I don't even remember writing this, or what thread it came from. The HTC forum I joined 2 years ago and it was kind of neat seeing peoples setups, and they post a lot of pictures of their plants.
You used to be able to sign into Yahoo via your Gmail account, and now you can't, so I havn't even checked the lists gallery's in a while. I think they had an internal place on the yahoo groups you could upload your photos of whatever projects you were working on, I don't think the same is true for a google group but I could be wrong.
I only use this mailing list really, and
www.sciencemadness.org for hard-core chemistry. I'm not involved in much hardware stuff so I don't know what list or forums people frequent for that.
I can relate a lot to your last sentence. Havn't really found a solution to it. I've been video chatting with a lot of people recently so if you ever want to chat science hit me up! I think the best solution to that problem, at least personally, is grad school, so that's the plan.
I really liked going into BOSSLab to meet like-minded people but, getting to and from there kind of sucked because of where I lived. Obviously having a maker-space around or something like that would help.