mid levels for junior positions still, but many employers know that investing in passionate people at entry level is often a good investment.
Biggest interview tip I know is not to pretend you don't know about something, try to relate it to something you do "Do you know JS/React?" "No but I have worked with python and made [x], and I am excited to transfer that experience to your environment." The positions you should be looking for shouldn't care much about what you already know, they should care about how long in seat before you know what you need to. Show that you're trainable, definitely talk about stuff you do at home (training they won't be paying you for).
Most people will have to work help desk a couple of years before any of this, but if you look hard/long enough (and probably get fairly lucky), you can jump right into the industry. I would look for small-medium businesses if you want to skip helpdesk hell- if you're going to be the second of two employees in IT, yes you will do helpdesk, but you won't be a phone slave 8 hours a day, you'll get the opportunity to work on new things and learn.
Hope that helps. I've only been professionally in networking/security for about 6 months, and definitely got my current job in part from networking from my repair tech, so you may have a different experience. I was 24 when I started, I don't have a college degeee or any certs yet, though, so I would honestly say the soft skills of interviewing, social networking, and presentation are what will help you get the job the most.
Hope that helps and you can get what you want. Job hunting will crush your soul, but if you enjoy computers, the other side of that tunnel is a great place to be.
Ooh, what kind of fish? I used to be deep in the world of aquarium fish before life had its way with me.
Corydoras catfish, mostly. Trying for otos but haven't had much luck yet.
Ahh man I love me some Cory's.
We used to have an Orinoco basin themed tank, Corydoras Delphax, Otto's, Cardinal tetras, Farlowella acus (twig catfish) and a couple of huge Altum Angelfish.
We had some luck with the Cory's but just like you the Otto's proved stubborn.
Currently cooking for friends and family. I let them know what I'm cooking that week; they can opt into any of the meals. I just make extra of those, and they give me $10 per portion.
I flipped cars for a few years. Im a pretty good diy mechanic.
The amount of people who cant be bothered scraping off stickers, and giving a car a good detail astounds me. Take the car home, wash it thoroughly, detail the engine bay and interior, and if you have the skills change the oil, air filter and coolant. Those were usually good for a few hundred per flip but the bar to entry is low, anyone can do that.
Also buying cars with 4 steel wheels with bald tyres and finding a set of cheap alloy wheels with good tyres that someone was flogging off were also a good flip if you could find the wheels and tyres cheap and negotiate the car down. "Mate a set of tyres is $600" when you can find a legal set on nicer wheels for $200.
The best ones were nice cars with 1 big problem, "needs a new clutch" or "blown head gasket" made a few grand off those usually because I could spend as long as I needed to to do the job on the cheap by myself.
In my state title flipping is a felony...
In Australia the limit is 4 per year before you have to apply for a motor vehicle traders licence, but thats per person. The official paperwork on a few of mine may or may not have have had my flatmates details.
Im curious as to how they figure out the difference between title flipping and just some guy selling a car.
Started a lawn service on the fly. Worked great!
All I had was an old car and a lawn mower, didn't even have a phone or pager (1994 or so). Whipped up some flyers and pasted them all over the trailer park communal mailboxes (several parks). Used mom's phone number and checked in by pay phone.
First day, lady called mom wanting to know if I could edge.
"Tell her I can."
"You don't have an edger!"
"I will after I get paid on this next job."
Hauled ass to Home Depot, got an edger, rest is history.
A major leg up was mom (grandma) being old and having old friends that wanted the work done. Once I displayed competency, the referrals rolled in.
Sold weed in college. Overall I came out ahead, despite getting robbed one time.
In the 90s I would buy and sell baseball cards. It wasn't big bucks but it was enough to put gas in my mom's car and buy food every day.
My very first job when I was little was a professional grammar nazi for a publisher. Something that was akin to a favor with benefits. It lasted less than a year. I was able to buy my first game with it.
Selling plasma is kinda my only one.
But if you're healthy enough they pay a lot for it.
If you're lucky enough to have that "Golden Gene" (or whatever it's called) they pay you even more and you get to be a mini-medical-celebrity lmao
Oh, you mean RhNull? That’s only got like 43 people worldwide.
Can you kidnap them to breed more? Asking for a friend.
I think human trafficking was mentioned somewhere else on here.
Do you mean being an universal donor (if it is called that in english as well)?
That's O- blood type, I don't think they're the same thing
Don't do it too much, it has adverse effects. Those big needle marks on your skin they tell you go away with cocoa butter...lies...
I also had a low thyroid stimulating hormone test result after several weeks of biweekly donations
If I hadn't found a job a few weeks later I would be in a really, really bad place. I got lucky.
Some years back, we made a trip to make/selling some simple food at a weekend street-fair (travelling to a bigger town about 100 miles away). One item only but with several ingredients ... non-cheap, fresh , high-quality. Two people, cleared (in today's dollars) about $1000 in two afternoons. It was different from what other vendors were selling, simple, $2 a shot, great-tasting.
Scalping crypto (daytrade tactic), turned 300$ into 2000$ in 24h! Was on employment insurance at the time so it went into essential stuff.
Just keep in mind that financial markets are a zero-sum game. For every gain one person makes, other people lose that much.
Eh... Don't know why that's relevant here, but keep in mind that any financial gain is a zero sum game?
Well just that OP asked for a get rich quick idea, and you essentially said "I went to a casino and made a profit" even though the odds are usually that you will lose money at a casino
Shoplifting. Lifting hubcaps. Forging checks.
Did a lot as a kid.
Once, no money for food. So posted to craigslist something about a broke dykes dinner. Bunch of fellow gay women showed up, each contributed one item. Memorable night. There was some whipping with green onions in the kitchen. One of the women told me (we were all out of jobs, struggling) that a straight guy would pay her $50 to throw tomatoes at him while he jerked himself off.
Loving the Craigslist anecdote!
But there must have been a couple of rightfully confused girls dedicated into put thumbs into the Hoover dam a la apocryphal Netherlands story.
No euphemisms were included in the making of the above paragraph..
Did click fraud against a UK search engine and earned a few pennies per bot-generated click on a website I ran.
Made a few hundred per month.
It's pretty much impossible these days cos Google dominates the market and click bots are a lot harder to run.
Working... Slow 🥺
short term ways
Yeah I'm only working till I get an inheritance from a mysterious relative. It is short term!
Everyday on the way home from work I would stop at the thrift store and buy WiFi routers for anywhere from $5 to $7 and then immediately sell them 10 minutes later for $40
That game is over now but it was a good way to put a thousand bucks+ in my pocket every month for almost no effort.
Edit: and about one out of 10 of those sales, I could parlay it into a configuration & setup service for another 40-80 bucks which of course would take me 10 minutes plus drive time.
Grindr is a great way to make some quick cash if you like sucking dick.
I haven't tried but -
I once asked what would be a real life equivalent of those small chores you find in video games that earn you a little gold.
Someone answered that driving people around.
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