2019 in review

  • \o/

2019 in review

Tue Dec 31 2019
6 minute read

These review posts have proven incredibly useful when looking up stuff, so I'll continue this tradition.

(2018/2017/2016/2015/2014/2013)

Non-Board Games I've played/bought

  • World of Warcraft
  • FFXIV
  • EVE Online
  • Borderlands 3

Books I've read

Worst year ever, again. Zero novels. Reading Thinking in Systems right now.

The pile of shame - books I wanted to read

Same as last year:

Movies I've (re-)watched

  • Thor: Ragnarok - a bit weird, but ok
  • Star Wars: Solo - really good
  • 6 Underground - ridiculous and funny. mostly ridiculous
  • Big Trouble in Little China - very 80s, but it's really ok
  • The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring - Extended

Movies I didn't manage to watch

TV Series I've (re-)watched

  • Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Netflix) S1-S2 - funny
  • Firefly - about time for a rewatch

TV Series I didn't watch

  • Wynonna Earp S2
  • The Expanse S2+
  • The Shannara Chronicles S2
  • Jessica Jones & Luke Cage

CDs I bought

  • Arch Enemy - Rise of the Tyrant
  • Arch Enemy - Khaos Legions
  • The Chats - Get This In Ya
  • The Chats
  • In Flames - I, the Mask
  • In Flames - Battles
  • In Flames - Sounds from the Heart of Gothenburg
  • Gloryhammer - Legends from Beyond the Galactic Terrorvortex
  • Amon Amarth - Jomsviking
  • Amon Amarth - Fate Of Norns
  • Amon Amarth - With Oden On Our Side
  • Amon Amarth - Twilight Of The Thunder God

Only one In Flames album missing from my collection now, discovered The Chats, and been listening to a lot of Amon Amarth lately.

Other stuff I bought

  • Fenix PD25 Flashlight - nifty
  • Gerber Paraframe Mini pocket knife - went camping, lost it without using it once. doh
  • a new computer
  • my first smart home device, a smaho wifi power plug
  • replaced my Roccat Kone+ mouse with a Roccat Kone EMP, I hope they won't stop making those
  • first batch of LED light bulbs as my inherited stock of old heatballs was finally used up
  • bought a slim/small leather wallet after searching for a long time

Social network usage

  • Twitter - no change - regularly, not overly much
  • Facebook - logged in maybe three times?
  • Instagram - posting a photo from time to time, checking others' stuff once a month

Messaging

  • IRC - daily use, default communication channel for many people I communicate with
  • Matrix - daily use
  • MS Teams - work stuff, it's not as bad as it sounds, but Slack is better
  • Jabber - server was shutdown, might revisit
  • Email - same as usual
  • Slack - using two communities, sparingly
  • WhatsApp - replaced FB messenger

Trips

  • road trip (France, Switzerland, France, Monaco, Italy, Liechtenstein, Austria) in June
  • Austria in January
  • Chaos Communication Camp near Berlin in August

(Online) services

  • Still subscribed to Netflix and Amazon Prime
  • stopped using xmpp/jabber, migrated to Matrix
  • upgraded my mailserver, Ubuntu 14.04 was EOL, I'm using docker-mailserver now, originally planned to do mailcow
  • upgraded my Neo N54L NAS, it has 8 GB RAM now and runs FreeNAS 11.2-U7 now

Programming languages used, roughly in order of hours spent

  • C++ - work, I like it a lot more than I had thought
  • bash - still too much
  • Python - work and a few private things, deployment and packaging is still hell
  • PHP - for one private project
  • Rust - still learning
  • several for AoC

Podcasts I listen to

Very irregular this year:

  • Battle Bards - "A musical journey through MMO soundscapes"
  • ATP - I'm not using any Apple products and still listen to these guys sometimes.
  • some real gaming podcasts, but even less regularly

Stuff that kinda worked out

  • write more blog posts: 7 isn't a lot, but it's ok, also wrote elsewhere
  • get my self-hosted services in shape, trimming unneeded, keep everything updated, etc
  • learn try out some new programming language(s)
  • after 2 years I'm no expert in C++, but I can work just fine with it

Stuff I planned to do this year but didn't

  • start properly learning Spanish
  • write a replacement for my podcast downloader of choice (JuicePortable), because it stopped working
  • solve the deployment problem of hobby projects
  • add Micropub support for this site. Started but didn't finish.
  • do more Rust
  • do more Clojure

"New Year's Resolutions" aka stuff that would be nice if it would work out

  • be able to read cyrillic letters fluently and practice enough to memorize them
  • learning from AoC: focus on one or two languages for hobby stuff and get good with it, not just be able to use it and forget stuff all the time
  • read at least 3 novels this year (starting slow, somehow I lost the enjoyment of reading. Literally lost it, my shelves are full with books I read.)
  • get my podcast management thing to at least a usable state

These lists keep getting shorter and shorter, maybe the focus on media consumed and used for communication is not the right angle anymore.