In short, it's been an incredibly busy year, work-wise. While I have had time for numerous projects and hobbies (yay, photography!), most haven't really warranted a blog post. There hasn't been much (any) progress on the Xsata project, though that remains a priority, time and space permitting.

Potentially the coolest picture I've ever taken. Love the splayed tail feathers and the tiny feets. Totally unedited.

I did design two circuit boards this year: one for a totally custom keyboard that I'm working on and the other for a weather station. Both projects are coming along nicely, though I still need to design a case for the keyboard. The goal is to have the keyboard case CNC'd out of aluminum; it should look pretty svelte if it ever comes to fruition.

Controller for the keyboard PCB. It's not stupid if it works? Kinda fucky with the spacebar stabilizer in place though.

I've built several weather stations over the years, but they've always been handwired and the PCBs definitely make it much easier to assemble more of them. I've toyed with selling them on Etsy, but that's contrary to my goal of never providing support for anything done as a hobby.

I suppose there are also still a couple blog posts in the works, namely about my VPN/network setup. I think about starting those from time to time, but, again, I've been pretty spent at the ends of most days lately.

I would also like to continue developing my DNS-based shortcut service that I run on my local network, which is apparently akin to Google's "golinks." [1] [2] [3] That will also hopefully be the subject of a post someday, though I think at this point I coded a minimum viable product of it about a year ago and it's seen little development ever since.

And lastly, I still need to finish the blog post that was the reason for starting this blog in the first place. A little ridiculous to think that the primary reason for screaming into the void still hasn't seen the light of day, but here we are. That's been getting less thought in my day-to-day life, but the problem it aims to address is as relevant as ever.

Fall is just the best, isn't it?

On a personal note, I am pleased to report that I did a good job of getting out and seeing the world this year (thanks, COVID). But really, that is only another excuse to drop one last picture in before wrapping up.

All that to say: "I'm still here! And I'm not going anywhere." Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that my initial hopes for this blog were overly ambitious (as so often is the case), but I do hope to have more time in the new year (and to make progress on the Xsata project once I have more space to actually work on it, c'mon housing market 🤞🏼).