2024 has been a good year for me and my family, and I wanted to share some highlights from it.
Personal life
Keirthana and I had our tenth wedding anniversary ❤️ at the beginning of this year (we have known each other for more than 32 years now!) and celebrated it with a trip to Murudeshwara (a long train journey that we enjoyed) where our daughter had her first beach experience.
Our daughter also had her first flight, and her first international trip (to Singapore) along with my cousin who had his firsts too. A day trip to the Universal Studios at Sentosa was a highlight of this trip.
We also had a memorable trip to Jaipur with family while presenting at the UbuCon Asia 2024 event held there. More details about that later.
A beloved family member passed away in the middle of this year, causing a mix of sorrow and relief to the bereaved.
Towards the end of the year, we managed to achieve some longstanding financial goals, which should stand us in good stead for the future.
While there were some challenges throughout the year, we are grateful to have been in a position to deal with them well. 🙏
Work
I continue to work in the awesome Launchpad team at Canonical, and we have been doing a great job so far in coping with the departures of legendary colleagues (Colin and William), and the team growth has helped with it. This has given me a valuable opportunity to grow and provide leadership in specific areas (infrastructure, overall system design etc.) within the team, and I am grateful for that.
At the beginning of this year, Keirthana and I had a stressful time when we had to assess our options and decide not to travel to the Canonical engineering sprint at Madrid in May. As a Real Madrid, I was really looking forward to going to Madrid, visit the iconic Santiago Bernabéu stadium, and possibly attend a Real Madrid game. 💔 But this tough decision had to be made due to a lack of reasonable childcare options for our daughter during our work trip. We were able to travel to The Hague for the second engineering sprint in October and also attend the Ubuntu Summit 2024.
During the summit, I had the chance to meet and thank some inspirational people from the Linux ecosystem (Mathieu Comandon from the Lutris project, GloriousEggroll of Proton GE, Nobara fame, Neal Gompa, a prolific contributor to Linux distributions and a fixture in many of my favorite Linux podcasts), ex-colleagues, and friends (Soumyadeep Ghosh). I loved the Matrix 2.0 talk by Mathew Hodgson and the lightning talk by Nirav Patel from Framework where he successfully switched the Mainboard of a Framework laptop from x86 to RISC-V during the talk was mind-blowing!
Keirthana and I presented talks at the UbuCon Asia 2024 at Jaipur in September. My talk was about ‘6 little-known features: How to make the most out of Launchpad’ and it was well-received by an audience containing a mix of many students very new to Linux and some seasoned, veteran community members.
During this event, I met Soumyadeep Ghosh, a still-in-college prodigy doing great work in the Ubuntu, Snap, KDE, and the open source software communities, and gained a new friend!
I started learning Golang this year and have used it to build some toy personal projects so far. Python has spoiled me so much that I find it very difficult to pick up a new programming language. After relying on the ‘batteries included’ approach of Python and its standard library, I find the ‘So what if it is not there in Golang? We can easily implement it ourselves’ attitude of developers using Golang, very hard to accept. But this ‘learn, unlearn, and relearn’ process is very important for me to master, and so I will continue learning Golang in 2025.
Hobbies
Self-hosting
I built my first homeserver (code-named, tesseract, because of the cubic shape of the Fractal Design Node 804 case that I used for the build) at the beginning of this year and moved all the local self-hosted services from the 2 Raspberry Pi 4s to it. I run Ubuntu 24.04 on this server with multiple ZFS pools having plenty of storage. Even though I have known about ZFS for a very long time (right from my college days as a Sun Microsystems Campus Ambassador in 2008), I am grateful to the 2.5 Admins podcast (Jim Salter and Allan Jude, in particular) for evangelizing ZFS and nudging me to use it! I plan to convert all my computers to use ZFS, with tesseract acting as a zfs send backup target, soon.
Gaming
I continued to wade through my ever-growing backlog of video games this year, and managed to finish many more games this year than the averages from the previous years. You can see my posts about these games in this Mastodon thread. Here is a list of the games that I played and completed this year.
- Venba (Xbox Series X)
- Lovers in a dangerous spacetime (Steam)
- Spiderman 2 (PlayStation 5)
- Trine 3 (Steam)
- Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty (Steam)
- Super Mario Odyssey (Nintendo Switch)
- My Friend Peppa Pig (Xbox Series X) — I played this for/with my daughter, who is a big Peppa Pig fan
- Journey (PlayStation 5)
- Operation Tango (PlayStation 5 + Steam)
- Trine 4 (Steam)
- Astro Bot (PlayStation 5)
- Plucky Squire (PlayStation 5)
- Trine 5 (Steam)
- We Were Here (Steam)
- We Were Here Too (Steam)
- Marvel’s Midnight Suns (PlayStation 5)
- It takes two (Steam, 2nd playthrough, this time as May)
- SteamWorld Dig 2 (Steam)
As you can see, most of the above games have cooperative gameplay of some sort and that is what I have enjoyed the most this year, playing with my cousins during weekend nights. Astro Bot (I preordered it) was my best game of this year and I enjoyed every moment of it and got the Platinum trophy at the end.
I attempted emulating my Nintendo Switch games using Yuzu (RIP!) before Nintendo took it down and then came back to stop all development on Ryujinx too. I swore off Nintendo due to this, but I suspect I will buy their games and consoles in the future because they do make excellent games! ☹️
I had an on and off relationship with my Steam Deck and played some games on it, without completing anything meaningful. SteamWorld Dig 2, Dave the diver, Cult of the Lamb, Borderlands 2, Yakuza 0, and Psychonauts 2 are some honorable mentions. You can find more details about it in my Steam Replay 2024 showcase.
I bought game discs/cartridges for Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Metaphor: Refantazio (I loved playing Persona 5 Royal), and The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom during my international trips, and I am yet to play the last two.
Gadgets
I bought myself an Aorus FO32U2P 32-inch 4K 240 Hz QD-OLED monitor to add to my existing BenQ EW3270U 32-inch 4K monitor, and it has been great to use so far. Since there isn’t a GPU that can run most of my favorite games at 4K 240 Hz, I will have to wait for a future GPU upgrade to be able to use the full power of this monitor. I chose this over the cheaper Alienware AW3225QF monitor because this doesn’t have a curved display and has more productivity features than AW3225QF. I still need to iron out some issues/limitations with my current setup to make the best use of it.
Ever since Apple released the M-series MacBooks a few years ago, with trailblazing compute power and battery life, I have been interested in buying one and running Asahi Linux. So this June, I bit the bullet and bought myself an M3 MacBook Pro laptop with the M3 Pro chip, 18 GB RAM, and 512 GB storage. While the Asahi Linux project doesn’t support it yet, I am happy to wait and use macOS till then. I have been using it as an “on-the-bed laptop for personal projects and entertainment” device so far, and have written this post on it.
Furthermore, I bought 3 more TP-Link Deco XE75 mesh routers during my Netherlands trip to allow extending my home Wi-Fi network’s coverage and/or replace any existing devices if they fail. This was important to me because the Wi-Fi 6E/7 mesh routers are no longer sold in India due to some uncertainty around the licensing and usage of the corresponding radio bands for Wi-Fi or telecom mobile networks. I hope this should suffice for the next 5 years or so.
Podcasts
After listening to and supporting Jupiter Broadcasting network’s podcasts for nearly a decade, I stopped listening to their shows this year because of the excessive bitcoin shilling (I hate cryptocurrencies) that took the focus away from the great content in those shows. It looks like they have been doubling down on the bitcoin stuff since I stopped listening, so there might be no way back for me. ☹️
The Late Night Linux family of podcasts have been as great as ever and provide a lot of excellent content. 2.5 Admins is my favorite podcast and I can’t wait to hear its every new episode.
I am currently evaluating ‘The Untitled Linux Show’ and so far it has been enjoyable.
FOSS contributions
This year, I have continued my recurring donation to the KDE project and started a new monthly donation to the Matrix project. If you haven’t done so, I strongly recommend donating/contributing to the FOSS projects of your choice.
Gratitude
2024 was a memorable and an eventful year, that ebbed and flowed every day. We are thankful for all the good and grateful for the privileges that allowed us to deal with the not-so-good well. Looking forward to a great 2025 ahead! Wish all of you a happy, prosperous, and fulfilling 2025! 🎉🙏
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