2024 Recap - Surprisingly Eventful

2024-12-21 - [53] 10:6

HAPPY WINTER SOLSTICE! (or Summer if you're in the Southern hemisphere, and if you are, can you please give us back the Sun? It gets dark out too early...)

I wrote one of these about this time last year, so I'm doing that again this year!

Last year, I made some resolutions of sorts for 2024, which can be seen in the post below.

Hopes (Resolutions?) for 2024

Those hopes/resolutions were:

Well, I certainly failed the desktop use only on Sunday one... heh. The other 2 were met! Now for a recap of 2024 for me!

2024 In Review

While I didn't go to any conferences or conventions in 2024, looking back at this year, I can tell I had quite a bit of motivation and energy. I wonder how much of that was due to working on leaving the noisy racket of "social" websites, where instead of having to use energy to yell in an area to be heard where everyone else is yelling simultaneously, I could use the energy to be more productive for myself. I'm sure there are plenty of other things I could put here, things I missed, or things I forgot, but here are some themes/things/actions that stick out to me looking back at the year in no particular order.

Writing

Including this post, I ended up writing more posts this year than I did in any other year. 28 posts including this one. 2017 was my second highest amount of posts, at 27, but I was trying really hard to "promote my brand" then, where this year I just wrote when I felt like writing. In 2017, I tried everything I could to get the attention of others, and this year I set my robots.txt file on my website to disallow everything from being crawled by (well behaved) web crawlers, so a Google search of my name or vigrey.com shows "No information is available for this page." for the first result. (Search engines seem convinced that a search for "Vi Grey" should return results of gray shoes for some reason... although that has always been the case)

There is no promise I'll stay this motivated to jot my thoughts down here in the future, but it's nice to know I had quite a bit of mental energy this year to journal.

Ham Radio

I ended up getting my General amateur radio license this year! Not that I ever use the privileges provided by the license... but it's nice to have just in case.

Coding / Git Usage

Rather than coding for others, I spent 2024 coding for myself. Whether it was building tools that are useful for me or just building things that make me happy to build, it was nice having a year to myself. I didn't code because I felt pressured to do so, I coded because I wanted to, and that was very freeing for me.

As a result of coding for myself, I used git considerably more than I thought I would

Here are some stats of my git usage in 2024 as of writing this post:

15213 of those 26717 lines (about 57%) were test questions and answers for the 3 ham radio license tests, so it might be more honest to say 11504 lines of text/code added.

These stats only apply to code I have pushed to my own git server.

Game Boy Tarot Project

As mentioned on Day 5 of my "December Adventure 2024" post, all of the Game Boy development I did for the Game Boy tarot card reader project got lost. The card designs and some mockup images are fine, but all of the assembly code I wrote went away. Because of that, I restarted the Game Boy assembly code from scratch and am making pretty decent progress. I'm even writing some dev logs as I progress through the project, which can be found at the link below.

Game Boy Tarot Card Reader Project Dev Log

Fewer Passwords/Accounts

I started the year with 28 passwords I had to keep track of, which is a lot better than the ~150 I had before then. I am now down to 11 passwords!

Offline Accessible Website

Inspired by Rek Bell's website, I decided I wanted my website to be available in a way that let's people download it so they can navigate it without an internet connection. Not only did I want that for my website, I wanted that for my gemini capsule, so whether you are using a web browser or a gemini client, it should be possible to navigate my site without an internet connection!

Grilling and Food Preservation

This year is the first year I grilled. For some reason, others around me decided they were going to be the person who grills. This year, I picked up a small cheap grill and figured out how to grill on my own. I even went to a state park and used their grill and went to a local city park and used their grill. After grilling quite a lot since the Summer happened, I am now pretty decent at it and will grill whenever I feel like it, no matter the temperature or the time (I have grilled at 2 in the morning quite a few nights now). I suspect I'll also grill this Winter in the snow a few times.

I also finally learned how to ferment vegetables this year and made a LOT of sauerkraut. I also fermented a lot of jalapenos given to me from friends and family, as it seems like a lot of folks in my area had overly successful jalapeno yields this year. The fermented veggies I make go great with the food I grill. Once the weather gets warmer around Spring, I can guarantee that I will be fermenting a lot of veggies again!

Celestial Timekeeping and Navigation

I can now determine the time to a pretty accurate degree as long as the sky is clear and I can see the North Star and either Cassiopeia or the Big Dipper. That skill has been surprisingly useful for me so I don't have to carry a device with me, as I really don't like carrying around my phone... I can also determine directions quite easily by looking at the sky now, which is also useful for me.

2025 Hopes

My list of hopes aren't too out there for 2025. Much of this in theory could be done relatively early into 2025, it's just a matter of doing it.

Contact/Reply

If you would like to reply to this post, feel free to send me an email.

Email: vi@vigrey.com
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