Hi everybody. I hope things are going well for everyone. It's been pretty quiet here. I want to reassure everyone that yes I am still here. I've actually been in hospital for over a month. Since it's pretty close to home I was able to sneak in a few times.

Last year was difficult and I am sorry there wasn't any significant developments. There were attempts to move to a more hands on server - but in light of my recent hospitalization I think the decision to stay on a fully managed server was a good one.

I should still look into moving to a different host perhaps as HostGator did a pretty sudden increase of their basic hosting and not everyone was happy about it.

On the plus side since last year we have reached over 50 active patrons on Patreon! Ever since the Patreon was created we've always hovered around 40-45 active patrons so it's really cool to have reached this milestone - and I am grateful for the support.

One of the developments since hopsitalization is I am moving in some kind of "co-living" house which will be much better for me. During COVID I lost my appartment in Brussels and being in my father's home when I'm closing in 50 was definitely taking a toll - not to mention the stressful environment in the neighborhood which I've hinted in previous posts. So this is very good for me - but will take some adaptation. I have basically a private room, and shared living spaces, kitchen etc. like a typical co-living rental.

I hope as I get better to find some motivation to do some updates this year. As part of this move I am also mulling over getting a laptop but can't make my mind quite yet.

An Apple Macbook Air would be plenty enough for development/maintenance and it seems like it's possible to do some light gaming on it very recently with Game Porting Toolkit. Recent developments with Asahi Linux are very interesting too. The Macbook could be basically a beautifully designed linux laptop as well - albeit they haven't yet got the DisplayPort over USB-C working if I am correct and that's definitely something I would want. I am still sporting a good old 1440p LED Cinema display with Mini-DisplayPort cable.

I could also just move my tower PC to the new co-living space, but a laptop would allow me to move around the house. I looked into Linux certified laptops as well and they all have their quirks I saw some good reviews for Tuxedo InfinityBook Pro 14.

Thing is if it's not going to replace a gaming PC - I'm thinking I should probably focus on having a laptop completely dedicated to Koohii and other small projects - so it is always available in emergency (actually, this reminds me a recent email from HostGator - there will be some small down-times as they will finally add php 8.x support to the shared hosting). With that in mind perhaps a base 15 inch M2 Macbook Air would be a good pick - with the option to turn it into a Linux laptop eventually. I like macOS - but being able to get really comfortable with ONE OS is definitely a plus. I'd be pretty happy to run Ubuntu 24.04 instead, especially that last time I heard macOS still doesn't have native containers so development with Docker was noticeably slower on my M1 Mac Mini - that said this was 2+ years ago and things may have improved.

What else is going on here? I am pleased to let you guys know that I am now finally the owner of an actual smartphone. Ha! I bought a refurbished iPhone 12 Mini and I really enjoy it. My small gaming related project Diablo 2 Runewizard looks pretty wonky on it so that could be a good little warmup to get back into CSS.

For Koohii though I think we did a pretty good job? There's definitely improvements to be made but I did surprisingly well with the preview in Google Devtools considering I never actually used the site on a smartphone before (I did check it out once or twice on a coworker's phone). So this could also be some small tweaks I could work on this year to get me back in the groove.

Hope you enjoyed the off the cuff post!

Sometime last year I started the tradition of sharing some of my favorite electronic music to end the post. So today it is Megalon - Darkness a timeless techno album from 1994. Here is the album on bandcamp.