BIT-101
Bill Gates touched my MacBook Pro
Well, here we are at the end of another year. Time to reflect on what went well, what didn’t, what I will do different next time.
Yes, I created some stuff…
Let’s start with the last one, music. For a few years I wanted to get to the points where I could execute a song and release it into the wild for people to listen to. In fact, in my 2022 Retrospective one of my goals was to release a song. I did actually put out a “song” here and there since then. Often just some random tone generation or something like that. In 2025 I published 24 songs on SoundCloud. Actual songs with structure and different instruments. Not saying they were amazing, but they still make me happy when I hear them.
These were mostly created with Renoise and the M8 Tracker. This really kicked off in January when I was bedridden and quarantined with my first bout of Covid. I tried out Renoise and loved it. Loved the tracker paradigm and got an M8, which was really just completely amazing. I was very deeply into creating music for most of the first half of the year and then somehow just burnt out.
Creating music is a lot of fun and really rewarding. I’m extremely happy that I got to the point where I did with it, and that I had enough confidence to release the stuff I did. For my entire life I felt that the inability to do anything musically was a horrible failing. So I’m over that now. At the same time, I realized it’s not my calling. I’m sure I’ll continue to dabble in it now and then and create some tunes once in a while. But visual graphics and animation is my real passion. I hope to combine the two more in the future.
I’m not really a huge 3D guy. I do love creating retro-3D effects in wireframe or point clouds, but full-on 3D rendering has never been my outlet. That said, I did create my own 3D raytracer from scratch in 2022. And that was one of the most rewarding things I’ve done programming-wise. For some reason this year I was reminded of POV-Ray which I played with back in the day. It’s still out there and functions perfectly. So I installed it and had fun for a few weeks. I had a bit of a go trying to create a wrapper for POV in Go. I had some success, but in the end it was over-engineered and I went native and just started coding scenes by hand. Most of the problems I was trying to solve with the wrapper had better solutions built-in. It just took a while to find them. It didn’t go very far, but it was probably good for a month of fun. Here’s some more words on that subject:
https://bit-101.com/blog/posts/2025-06-14/pov-ray/
In October, I was feeling the urge to do some daily coding. I created my own hashtag, #octanimate and posted something every day in October. Here are the results:
When October was over, I wasn’t ready to stop, so just continued on daily for an additional 39 days, using the tag #dailycoding. Those are all over on Art From Code: https://www.artfromcode.com/tags/dailies/
After 70 straight days of posting, I was satisfied for a while.
I also took place in Advent of Code. This year was different. They went from 25 days down to 12 and killed the global leaderboard. This was a good change in my opinion. I still didn’t finish though. I got through day nine and had a blast, but I looked at the instructions for day 10 and said, “I’m done.” Maybe I’ll go back and try to wrap up the last three days at some point, but I’m good for now.
Genuary 26 is coming up in a week or so. I think I’ll abstain this year though. I’ve had good fun with these prompt-based challenges in the past, but in general, I’m not crazy about them. I have a lot of ideas on my own that I haven’t gotten around to. A lot of the prompts are interesting, but things I’ve already done. Some are just things that I have no interest in doing. I’ll probably look at them each day and if something sparks an interest I might give it a go.
I revamped a lot of my personal technology this past year. Earlier in the year I had a home server consisting of an thin HP client running Ubuntu Server. I had Plex, and then later Jellyfin running on it, some other personal services, using Wireguard ported through an external VPS.
This summer I upgraded all of that. I got a larger used HP box and installed TrueNAS on it, reused the older one as a backup server. Switched over to Tailscale from Wireguard. I spent a lot of time scheduling backups (local and cloud sync remote), S.M.A.R.T. tests, snapshots, scrubs, and set up all kinds of monitoring. More details here:
Since then I’ve also moved my RSS reader over to a self-hosted FreshRSS install and my “read it later” stuff to a self-hosted LinkDing. I’m really, really happy with both of those.
It was my intention to move the whole rig over to a dedicated NAS case with a low power motherboard early in 2026. But since it’s working fine as it is, I may postpone that a bit. At least to see if the price of RAM goes down.
I fully migrated off of github. I was not one of those people who freaked out when Microsoft acquired github, but I don’t like the direction they’re headed right now and did not feel great about having my code there. After looking around, I settled on Codeberg. They seem like an amazing company and I feel really good about that move. I also set up a Forgejo install on my NAS, for hosting private repos. It feels really good to self host this. I did have a bit of concern over being fully responsible for maintaining this. But I have to trust in the work I did on my NAS - double backups, snapshots, scrubs, tests, monitoring, alerting. It’s the most responsible data protection I’ve ever had set up.
More info on that whole git migration here
Overall, going pretty well.
Work is fine. I think. One never knows these days, right? I think it’s good. I hope it’s good because I’m in my 60s now and the prospects of getting a new tech job at my age feel kind of sketchy. In the decades I’ve been in tech, and the many companies I’ve been in, I’ve never seen anyone my age hired into a technical role. I might have a chance as a manager. But for all the activism around various forms of discrimination (activism which I support), it’s still open season for ageism. I’ve heard age-related comments that might get someone fired if they said those things about any other group, but for age nobody bats an eye.
Health is fine. I wound up with a strangely large number of medical visits this past year. A couple of procedures, nothing serious at all, one dental, one cosmetic. And lots of follow ups and tests for previous concerns. Any time they look too closely, they find something else they want to look at. And when they look at that, they see another thing they want to check. But I worked through that whole cycle got all the tests done and have a clean bill of health at this point.
In recent weeks, I’ve embarked upon a new project, which is creating physical paper-and-ink prints of some of the stuff I create. I’ve repurposed keithpeters.org for that (was previously hosting my music). I’ve done some test prints and I’m really happy how they’ve come out. I’m doing a lot of other groundwork to set this up and some time very early next year I’ll have more to say about this.
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