diff 2024 2025
My favorite time of day changed from 4:44 to 3:59. This might just be seasonal.
I got really into Abraham Lincoln and finally watched Lincoln (2012). Right now, I like that more than Good Burger, but it’s still pretty close.
The Bullpen↗ did a gift exchange this year. Sam gave me a Pilot Hi-Tec-C Coleto 4-in-1↗ and way too many refills.↗ I settled on black, blue, red, and dark blue. The Pilot Hi-Tec-C is probably the overall best gel roller ball pen on the market and I truly cannot comprehend how many colors there are. He even included a mechanical pencil module!↗ . I also found an interesting video from White Glove Reviews on YouTube where they assembled a multi-color mechanical pencil. Very interesting idea!
I recently dropped iTerm2 in favor of Ghostty. I feel like a bandwagoner and a hipster, but I genuinely like Ghostty’s quake pane better! I actually ended up sponsoring gnachman on GitHub↗ for the better part of the year! I think iTerm2 was one of the very first things I installed on my first MacBook in 2013. It was, to put it frankly, the shiz. It still is! Ghostty is just also very good, tho as of time of writing v1.0.1, there is no global search, so that may be a deal-breaker at some point.
Why is installing node so weird? I used to install with brew but people made fun of me for that, so I switched to nvm which always felt insane to use. Then, I found Volta which is pretty slick, but I’ve also run into strangeness with. Carter↗ recommended fnm↗ , and I’m using that and so far it feels slick.
I added a Brother HL-L2370DW laser printer to my office and I love it. I can trick it into printing on 3x5 index cards for my various 3x5 card projects:
I also had a lot of fun playing with 86Box↗ to set up a Windows 98 machine with half-decent graphics acceleration. I even went so far as to thrift a Samsung SyncMaster 710ɴ which is a 4:3 1280x1024, which I can actually drive at 75hz off my Thunderbolt dock with a USB-C to VGA cable. I’ve actually got a lot of use out of the little thing! Sam hates it when I share the little screen with him though, I think he feels demoted. Having a full on second display is also useful for streaming with OBS. I also find that at that resolution, I can set up a 1080p stream with a nice overlay and it looks great for me and the viewers at native resolution. 86Box is so accurate, it really feels like using a really good KVM than a virtual machine or an emulator.
For Christmas, I got a ViewSonic X100-4K DLP projector and a 80” pull down screen. I feel like I’ve hit the life hack. I had to give up my nice OLED home theater after the kids destroyed it, so it’s just my home office now which is a small bedroom in my house with a really great view. I also find a big all mounted TV in the middle of the room kind of… tacky? “WELCOME TO MY MAN CAVE” The projector and screen are really mostly out of the way, but I can pull it down and have a really great movie viewing experience in a minute. I have a super long HDMI cable run to where I dock my Macbook, so I can drive it at 4k native resolution. It’s not good for gaming at all. The built-in speakers have served suprisingly well for family movie nights or shows with the wife, but if I’m alone I’ll just use my AirPods (Pro 2 or Max) and it’s about as good of a viewing experience as I could reasonably ask for!
I’ve had a lot of fun posting on Mastodon↗ , and also set up a Ruby/development focused account for The Bullpen.↗
Apparently, I also got back into blogging in a major way by publishing 24 posts in 2024. That blows any other year out of the water. I have somewhat strong personal and philosophical opinions on what I think the world wide web actually is and will become. A small part of that is taking extreme ownership of my thoughts and ideas by publishing them on a personal website that I completely control. I use free hosting providers and other services, but I could serve it at home and invite my friends to a Tailscale network if a really had to. My words aren’t free for someone to sell to a third party. Honestly, when I die, I hope they bury me with a bunch of really nice markdown files and maybe a little YAML. This website represents some kind of symbiotic relationship I have with my current, future, and past self. It actually is somewhat laborsome to constantly tweak, update, and optimize, but it’s a labor I feel inclined to do and I enjoy it.
Looking forward, I’m excited to see new things in 2025. I’m surprisingly optimistic about the state of the world and I see a lot of joy spreading in diverse places and the ability we have to connect with each other is only getting stronger. Family is, and always has been, my number one priority and we’ll continue to learn and grow together.
Theme for 2025: Here We Go!↗