OffSetLab

A year has gone by already and looking back it was quite eventful so I wanted to recap the highlights for the fun of it.

We traveled Europe with what days off we had at disposal and went to:

• Croatia because we wanted to see family and friends
• Iceland during the winter, where we saw Aurora Borealis and geothermal fields with geysers, and almost lost our fingers from taking pictures without gloves
• Germany to see the valley of Rhine from Frankfurt
• Spain to see Madrid and the surrounding small cities (Alcalá de Henares, Toledo, El Escorial)
• Scotland to see Edinburgh
• England to see Bristol, Bath and Stonehenge (so Vesna could take a picture in front of the house where Jane Austen once lived)
• Malta, which we covered quite extensively (because it's small), where we saw some nice megalithic structures and the less known, but still standing, Blue Grotto natural sea arch

We also roamed across Ireland with our friends and visited:

• Malahide and some beaches around Dublin
• Tayto amusement park north of Dublin for some thrills
• Sugarloaf mountain, Powerscourt gardens and Blessington greenway south of Dublin
• Arklow on the way to Wexford and Waterford
• Aran islands (Inis Mór), as well as caves with stalactites in the Burren
• Cork and Limerick, which are both beautiful

Concerts:

• Incubus, which was planned. It only took us 15 years to see them live since going together to see a cover band
• Why?, which was not planned, but was great none the less. They had a 10 year anniversary of their Alopecia album

We've been the best man and maid of honor to our best man and maid of honor. Woohoo.

I did an Inktober challenge as preparation for drawing characters in a video game (we may or may not be making); inking for the whole month of October every day. I produced a number of drawings and I'm slowly getting back into it after a long hiatus.

I changed jobs earlier this year and am now contributing to helping people with what I know. My new job is in IT health sector.

Vesna gained confidence in her career switch to front-end coding and got a job as well.

I dared to climb an artificial wall. I think I could do it recreationally, but I'm yet to figure out how to do it, if at all.

I published these articles semi-regularly. It's OK. I do need to push myself to get them out more frequently.

I replaced the cameras in my cell phone. I talked about the Fairphone earlier. It was easy enough to replace them and I needed to do it since I was taking photos a lot because of all the trips.

Because of the photos, I found a way to enrich the GoPro photos with geotags through my cell phone GPS and also made and published a photo tagging script that outputs KML. It creates placemarks for it on specific spatial and temporal coordinates with the photo attached. It figures out what's in the photo with Keras library and puts the results as a name for the placemark. The KML file can then be opened with Google Earth so I can keep track of where my photos were taken.

We visited Octocon which was enjoyable if a bit predictable. We also got Worldcon tickets. It's coming next year to Ireland, which is convenient.

We visited a Marxism conference to see how the community thinks.

We visited Porterhouse brewery and saw the beer making process.

We hosted some guests and went to the the usual sightseeing spots in Dublin with them.

We celebrated 15 years of our relationship and four years of marriage... and four years of being in Ireland.

We used our anniversaries as an excuse to buy new toys: we bought PlayStation 4 to play the exclusives and a projector so we don't need to go to the cinema anymore. To be honest, we've been talking about doing it for five years now.

We did go to the cinema with usual frequency, but this year didn't really see anything that stuck with us. I guess we hit a rut.

We're still playing pen and paper games with two parties over Skype. It's been a couple of years now.

We're still donating blood regularly and we didn't have any serious illnesses throughout the year.

We kept the apartment in order, replaced the window locking mechanism, bought a new table.

I made a GreaseMonkey script for Reddit so I could color code posts from the favorite subreddits.

Regarding other projects I have active, I kept the code in order and did minor upgrades like adding SSL on the OffSetLab because browsers are forcing me to, even though the site is static.

Bought Lazy Nezumi Pro. It's a great piece of software.

Reported a bug on Krita.

Wrote this recap. Fingers crossed that the next year is going to be great, too.