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2023-12-31 - 2023 Retrospective

I think this year overall has been an improvement over previous ones. I have gotten more done this year than in the last few years and I'm making progress on some things. Progress is important.

So starting with more personal stuff.

Cats

The year started off a little stressful with Robin having the days where she wouldn't eat. I tried to make changes and it would seem like it was getting better and then it would get worse again. In March there was a few days where she wouldn't eat her wet food at all (she was still eating her dry food). I took her to the vet for tests and they were a little concerned about her kidney number so I ended up switching her to urinary tract food.

In the fall I was also getting concerned about her pooping. I've started giving her some senior food (it has more fibre) in addition to the urinary tract food and I've also changed her litter. It seems like she may not like the pellets that I was using to try and cut down on the dust for Lupo. She may also like deeper litter and I was purposely keeping the pellets low because they degrade and I didn't want to throw away a bunch at a time.

Her main problem seems to have been Lupo. When she stopped eating I bought some new feliway diffusers and that seemed to help a lot. I also put a cardboard box between their bowls and started feeding her before letting him out of the bedroom. That seems to have done a lot to improve her mood. I've been trying to referee between them more but that's a stressful job and I'm not always where they are.

Over the summer I was doing clicker training with the two of them. I would try and get them to sit next to each other and then give them treats. This seemed to help but may have also been causing some digestion issues so I put it on hold while I sorted that out.

Lupo is doing well. I changed his food and it seems to be agreeing with him a little better. I also stopped giving him dry food which seemed to get stuck in this throat quite often. We seem to have gotten into a good routine with his cleanings. I think there's only been a single time when he seemed like he was having a major issue. That passed fairly quickly and was likely just a bit of something caught in his throat and he felt better after he managed to cough it up.

He does like to worry me though. He has a red spot in the upper part of his tracheotomy which sometimes swells up and that makes me concerned that his hole is changing shape. I've been trying to keep an eye on it more but it's difficult to predict when there will be a problem to know when I should keep a closer eye on him.

The biggest thing lately has been trying to listen to him more. To accept when he doesn't want a cleaning and to trust that he'll be okay.

Sickness

I had several more throat issues early in the year. I didn't take antibiotics for them and I still got better which means it's probably not a bacterial infection but I'm not sure what it is.

I tried seeing my doctor about them but he had no interest in helping me. I asked for a referral to an ENT but he said they were only surgeons and would laugh at him. I think he just didn't want to do any work.

I have been taking allergy pills whenever I start to have a sore throat and that seems to help prevent major issues. I have no idea if it's a good idea to take allergy pills for long periods of time but it seems to help.

I had less problems over the summer but things got worse in the fall. I had one episode where I actually had to take a sick day but other than that it's just been long periods of kind of feeling ill.

It might also be a stress/sleep issue. I started listening to the relaxation recording before bed and that seems to have helped me sleep better but I think my stress levels are still very high.

House

My house plans got side tracked by a leaky bathroom vent. It turned out that it wasn't sealed properly and that the ducting also wasn't installed the way it should have been. This turned out to be a very expensive repair but I am a lot more comfortable having Lupo in there now and there haven't been any more leaks.

I bought a reclining chair for reading in the basement and many more bookshelves.

Volunteering

In February I participated in a resume review ran by APEGA for students and that was a lot of fun. I also sat in on a presentation about a possible APEGA program for universities. In May I volunteered for a local clean-up day which was also a lot of fun. It mostly involved throwing things into garbage trucks.

In September I started volunteering at the Library every other week for Teen Tech Lab. The Library has a room with a bunch of stuff in it and they let teens come in and do whatever they want. My role is mostly to supervise and to help the teens if they are having a problem.

I'm not sure if this is what I am looking for but it feels good to get out of the house and to do something. For a long time I was worried I would never find a volunteer position I was interested in.

Videos

I've made two episodes of Mafia Story Comparison and a mini-episode this year. I really enjoy making these videos and there's a lot more I want to make videos about but I'm realizing that they require a lot of time. Not only in terms of actually making the videos but also in terms of learning how to make videos.

Collecting

I've been trying to cut back on my collecting this year as it can be very expensive but I still managed to get quite a few cool things. I've also found quite a few things that I thought would be impossible to find, so that's good.

Breadboard Computer Project

I managed to finish the computer this year and even added buttons which aren't mentioned in the videos. I got the ROMs that I needed and also got a zero-insertion-force (ZIF) socket to make them easier to insert and remove.

I added options to the example program in the video so that using the buttons I can increment or decrement the number displayed on the screen by 1 or 10 and reset the number to 0

I started documenting the 6502 instruction set but the documentation and the project are currently on hold as I work on other things.

PenguinCooker

This is an application that I've been wanting to write for a while to help me maintain my website. My main push for writing this application is that I want to document the programs that I have purchased and that includes having pictures of them but currently I don't have a good way of uploading pictures to my website.

The application reads information from the remote database to display the current state of the website. When making changes it writes to the remote database and uploads files to the FTP site as well as trying to update the local database. Local database changes may not be applied if the current state of the data doesn't match what's in the remote database.

I have implemented the ability to add and edit picture sets. I also updated the app and website to support nesting picture sets which will make organization easier.

Floppy Disk Archiving

Early in the year I started collecting the parts to build a Floppy Archiving setup. This includes two USB floppy controllers, three floppy drives (a 3.5" drive, a 360K 5.25" drive and a 1.2M 5.25" drive) and two enclosures (1 for the 3.5" drive and 1 for the 5.25" drives).

The first 360K drive had some issues reading disks and had to be replaced. It doesn't recalibrate itself after being reset which leads to some inconsistencies when the floppy controller tries to move the head. It also seemed like it had problem reading data from the higher tracks.

I also ran into issues converting between disk image floppy formats. The USB floppy controller generates SCP files. These files break up the disk into tracks and records the amount of time between flux transitions. This gives a really accurate copy of the disk but isn't as practical for actually reading.

HFE files convert the timing information into the binary information encoded on the disk (including the bits used for clock synchronization) and IMG files contain the raw binary data encoded on the disk.

The first problem I ran into is that the SCP file wants extra tracks in case anything interesting is written to them but the IMG files shouldn't contain these tracks as they shouldn't contain valid data. The program I was using to convert the floppy images to IMG files was including extra garbage at the end of the file from these extra tracks.

I ended up writing my own HfeToImg converter program which reads in an HFE file and generates an IMG file but only uses 40 or 80 tracks. This was mostly an exercise in understanding the MFM encoding scheme which is actually pretty interesting. The program also validates the checksum of sectors which has been very useful in confirming I got a good read of a disk as the other program would just save whatever.

The next problem I had is that the HFE file generates from the SCP file seemed to be missing data. Eventually I figured out that this is because the tracks aren't recorded consistently on those disks. The start point varies from track to track. This wouldn't be a problem for actual disks as the drive could just keep reading the disk and find the rest of the data but HFE files only contain a single rotation and so all of the data needs to be there.

I started writing an ScpToHfe converter but this proved to be much more complicated. The SCP file encodes the time between flux transitions. A flux transition occurs when the magnetic polarity of the particles on the disk reverses and always indicates a binary 1. The number of 0s between the 1s is determined by the amount of time between the flux transitions. The issue is that this time isn't consistent between disks as it depends on the drive that wrote the disk.

I currently have a rather crude implementation that sort of works. I have started to reverse engineer the converter that I was using to understand how it works but there's a lot of code there. I'm hoping that not all of it is involving in the actual decode logic but we shall see.

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