personal_site/_posts/2024-11-29-2024-roundup.md

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title: 2024 Roundup
layout: post
excerpt: Wherein I look back at what I got up to in 2024, mostly for my own benefit.

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## January

The first big project of the year was repainting this ladder up to our mezzanine bed. This ended up being so much more work than we expected, they say it's all in the surface prep and the surface prep here took ages with all the awkward corners. 

There was one aspect that was fun with this which was that I made non-slip pads on the rungs by mixing the gloss paint with sand and painting over masked rectangle. 

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<img src="{{page.images}}/ladder/late_into_the_night.jpeg">
<img src="{{page.images}}/ladder/finished.jpeg">
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Two disappointments here which only cemented my long standing hatred of gloss paint, first despite our fastidiousness we still got too big drips! And second the nice non slip sections I made mostly worked except those sections took more than a week to fully harden and we ended up tearing it up a bit when we used it a bit too early. Repainting a ladder that you rely on to get to bed is really inconvenient! 

I was actively learning to drive at this point so did a road trip with my dad and brother to Dungeness to get some more driving experience. Driving trip to Dungeness with my dad and brother. 

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I also started on my frilly ceramic plate in Jan, a piece I really like using in our kitchen!

Late 2023 I got myself a steam deck and had a bit of a renaissance in gaming. I had previously had a switch but was mostly looking to player older games held in high regard and felt limited by the switches limited catalogue. 

Particularly because I try not to fly these days I've spent many a train journey enjoying a good game this year. [My steam replay][https://s.team/y24/wgnfpvc] has helped me a lot here to remember what I has up to! 

My first steam deck game was Dave the Diver which I played Jan and Feb. What a relaxing game, much longer and richer than I expected picking it up. Would highly recommend. 

## February 

Feb brought a little project adding a better dust collector to the workshop chopsaw.

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I also went on a work trip to Turin, with a stopover in Munich to visit friends Ping pong, protests, parties.

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<img src="{{page.images}}/train_view.jpeg">
<figcaption>Crossing the alps by train provided some good views and also some good gaming time on my then new Steam Deck.</figcaption>
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## March

My partner organised my first 'big' birthday party, we booked out an entire Chinese restaurant in London and had a lovely evening with all our friends. For reason we did this for my 29th. Definitely want to do that again.

I also did a bit of PSU case prototyping and lasercut an organiser which has turned out to be incredibly useful, I'll be making more of these.

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<img src="{{page.images}}/lasercutting/boxes.jpeg">
<img src="{{page.images}}/usbc_psu/case_proto_1.jpeg">
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## April

Passed my driving test! Paris trip to sort out some family stuff. Catalonia night at RARA.

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<figcaption>Passed my driving test first time!</figcaption>
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Some nice ceramics out of the kiln.

This month I played the Outer Wilds Echoes of the Eye DLC. An excellent dlc to one of the best games of our generation!

## May 
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<figcaption>Played around with some logo designs that I could stamp into ceramics.</figcaption>
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In May, I spent a couple weeks in the Spanish countryside with friends, got to spend a day with a professional ceramicist. Managed to miss my train from Paris to Barcelona by being far too complacent but ended up having a lovely evening in Paris and they let us take the train the next day. 

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I also ran the Hackney Half Marathon, pretty slowly and got way too hot!

And finally this month, I spent a few afternoons preparing [my Sensor.Community workshop for EMFcamp](/2024/05/29/sensor-community-emfcamp-workshop). 

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<img src="{{page.images}}/emf_workshop_prep/organised.jpeg">
<img src="{{page.images}}/emf_workshop_prep/final.jpeg">
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The workshop went really well, before arriving I had been a bit unsure how to decide how many kits to put together, they were about £30 each so I didn't want to have many unsold kits. Particularly because I was selling them at cost. But apparently EMFcamp workshops are always 100% sold out so this turned out to be a complete non-issue and I kinda wished I had brought more kits!

That being said we filled a large workshop tent with 30 very enthusiastic people and I think almost all the kits worked in the end!

## June

Work trip to Zuric for PASC 2024. Played Hades, what a fun beat em up roguelike. This was a very work heavy month, I also had a week long training course on low level UNIX programming, which was quite fun. Apparently the training company don't offer the course publicly anymore because it's so low level. 

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<figcaption>A gig put on my one of my favourite bands at the vagina museum in London.</figcaption>
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And honestly a low of what we learned is stuff that any good standard library in any reasonable programming language would abstract away from you. And most of the time that's the best thing! It's still nice to know what's going on under the hood though.

## July

This month I played Stardew Valley for the first time. Definitely lived up to its status as one of the best selling games of all time! 

In junas for two weeks

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<figcaption>Testing out a new swimming spot near Junas.</figcaption>
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## August

Cornwall with friends

My gaming august was split between Stardew Valley and Tactical breach wizards. The latter is a short and sweet turn based... breach wizards game. Surprisingly funny and well written dialogue.


## September 

Poznan for work and Brussels on the way back. Three weeks in Italy! Visited my home Italian commune and found my grandmother's grave. 

## October

This month I spent some time playing Batman Arkham Night - I grabbed this after watching Jacob Geller's video "How Does Arkham Knight Still Look So Good?". It's true that it looks great but predictably for a AAA game the gameplay is quite formulaic. The open world, grapple hook and gliding mechanics are quite fun in combination though.

## November

## December

In December I bought a bunch of games in the Steam sale, including Fallout 4 which has occupied my gaming time for the month. 


### Books
A lot of Octavia E Butler this year. Also Becky Chambers and Anne Bishop

### Crosswords