Every year towards the end of the year, I put together a retrospective of events that have happened over the year - the good, bad and the ugly. The Bad Most of the year was taken up with treatment for relapsed Hodgkins Lymphoma cancer. After the clinical immunotherapy drug trial finished in Feb 2023, cancer was unfortunately still detected, so it did not completely cure it. I had a further (awful) spell in hospital around March/April where my Hickman line became infected and I had a severe mental health episode, probably caused by the strong antibiotics being pumped through my system. Finally I was accepted for a stem cell transplant, and had my transplant on 4th July. We have had to deal with complications of cancer elsewhere in the family, not just my mum’s own cancer treatment being ongoing, but the financial impact of the family having to support both of us, is quite a significant burden. The Good Thankfully, I’m finally in remission for cancer! I have been in remission for 6 months, and if I make it to 2 years, then I am effectively cured. I have a 75% chance of it not coming back within that time, approximately. We got an absolute ton of stuff done on the house, and I have an awesome gaming setup, an awesome DJing setup, an awesome music production setup, an awesome high speed network and server setup, and an awesome WFH setup. All of the goals I set myself of things I wanted to achieve during my downtime having cancer treatment nearly 2 years ago, are more or less finished now. We have decided that we’re moving out of Manchester. We are going to move to Chester, which promises a much, much nicer, quieter, and actually, cheaper place to live now that I am committed to a 100% WFH work life. Things are progressing well with the house sale, and we’ve got a lot of interest so far. I have got fitter and healthier and my posture has got better over the year. I have also managed to reduce the medication I am on, which has helped my health. The Ugly There has been a worldwide downturn for software jobs, just as I had to take some time off my career due to work reasons. This downturn is probably comparable to the 2008/9 downturn in software jobs around the financial crisis. This is definitely bad news for everyone in software.

I’ve been having online guitar lessons with my friend Jon. After a while we have got things down to a setup that seems to work remotely. I have an Epiphone Les Paul Vintage Edition electric guitar, and a Marshall MG15G Practice Amp. I use a headphone splitter cable to plug into the Marshall’s headphone out socket, which splits the audio into left and right channels, and a 3.5mm to phono mono cable plugged into the headphone splitter that runs to my audio interface. I use Logitech C270 and a Logitech 920 cameras, the C270 for the front on face cam, and the 920 suspended on a lighting boom above my head, pointed down so that Jon can see the guitar fret fingering I am attempting. I also use a t.bone MB88U directional microphone on a desk microphone stand to talk into. The sound interface I use is my studio one, which is a Behringer UMC1820 audio interface, but really, you can use any audio interface with two mono input channels and a headphone monitor. I have a KORG CA-2 portable tuner which helps me get the guitar in tune before each session. I use a WINGO Guitar Capo and plectrums as well. We use Zoom to do the lessons over, Jon has a subscription, and Skype to store notes between sessions. I use my phone to take pictures of my fret fingering to practice. I have a portable flask that I keep with me if I need to take a drink during the session, as to not disrupt things. I always tune the guitar before the session as to not waste time. I always switch my audio speakers off, and use headphones on the audio interface, to minimise disturbance to others, and to stop feedback. I have a pen and paper to make any notes needed on the session. This saves time compared to typing them into the computer. The sessions are 45mins -> 1 hour max, weekly. Zoom Setup This is the Zoom configuration options that I use. Currently I do not turn on the ‘original audio for musicians’ toggle when on the call: ...

If you are still using optical discs, e.g. CDs or Blu-rays, in music, video or games, then you are in the minority these days. Downloads and streaming have become the norm, which means 1) A lot less discs are being produced 2) A lot less optical drives are being produced. Because a lot less optical drives are being produced, we can imagine a time in the future when the only optical drives you can buy, are second-hand. Regardless if you can buy new optical drives currently or not, often the best value/quality ratio can be found in second-hand optical drives. ...

The Mythical Man Month and other Essays - Fred Brooks - Read it as part of my university degree. A lot of good sense. I can’t believe there are people out there in charge of software projects that haven’t read this book, or think it somehow doesn’t apply anymore, but unfortunately, it seems quite common. - [Read reviews on Good Reads] The Cathedral and the Bazaar - Eric S Raymound - One of the first books I read on software development process. Really blew my mind. - ...

Every year (when I remember) I do an end-of-year summary to outline what has been going on in my life. I’ve been doing this for a few years now, and it’s a great way to look back on the year and see has happened. The Bad: The main bad news of the year is that, contrary to expectations, my Hodgkins Lymphoma cancer was detected again around April after the initial chemotherapy. So it had come back. The rest of the year has mostly revolved around subsequent treatments to try and reach a long term remission, e.g. cure. I’m not there yet, but there are a lot of treatments still available, and I have hope that my current immunotherapy treatment might be the one that works. It wasn’t just me that was affected, my wife suffered quite a bit on hearing the news, and has only just really taken it all in and come to terms with it. I’m pretty sure that I will be cured eventually, at least for a good 10-20 years or so, it just is a pain having to take time off work and go through sometimes intensive treatment sessions. The economy has not had the greatest of years either, and the cost of living crisis affecting the UK has had an effect on us, and my parents who are the main financial support we have while I am unable to work. The Good: I have found a renewed interest in my career, in software development, and I have spent a lot of my spare time, and part of my downtime for treatment, learning new technical things and just generally finding the enjoyment in technology that I thought I’d permanently lost for so many years. The career opportunities around working from home have been very good considering my illness. There is still, despite a downturn, more than enough work around, and a lot of it is 100% work from home work. I’m no longer worried about being unemployed for any great length of time, presuming I am healthy enough to work from home. I’ve been developing my writing and social media skills, which have been a welcome distraction from the bad stuff going on. I’ve always enjoyed writing, but I would say my writing has particularly improved over the past year. Work on the house We have spent a lot of time, effort and money on working on the house this year. Conny has put in a great deal of amazing work, in particular. ...

(Full Room View) (Desk worktop) (Below the desk) (Left of the desk) (The gaming/morale shelves) This is my work from home setup. I work from home every work day. I use the following equipment: ‘Studio.local’ - my main PC for WFH and gaming I run Windows 11 on this, and use Ubuntu Linux WSL2 with a Kali Linux virtual machine also. ...

I have been working from home, the majority of the time, for over 5 years. It took a lot of adjustment, and I’m still not 100% adjusted, but if you want to undertake this, then these are my tips. Note that a big part of the benefit from working from home is the total flexibility in work environment, so these are only tips that work for me - they might not work for you! However, I think there is probably quite a bit of commonality. ...

This is based off of the 2021 Reddit post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PSP/comments/kcx4ei/tutorial_convert_most_video_formats_to/ I am using it with Handbrake 1.5.1. You can import it into your Handbrake via “Preset -> File Import”. Download PSP Handbrake Preset .

For years, UK politics has become more right-wing, popularist, and presidential. Right-wing, because the Conservatives have been in power for over 10 years, and have had the opportunity to implement most of their ideological policies, which we see at the moment highlighted to an extreme with Liz Truss gearing up to emulate Thatcher on almost every level. Popularist, because the Conservatives have implemented policies designed to appease the populations feelings, rather than those based on factual positive outcomes. ...

Here are some extra tips if you’re just getting started out on Ubuntu. You don’t have to go through the UI to shut down or reboot your computer. You can do it from the command line. The commands are: sudo reboot # to reboot sudo poweroff # to shut down and power off the computer You can get a lot more information on your computers startup and shutdown sequences by removing the default Ubuntu splash screen that obscures this. You should definitely do this if you want to learn more about what your system is actually doing under the hood, especially if you need to troubleshoot what it’s doing. To do this: ...