Avian’s Blog

One of my more vivid childhood memories is from the center of Ljubljana, somewhere around the new year 1990. On the building of the Nama department store there was a new, bright red LED screen. It was scrolling a message that read "Welcome to the new decade". It was probably one of the first such displays I ever saw. I remember finding the message kind of weird and surprising. I think up to that point I had decades shelved among the terms that were only the matter of books or movies.

It's now the end of another decade and, amusingly enough, I was again not really thinking about it in such terms. I was only reminded of the upcoming round number on the calendar when social media posts and articles summarizing the past 10 years started popping up. Anyway, I'm not even going to attempt to sum up the decade. A huge enough number of things happened in the past year alone, both happy and sad and somewhere in between. I usually have problems summarizing even that down to a few paragraphs, so here are only a few personal highlights.

On the electronic side, I'm really happy with how one work-related project turned out. It's a small multi-purpose microcontroller board that includes an analog front-end for certain proprietary buses. I've executed the whole project, from writing up a specification based on measurements and reverse engineering, drawing up the schematic to assembling prototypes and coding the firmware. It was an interesting exercise in optimization, both from the perspective of having a minimal BOM and low-level programming of integrated peripherals in the microcontroller.

Each year I mention the left-over pile of unfinished side projects. This year isn't any different and some projects stretch back worryingly deep into my stack of notebooks. Perhaps the closest to completion is a curve tracer that I designed while researching a curiosity in bipolar transistor behavior. I've also received the ERASynth Micro signal generator that I've helped crowdfund. It's supposed to become a part of an RF measurement system that I'm slowly piecing together. I feel bad for not posting a review of it, but as usual other things intervened.

I've continued to spend many evenings drawing, either in a classical drawing class at the National Gallery or behind the digital setup I have at home. At the start of the year I was doing some more experiments with animation, trying out lessons I've learned and checking out how far I can get with Python scripts for compositing and lighting effects. I further developed my GIMP plug-in.

I played around with some story ideas, but I didn't end up doing any kind of a longer project like I did a year I ago. I enjoyed trying out different drawing styles, experimenting with character design and doing random illustrations that came up in my mind. I've come up with some kind of an alternative space-race theme with animals, but in the end I realized that while I can draw the characters, I don't really have a story to tell about them.

Speaking about telling stories, I've written more blog posts this year than the year before. I've also had my moment of fame when my rant about Google blocking messages from my mail server was posted on HackerNews and reached the top of the front page. My server received a yearly amount of traffic in just a couple of days and the article got mentioned on sites like Bloomberg and BoingBoing. It was a fresh dose of motivation to keep writing amid the trend of falling number of visitors and RSS subscribers that I've seen since around 2014.

As I always repeat in these posts, it's hard to sum up 365 days in a few paragraphs. I've tried to stick to the positive side of things above. In case the picture is too rosy, I must add that there were also sad times that were hard to wade through and plans that didn't turn out as they should. The next year looks like it will bring some big challenges for me, so again I'll say that I won't make any plans on what kind of personal projects I'll do. If anything, I wish to finish some that I already started and try to refrain from beginning any new ones to add to the pile.