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2025-01-11 - 2024 Retrospective

Once again I feel like I have made progress. It’s not entirely clear how much progress but I think I am moving forward in more ways that just temporally.

Personal stuff first

Cats

The cats continue to slowly get better with each other. I still have to referee a lot but I think the total number of incidents is still going down. The main challenges there is finding ways for them to have positive interactions. Refereeing is also a challenge because I want to keep Robin safe but not upset Lupo in the process.

Robin’s poops continue to be a problem. In September I switched her to half-and-half urinary tract and senior food which seemed like it was helping but then at the end of December she stopped eating and got constipated. I started giving her restoraLax (A stool softener) which seems to be helping but now the trick is making sure it doesn’t cause urinary issues.

Lupo got his teeth cleaned this year without any complications. I started brushing his teeth but I’m not sure if I’m doing a good job or not. It’s difficult to tell how much I am actually brushing and keeping him still for the brushing. He also decided not to eat at the end of December and I’m not sure why. He started eating normally again a couple days later and seems fine.

Health

I have continued to have spats of feeling sick without really getting sick this year although it might be to a lesser degree. I went to a new doctor to get a check-up and they referred me to an allergist. I had an allergy test and nothing significant came up (I am allergic to some kind of weed but that seems to be it). Both doctors had me do a bunch of blood and urine tests with no significant results.

I got properly sick just before Christmas and still have a cough. I’m hoping it will clear out my throat and I will feel better.

I would like to get a camera shoved down my throat just to see if anything’s up but I’m not sure how to properly ask for that.

It’s possible that it’s stress related or sleep related which is related to stress.

House

I bought a new bookshelf for the office/second bedroom and did some re-arranging in there. I also drilled a hole in the wall and ran an ethernet connection to the main floor so that my work laptop could be wired. I also bought a bookshelf for the kitchen.

I probably need to get a new furnace and an AC or at least a duct cleaning but I don’t have the energy to arrange that

Volunteering

At the beginning of this year we got a new staff member who was at most of the volunteering sessions this year. She’s great and helped to make volunteering a positive experience. She was really involved and trying to make things happen. She was also more proactive about getting people to come in.

I also started taking paper folding patterns to volunteering this year. That’s helped to make sure I have something to do without being unapproachable (at least I hope that’s how it comes off).

I think my two complaints are the lack of feedback, I don’t know how well I am doing or if I should be doing things differently, and the time investment. I sometimes feel like losing that Sunday afternoon limits what I cam accomplish. It’s much nicer during the summer when I can take every other Friday afternoon off so I have a bit of extra time to get stuff done on weeks that I volunteer.

Collecting

I think I have managed to buy most of the software that I really want. There’s always more stuff but I have found most of the tentpole software releases that I’m interested in. I have also pretty much ran out of space.

I think the next steps for me are getting more user manuals for retro computers and maybe buying some actual retro machines to play with. The challenge there remains space.

Computers

I have built two computers this year. The first is a high-mid gaming machine and the second is a 486 based retro machine.

The gaming machine seems to be working well. I had some issues with game crashes at the beginning but managed to resolve those by disabling the BIOS setting which makes RAM run at the speed it says it does. Now it’s running all the games I play without issue. I have it slightly underclocked to keep temperatures manageable but I haven’t noticed any issues because of that. It was a fun experience because it was my first driveless build. There are no optical drives and it’s using M.2 SSDs which plug directly into the motherboard. That means that the whole front of the case can just be fans and there’s a lot less wires.

Building the new gaming machine also means that I can use my old gaming machine as a dev machine which is nice. My previous dev machine was starting to show it’s age and have some stutters when doing a lot of work. I have reinstalled Windows Vista on it and now it can be a retro machine. I also found out that the telephone activation for Windows and Office still works, so that’s interesting.

The 486 machine has been a fun and educational exercise. Learning about all the complications with older hardware and figuring out how to make things work. I had to re-wire the PS/2 mouse connector because the one I bought didn’t match the motherboard. I have also learned a lot about serial RS-232 connections because of this machine. Apparently there are two ways that the motherboard can be wired and this machine uses the less common one. I’m actually really proud of how I figured that out. I bought a serial tester (A box with lights that indicate what each signal is doing) and then I compared the results from the 486 machine to my other machines. From that I had a pretty good guess as to how things were miss-wired and was able to look up the issue and have my guess validated.

Penguin Cooker and Website

At the beginning of this year I finished up the management of pictures and picture sets. This includes the functionality for picSet parents, using a UUID to sync data between local and remote instances as well as cleaning up functionality.

The ability to sync pics and picSets was also added which required refactoring the creation and updating logic into separate classes so that it could be used by the edit pages and the sync pages.

Website

I’ve made some minor changes to the website, mostly cleaning up issues from the changes made for pictures such as cleaning up some URL issues and how thumbnail images are used.

The display scripts were updated to handle changes to how pictures are organized. Some files were moved so that the the content files were stored separately from the page scripts, this was done so that the content could be removed from source control.

The pic page was updated to add name and description. This makes it easier to understand the images when navigating. The pictures page and picSet pages were updated to have the link boxes wrap correctly. Also added parent links to picSet pages.

Floppy Image Rectifier

My big project for this year has been the Floppy Image Rectifier. This is a project to unify some tools that I started building last year. My goal is to have a single program I can run on an SCP floppy image to generate HFE and IMG files with feedback and options that I feel are important. I have made a lot of progress and have most of the application implemented.

Mainly what I still have to do is verify that I am doing things correctly. My process for this has been to read through the code of a couple other tools that do similar things and compare how they work to how my application works. The challenge there is understanding other people’s code and having the motivation to look at it.

I stopped working on other projects, book exercises and writing blog posts in order to focus on this project. I don’t think that has been super successfully as typically it just meant I didn’t do any programming but I’m hoping I can get more done this year.

I was hoping to get more done over Christmas but I got sick before going to visit my parents and then the cats had problems after I got home.

I would like to get this project done as it would allow me to archive all my disks which is the first step to going through them and making progress on other retro projects.

Videos

I have not made any videos this year. The challenge I have is that I think I need to dedicate more time to them and that requires taking time away from other things that I want to do. I was thinking about trying to make some one-off videos to practice but that just means I have more videos to make.

Part of the problems is that I don’t really want to make videos. That’s not something that I am really interested in. What I want to do is show people how weird the story changes in Mafia: Definitive Edition are, but video is the best way to do that which means I have to make videos.

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