These review posts have proven useful when looking up stuff, so I'll continue this tradition.
(2021/2020/2019/2018/2017/2016/2015/2014/2013)
Non-Board Games I've played/bought
- World of Warcraft - less, but still mostly that
- EVE Online - tied with WoW this year
- Final Fantasy XIV - came back very briefly
Books I've read
- finished Laika's Window which I started in 2020
- reread the Sandman comics
- quite a lot of pen & paper RPG material
- Polar: The Black Kaiser (comic)
Movies I've (re-)watched
- The Book of Life - good
- Space Jam - been a while
- Enola Holmes - it was good, and funny
- Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness - in a cinema, actually - loved it because of the sheer ridiculous stuff
For some reason I lost the drive to watch stuff a while ago, it's simply not fun anymore and I can hardly sit still through a whole movie or show episode.
TV Series I've (re-)watched
- The Sandman S1, but not all of it
Podcasts and other media
- a bit of ATP and some gaming podcasts
- a surprising amount of watching Twitch streams
CDs I bought
- Sleigh Bells - Texis
- Sleigh Bells - Jessica Rabbit
- Soilwork - Verkligheten
- Soilwork - The Ride Majestic
- Arch Enemy - Deceivers
- Amon Amarth - The Great Heathen Army
- Battle Beast - Circus of Doom
- Blind Guardian - The God Machine
- Tony Bennett & Lady Gaga - Cheek To Cheek
If I'm going off this list I seem to developing a bigger taste for Melodic Death Metal. In Flames has been a staple for years (soon decades), Arch Enemy and Amon Amarth are not so recent additions, but Soilwork is a new discovery of 2022. If I was 100% exact I'd also add the shipment of another 11 CDs I ordered just before the year ended (5x In Flames, Therion, Fear Factory, Hypocrisy, Soilwork, Sabaton, and The Halo Effect) - but I've not managed to even open the package on New Year's Eve, so those will be on the 2023 list.
Other stuff I bought
- an NVMe SSD, 2 TB, 189 EUR
- a 2.5" SSD I ended up not needing
- a multimeter, UNI-T UT139C, 50 EUR
- a couple Shelly Plug S, 20 EUR
- a coffee grinder (Hario Slim Plus), 25 EUR
- a lot of coffee beans
- 16 used RPG source books on eBay, ~160 EUR
- another new laptop PSU
- a new travel backpack, a Dakine Campus L (Night Tropical), 65 EUR (permalink)
A year where no big things needed to be replaced, which is always nice. Not using my laptops a lot, so the 2013 x230 and the 2016 T460p are still completely fine for casual usage, although the x230 could of course be thinner and lighter as a dedicated travel machine - a Chromebook would have worked fine for me since the pandemic started, with one exception where I had to bring the big machine anyway.
I have a 10-12 year old Dakine Campus 33L which has accompanied me on most, if not all, trips around the world and only recently has shown signs of wear, because I've also used it for getting groceries and have regularly had 20kg of stuff in it, milk cartons and bottles and whatnot. The new interior design isn't as great as the old one but it seems servicable, and I like the form factor and that it does not look like a tactical bag or if I'm a onebagging tourist. So yeah, 10 years of abuse (except maybe crawling through mud) and it's held up just fine, so this was my default choice for a replacement. We'll see how this one holds out, hopefully just as long, as I'll keep the groceries to the old one.
Social networks
- Twitter - daily light usage until November, then I stopped
- Facebook - logged in like three times
- Instagram - account sucessfully deleted
- Fediverse - yes
I managed to follow most of the people I followed on Twitter on my Fediverse accounts, also closely following the development of a self-hosted Mastodon alternative, ktistec - already sent some small patches.
Messaging
- IRC - still daily
- Matrix - nearly daily
- Email - no change, but I feel it's getting less
- Slack - work and 2 other communities
- Signal - yes
- WhatsApp - yes
Still don't see any widespread migration away from WhatsApp, but some discussions here and there that IRC isn't cutting it anymore for a lot of folks. The #erlang channel on Libera often references a Slack, the Munich CCC chapter had a discussion about Matrix vs IRC, and then some.
Trips
- other countries: Czech Republic for a weekend
- in Germany: once to Berlin, also a few days near the mountains
While I don't like German Pilsner at all, since this trip I've been buying Pilsner Urquell again, because Czech Pilsner is good (so is Budvar and most of the others I tasted). This phase will be over at some point I suppose, but for now I'm enjoying my small 33cl 4.4% bottles, usually not more than one a day.
(Online) Services
- Subscribed to Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime
- some MMOs subscriptions
- I finally managed to consolidate all my domains at one company, INWX
- in the foreseeable future I'll keep paying for one VPS at Strato, two "cloud vps" at Hetzner, and one at Scaleway, for a total of 20 EUR
- procrastinating changing my mobile plan
- still waiting for fiber to the home, no dice
Overall I'm investigating running even less of "all the services on one box", as seen on the hosting options post, but of course that's a slow work in progress and not everything has the same solution, but I'm very happy with Deno and Fly.io here. Guess it doesn't count as self-hosting anymore, but looking at it from an "own your data" point of view, I guess I'm trying to get rid of the stuff that has no "data" or not even a lot of state and let that be someone else's problem while still running the important services that have my data that is worth protecting.
Programming languages, sorted by usage
- Elixir - work, I like it
- Java - work
- Erlang - work
- C++ - work
- Clojure - went back to some old personal projects
- Rust - for Advent of Code, and a few small things
- Python - random small bits
We've been doing Erlang for years at my (not so new) job, but this time we needed something inherently HTTP API-ish, so we decided that Elixir might be a better fit than Erlang and writing all the framework-y bits ourselves, that's why we used Elixir and Phoenix. And of course everything took longer than expected and so a good chunk of my year at work was spent on this app and it was really nice. The only pain points are at the Erlang-Elixir boundary when working with strings.
Stuff I planned to do this year but didn't
- mountain biking fell flat due to health problems
Stuff that would be nice next year
- more cycling and mountain biking