Quantity does not equal quality

No one said quality and quantity were equal. That's just shifting the goal posts and poorly at that, you've no idea the skills acquired or the knock on effect. Certainly it's taught me about bonding interfaces and I'm sure I'm not the only one. It's certainly something I'll look into further and it's certainly going to have a practical real world effect. On that basis alone you're just wrong.

Making a pile of old forgotten modems download a file at .6 MBPS is not an achievement to be celebrated. It is a waste of time

Like your turbo, there's plenty to be learned along the way and plenty to be achieved getting to that point, I've listed a few above. Wrapping this in a project the person enjoys is a cherry on top.

and people that want to attempt to justify a total stranger wasting time on pointless activities are doing little more than showing that they too waste a lot of time on pointless activities.

From the start my comments have been more about pointing out your hypocrisy, somewhere along the line I've been sucked into pointing out it's not even pointless. People who shit on people pursuing their own goals certainly are wasting their time, I may or may not be - the key difference is I'm not spouting some nonsense about how everything needs to be done to learn or create something new.

I'm not sure how you infer I waste a lot of time doing pointless stuff, you know little to nothing about me, more just making stuff up to satisfy your argument.

When we are on our respective deathbeds, I am going to presume neither of us will go down thinking "I regret doing useful things with my time...".

I doubt I'll give a second thought to fixing the toilet tbh, but I know for sure plenty of the stupid shit I've done will make me smile.

Ultimately you don't see the point in the project and that's fine, for some reason you need to be a complete hypocrite about it and die on some imaginary hill.