2023-01-01

Hello 2023

Hello New Year! And a Happy New Year to all, who adhere to this calendar. Good day to everyone!

How did I fare with the 2022 resolution?

• The scanner is still not scanning. I should consider abandoning the idea of bringing my several thousand slides and negative images over to the digital world.

• No morse code, no brushed up Spanish, no dasher input method --- I have sensed some resistance to learning new stuff on various occasions. That might mean, that my brain has lost more of its capacity that I could wish for. And that infection with SARS-COV2 in autumn has certainly not helped either. Moreover, I used to read a few pages when going to bed, but I have completely given up on this habit. Nowadays I just switch off the light and go to sleep within minutes. I am certainly at a loss on how to deal with my personal health in the future. Oh well. Maybe I just have to accept the decreased capacity of brain and muscle power and deal with my life accordingly.

• I did officially announce that the Linux class currently happening, will be the last one. I also did officially announce that this software project is up for adoption. However, noone has stepped forward yet.

Most notable in 2022

• The regional clock skew (daylight savings time) did not hit me as hard this year.

• We have seen several occurances of dust from the Sahara desert being transported over Europe, the most spectacular one in the middle of March. We have had our share of earth quakes, the strongest on July 9th. That event lasted only a few seconds, but it was strong enough to open a number of drawers and cupboard doors. I noted 6 events, but official records are close to 100. And yes, we had our share of power outages, the longest lasting almost an hour, the shortest a few seconds.

• In summer I did come across another Alfa Romeo 75 from 1991, which was in much better condition than the first one I had. So I do have a youngtimer again, which generates some pleasure at moderate fuel consumption (8.0l/100km)

• Among other more palpable things (not limited to the openmoko, the guylaine bicycle, battery power supply for Pi) I got rid of a number of online accounts. I consider this as reducing complexity.

• Over the course of several weeks I applied a new coat of glaze to all window frames and the main entrance door. This has been on my list for a long time, and I finally completed one round. The effect is visible, and I have decided to continue along this course.

• I am a happily married man for 25 years. Yes, still happy.

• I did give several things computy a try: alpinelinux, wayland/sway to replace xorg/i3, openrc to replace systemd, netfilter to replace iptables, signet-hc, emacs configuration (modus themes, jetbrains mono font), redo, hoc, nanofingerd --- a minimal finger daemon written in C to be integrated with the bubblewrapped services by tobykurien.

• In 2022 I added 69 posts to this capsule. I have a lot of ideas for more posts, but time flies, of course, likely for everyone else as well. Plus writing about music and books has made it painfully clear to me that I am not a native English speaker. My vocabulary is insufficient for such contexts. I do use a dictionary more often again, but this is a far cry from actually learning new vocabulary.

2023 resolution?

I am hesitant to add anything to the seemingly endless list of tasks. I will consider only two more adventurous items:

• Building a carputer for the Alfa using a Raspberry Pi or similar. The project can be marked completed, if the Pi works as a navigation system using Navit and openstreetmap data. Everything else comes after that.

• Creating a board for my microcontroller stuff featuring working rs485 communication, power supply, rfm69 radio link. That would include all firmware to actually operate these components. The project would be near complete, if I could successfully reprogram a controller over long rs485 cables.

Chances are slim, but non-zero, as I have invested considerable time already in both of these items.

I do wish that the world will come into a more friendly state again overall. The amount of war and oppression does make me sad, I did naively think we had advanced further. I do acknowledge that the last few years have made a number of problems more visible. None of them were really new or unknown, see for example "The Limits to Growth" report by the Club of Rome issued in 1972

It comes as no big surprise that this New Years Eve was the warmest 31st of December here since the start of the available records. See also

May the goddesses be mercyful!

Cheers,

~ew