text/gemini
# Checking in – December 2024
The bottom of the year has come back again, and so a mostly uneventful year has ended. Surprisingly there is a huge rush of activity though, and I have plenty to write about for a change.
Everything is very busy and things are getting worse and better all at once. It's quite confusing to figure out what's going on but things are definitely moving very fast.
## Health
There's been a lot of doctor's appointments, blood tests, and all kinds of things that I didn't know anything about two months ago that I now have to. It's quite scary and now I have to have all this medicine.
Generally speaking though my day-to-day life has had a significant but manageable impact. My weight has bottomed out and now sits just under 60 kg. I think the medicine has caused me to become voracious and wanting to eat a whole lot but I can't lest that upset the stomach somehow, and I can't allow for that.
Otherwise, my skin has become extremely dry but this is kind of expected as the weather has been very dry as well. It's not great that it keeps flaking but clothes do a good job of keeping it all contained and not become dust most of the time. It's strange to see ichthyosis-like features appearing all around the skin though. It makes me look very old.
## Christmas & Winter Solstice
Speaking of food, we have the usual double-whammy of the winter solstice dinner on the 21st and the Christmas dinner on the 25th, such is the benefits of living around here. It's the first Christmas dinner we had for a while since the parents were away last year and we were ill the year before.
Both are very good, actually; the winter solstice one is from a Shanghainese restaurant and we added a bunch of Shanghai stuff to it (glass pork, thick noodles) while the Christmas dinner is a standard package bought from somewhere. The Christmas dinner was marked as "for 5", but despite having 6 people in total we can't eat it all. There's so much that the fried rice lasted me the breakfast and dinner for the day after.
## Games
I've finally broken the Minecraft drought and have been playing in my old world which I have left behind for several years. It's a good time and I enjoy it a lot, and have done a fair bit in the meantime.
Otherwise, I have bought a few games for playing at some point. Shapez 2 is a fun thing, I believe; I've given it half an hour and I think I will continue playing.
## Creativity
I wrote a bunch of ideas down for more articles. They mostly revolve around work and this new generation of AI stuff, and that filled up the last of my Ideas notebook. It took more or less three years to the day to fill up. Those can stew for a bit longer still while I wander my way around life.
I wrote a few pages this month but not as much as I would like.
## Programming and other computer stuff
Surprisingly I knocked out a few things in the backlog without thinking very much about it, which is surprising.
They're not really big deals. The first thing I did was to learn about the lower limits to when a database like `sqlite ` is necessary.
First I had finally combined all the Wordle result copy-pastes that were originally in separate text files into a single YAML file. It turned fifteen thousand files occupying 33 MB of space down into just four that occupy about 3.5 MB. Copy-pastes are all under a hundred bytes in size so keeping them all separate apparently pads them out quite a bit.
The other thing I did was to dump all the weather data I've collected over the years into a database to see if I can make something fun out of it. I had about 30 MB of that too, stored away in zipped up JSON files. I dumped it all in a database, and I ended up with a 1.6 GB database. Which is surprisingly large, but after running the numbers that's basically how much the JSON files would have occupied if they were uncompressed, and after talking to someone about it, I was convinced that JSON simply compresses extremely well. For this I'm conflicted; 1.6 gigs is a lot, but it's also not a whole lot, and now I can also use `sqlite` to query the JSON across multiple documents. Right now I have both copies, but I only update the compressed JSON one.
Also I have received a hand-me-down monitor that is much larger than the old one that I have had for seven years. The stats are as follows, as truncated output from `xrandr`:
```
HDMI-A-0 connected primary 2560x1440+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 697mm x 392mm
2560x1440 99.95*+ 74.97 59.95
```
Which is quite a lot. It's so spacious that Emacs will split one frame into eight windows before considering reusing them. That's very good, but the downside is that the left side of the monitor is now so far away from me that it's hard to use it properly. But that's fine, I can handle all that, aside from the fact that the Emacs minibuffer is all the way on the most inaccessible bottom-left corner!
Finally I got a new charging station and an air quality sensor. The sensor is nothing serious, and I basically got it so that I can look at more numbers on a screen that describe the environment around me.
This content has been proxied by September (ba2dc).