# Hobbies

My point of view on hobbies
October 10, 2025 · 12 min · Iman Alipour Comments

When I started my PhD, I was told “get yourself a hobby!” many many times by both my advisor, and the director of the group I worked in. In fact, when being interviewed for the position, I was asked about my hobbies.

For some reason I think I have like the weirdest hobbies of all time. Like, you know, people binge series, go to clubs, bars, hang out, and so on. But I always had interests in things that when I talk about people get weirded out, or at least some of them do so. To be honest though, when I talk more about some of my hobbies, they do show enthusiasm, but it feels like there is a clear gap between us afterwards.

Let’s go back in time. What hobbies have I had over the course of my life? Actually as a kid I used to play games on Mobile for some reason. I was also quite competative, reaching the highest possible ranks in pretty much every game I played by solo-queueing. I also enjoyed playing with my brother, but for some reason he always liked games that were not necesserially my most favorite. Like I liked Vain Glory, and my brother liked Fifa. We did play both in the end.

After my brother went to the capital to attend univesity, we bacame more distant. I had to also focus on my own studies, and was actually struggling in junior-high. Now that is a story in itself for another time. I used to play games back then as hobby. But my real interest was chess. I was really good at calculating. I was extremely sharp for my age, but since I was obbese my parents wanted me to take “active” sport classes. So… getting into a chess class was conditional.

I have’t really done any chess studying after those early years, and I just know a few openings with little depth. I do have a relatively good understanding of piece synergy and also ok-ish calculation skills to beat a good portion of people I see on a daily basis, but any professional player would easily beat me out of the opening.

In high-school I didn’t really have any hobbies. I did become interested in Basketball, but nothing serious. It’s funny how I was able to become good at any sport I tried. I tried Football, Basketball, Volleyball, Table Tennis, Tennis, Chess, Footsal, Swimming, and Badminton. I think swimming was, and still is my best sport. I never pursued it though, which is a shame.

Before starting my Bachelors, I became really interested in Cicada3301, and cryptography. Well, not the fancy state-of-the-art cryptography, the simple classic methods. The notion of delivering a message in plain sight that only the two parties envolved can understand it was so cool to me! That reminds me, we had these special things in junior-high called “Karsoogh” for math, physics, chemistry, and biology. I think I quilified for pretty much every one of them, and had a blast every time! In the chemistry one we cooked honey(!), in the biology one they dissected a bunny wabbit (with w to pay respect!), in the physics one we did cool experiments and tried to solve fancy problems. But the math one was different, it happend between a few close-by NODET cities, and annualy. The idea was simple. They gave us questions that did were solveable by developing ideas, with almost always little to no pre-requisite. Only in one of the years this event was internal, and they taught us 13-15 year young folks basics of cryptography, and ciphers. We then competed against each other. The competition was simple, develope a cipher with your team in a n*n (I think n was 6 or 8), then you split up into two groups, one team encrypts a message and you recieve the delivered message, the other team has to decrypt it. The fastest team gets the most points. The the message is common between teams. After this phase the teams got together and had to figure out other teams encryption algorithm, if successful, they got points. First teams to get an algorithm gets more points. Our team won the best algorithm in the end, and my ideas were most influential in this achievement! My teammates became really good friends with me after this competition which felt really cool! I think this was the reason I became interested in cryptography. I don’t remember the first year, but the first and last year in the final phase and after qualifying they tought us basics of game theory, and we had a set of two player fair and unfair games for which we had to compete against other players. If your team solved a game, you got more points. It was really fun, and since the games happened in parallel, all teammtes had to be active.

I said all of this just to say thinking on problems became a hobby for me out of all of these cool expereinces. I like to casually get lost in questions and think about weird equations, or natural problems. Something like Feynman’s obsession with the spaghetti problem! Initially when starting my PhD, I did this, but then I diverged to other things I will talk about later on. But I do want to get back to this fun hobby. I just need some questions, and an empty mind. Or I guess some time slots to chill and not stress about my other research.

During my bachelors, I became fascinated by hardware. Like sensors, actuators, micro-controllers, and anything that I could program to do something I do but do not want to do manually. Later on I realized this is related to IoT and Embedded systems. I did take the embedded systems course, and for the project that the cap was 120 points, we got a wopping 125 out of 100! Not only we implemented the whole project parts that we had to implement, but also we went beyond and just surprised the professor and his TAs! Unfortunately I don’t have any images from the project, but the code can be found here.

I bought myself a raspberrypi, many sensors and actuators, and did small fun projects! I deployed a VPN on my home network, made my Rpi accessible with dynamic IP over the Internet via DDNS, deployed my very own nextcloud, website, and so on. I smartified my room AC s.t. it would keep the temprature at a certain range in a way to avoid hysteresis via a simple temprature and humidity sensor, and an IR-transceiver by recording the controllers signal. I could not figure out how to fix the state when commands don’t go through correctly though, a challenge that I never solved or came up with a solution for. I would say my love with computers, making things smart, and networking became my main hobby!

After some protests and Internet blockages, I became interested in setting up VPNs that could penetrate through censorship attempts. It was, and still is a rat race. Well, it’s the story of my PhD pretty much now.

Reading books became a hobby for a while, but Youtube kinda distroyed that. I really love to get back to reading more books, I have a really exciting list of books to be read in my library. Listening to Music is another amazing hobby I have, specifically when I walk around or do chores. I find doing chores so relaxing! Since we talked about music I should mention I also tried to learn Piano, but didn’t pursue it. I actaully wanted to learn Violine, but the consultant we talked to said “if you’re not a hard worker it won’t workout for you”, and since my brother was going to learn Piano, I followed suit. And oh well, our teacher although he though I was doing really good for my age, did not give me the same set of practices that my brother got, and naturally since I was learning from kids books, I felt sad since his music always sounded better, and I eventually gave up feeling sad. This is a pattern that has happened in my life a lot, something I need to stop from happening. Comparing myself with other, and competing with them. It’s just distroying me mentally. I am me, and the best me ever to exist. And that’s how it should be.

Somewhere during my bachelors I also became fascinated by coffee! I watched many James Hoffman videos and learned how to use different berewing methods for coffee, and did lots of experiments with it. Then came matcha, though with matcha things are much more limited.

Another thing that comes to mind is boardgames. I love boardgames that you need to think and be smart! An example is Cluedo. People usually don’t like to play it with me because I pay attention to “everything”. But I also anjoy playing other simpler games like UNO, Risk, Catan, card games, Coup, and many many other fun party games. I have a whole collection of boardgames that I don’t get to play! :-P One of my all time favorite games is “Zaar” (a persian game that was discontinued), and a game kinda similar to it called “The Night Cage”. I like them because there is a bit of strategy, luck, and a lot of co-op in them. In the later you either all win together, or get doomed. In the first one there is a comperition aspect to the game which makes it cool.

Cooking is another hobby of mine, although I only enjoy it when done with someone, or in a group. Aaaaaand guess what, I’m a loner! (Drat. :P) I love to “not follow recipes” and try new things. Foods I make usually turn out to be quite yummy actually, though definitly not authentic. I also think I do a good job with the presentation part when I try. And I’m open to cooking anything and everything!

I was also interested in Hiking, but never really got to know someone who is both interested and willing to go with me, and when I’m alone, I rather do my other hobbies.

And that leaves me with my latest two hobbies. CTFs, and 3D printing! Oh ,and I guess maybe blogging and sharing photos online? Idk! xD

3D printing is an interesting one. I was fascinated about it from before, but never got my hands on a 3D printer until like 7 months ago. When I went to 38c3 last year, I saw so many printers, and how cool they were. And somehting in my heart was touched, that I need one! The thing is, I tend to like thinks that limit me to my creativity, like the IoT stuff, or how I always loved to play Minecraft as a kid. And oh well, 3D printing is just the hobby! I also tried to do some 3D design, but I’m quite a noob at it still. I will probably share some of the things I’ve made somewhere somehow, but not for now at least. Well, one of my cool projects inspired and mostly funded by my advisor was the INET logo (post comming soon!). It’s so cute and fascinating, and I had an absolute blast working on it for the one week I did. So much designing, fixing measurements, printing, coding, soldering, wiring, debugging, etc.! I also 3D printed and painted many gifts and organizers and other figues for either myself, or my friends. It’s just a fun thing to have, and to play around with. The fixing part of it, and maintaining it is not as fun, but it’s part of the journey. I will probably write about me and my 3D printer a lot more in the future. Another cool thing I can do with it, and have been doing so, is to do prints for the PhD hat of the people who will be graduating, a German cute and cool tradition!

And now let’s talk about the CTF stuff. This is somewhat related to my interest in computers, problem solving, and cryptography (kinda). I’ve been wanting to do CTFs for a long time and throughout my Bachelors, but never did so. After starting my PhD, I was introduced to Saarsec, and now I’m a proud member, trying to contribute as much as my time allows me to. I’m not good at CTFs, but the joy of getting stuck on a problem, and maybe finally solving it is just too good to pass. I love it! I want to do more of it. The only sad part is that it takes a long time, and well, I need to spend time on the social aspects of my life too. Too shay. I would love to share some of my write-ups here too, and also write about it in the future, but there is only so much time I can spend on the blog.

And last but not least, blogging. Well, I kinda started it for no reason to be honest. I just want to share my stories, and to show my vulnerable side with no guilt. It feels freeing to do this, and I hope I continue! I hope people won’t get mad if they are a part of these stories I share. I try to not name any names if not required, but I do think putting my PoV helps me with reducing some anxiety and social pressure. I really enjoy it!

With all this being said, I think that’s it. If I remember other hobbies that I missed, I will add them to the end of the article or maybe write a new post about it, Idk. The only thing I want to emphasize is that I’m into things that make me limited to my creativity. Oh, and also books, if only I read them instead of watching Youtube!!!!

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