This year I did a little review of what I got up to in 2024, it was a nice exercise and I’m going to use it as an excuse to do a summary here of fun things I did this year.

January

The first big project of the year was repainting the ladder that leads up to our mezzanine bed. This ended up being so much more work than I expected. They do say painting is all in the surface prep and here it took ages with all the awkward corners and curved surfaces.

There was one novel aspect for me 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 rectangles.

This project only cemented my long standing hatred of gloss paint. Despite our fastidiousness and thin coats we still got two big drips! And second the nice non-slip sections I made took more than a week to fully harden and we ended up tearing one of them up a bit when we used it a bit too early.

Turns out repainting a ladder that you rely on to get to bed is really inconvenient, who knew!

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.

I also started on my frilly ceramic plate in Jan, a piece I would end up really liking in our kitc

Gaming

Late 2023 I got myself a steam deck and had a bit of a renaissance in gaming. I had previously had a nintendo switch but felt limited by the switch’s limited catalogue. Given that I mostly want to play slightly older games that are held in high regard, the steam deck has been a great solution

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 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. I would highly recommend it as relaxing but compelling.

February

February brought a little project adding a better dust collector to the workshop chopsaw. This was the first time I’ve paid money for a 3D printable STL but it turned out to be really worth it.

I also went on a work trip to Turin, with a stopover in Munich to visit friends lots of ping pong, protests and parties that week.

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.

April

I passed my driving test first time! Paris trip to sort out some family stuff. Catalonia night at RARA.

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

May

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.

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

And finally, I spent a few afternoons preparing my Sensor.Community workshop for EMFcamp.

The workshop went really well, before arriving I had been a bit unsure how many kits to put together, they cost about £30 each in parts so I didn’t want to have many unsold kits. Particularly because I wasn’t making any profit on the ones I did sell.

As it turns out, EMFcamp workshops are always 100% sold out so this turned out to be a complete non-issue and I kinda wished I had done 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!

At EMF we also learned to spin yarn and did a short black smithing course.

June

A work trip to Zuric for PASC 2024. Played Hades, 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.

And honestly a lot 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. Especially when the abstractions are leaky or you need to interface between languages.

I also made a huge cube shape mono-drawer for some reason. It’s made of 18mm (!) birch ply so it is the heaviest thing in the world and will likely outlive me. Not 100% sure what to do with it or what I was thinking to be honest! It current holds all our winter scarves in the living room.

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!

Did a quick lasercut poster for a friend:

Was also in the south of France for two weeks, tried out a new swimming spot but our original one is still the best.

August

A weekend in the New Forest and a few days in Cornwall with friends.

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

September

A trip to Poznan for a European project meeting for work and Brussels to see friends on the way back. Then three weeks in Italy! Visited my the Italian commune where I’m registered as an overseas citizen and found my grandmother’s grave. Did some lovely hikes in the French alps on the way home.

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 so I didn’t spend much time on it. The open world, grapple hook and gliding mechanics are quite fun in combination though.

Otherwise October flew by, there were some good walks with friends, I got my little PSU PCB back (which I still have not tested in Jan 2025).

November

Did a nice South Indian cooking course, visited my parents, thought back on this old project I did many years ago:

This is the pipe work for a shower booster pump that I got off ebay when I was 18 or 19. I installed the pump, cut and soldered all the pipe work, ran it through the attic to the shower and the most nerve wracking part was drilling into the hot water tank with a hole saw to create a new outlet. Looking back I’m amazed I pulled it off. The shower went from a dribble to a gloriously powerful jet and the booster pump is chugging away to this day.

Later I put temperature sensors on the inflow and outflow pipes for the heating loop that heats the hot water tank from the wood burning stove. From the temperature difference you can tell how much heat is going into the tank and by proxy how warm the water at the bottom of the tank is.

Know how hot the bottom is is useful because the tank is quite tall you have to take the thermal separation of the water into account when deciding if there’s enough water for a bath! The immersion heater that heats the water from the top doesn’t quite give you enough volume for a good bath.

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. I also had the idea to put an orange lasercut cover over my bike display project. I really like how this looks.

I also got to finally give a gift I had been working on for a while. A custom, full sized map for a friend. I used the Strava running data as a layer in addition to a normal map. I find it fascinating to spot places where people walk or run that aren’t marked on the normal map. Interesting places included a lake where people definitely aren’t allowed to swim or kayak that nevertheless has a lot of activity on it! Strange patches where lines fan out and then come together at defined points which turned out to be golf courses, and areas where the lines just completely scatter which I guess are grassy fields where people can walk any way they like. Which is more rare than you’d imagine!

There was time for one last project of 2024 which was rebuilding this drying rack for my parents in law.

The original design only used two vertical ropes rather than the four I used in the updated version which meant it had a tendency to list to one side or the other if you didn’t balance the hung laundry. I also added a 2:1 mechanical advantage to the lift mechanism which made it a lot easier to haul the laundry up and was the first time I actually got to use pulleys for mechanical advantage!

It’s a shame I didn’t have a 3D printer there because I could have done with some idler wheels to help redirect the ropes a little in some places and prevent rubbing.

Finally, a project spanning the whole year has been learning how to solve crpytic crosswords with my partner. We’re been slowly working our way up through the crosswords from the Guardian. We did the quick (not cryptic at all just synonyms) for a few years. Then in 2024 started doing the quick cryptic on Saturdays which each week has 4 different clue types and tells you what they’ll be. The next rung up is the Quiptic on Sunday which we can now almost complete most weeks. The target for 2025 will be the full cryptic on Mondays which apparently is the next easiest one!

Phew, it took me until the 29th of January to actually finish this post after starting it sometime over Christmas, but it’s still January so it counts!