I mostly finished my holiday shopping this week. I picked up a few gifts for my family throughout the year and then randomly stressed out last week, thinking I didn’t have enough. I picked up a few last-minute items, and everyone was in good shape outside of a few gift cards. Now, to wrap everything…

Meta

Lately, my weekly notes have been more like monthly notes. I draft them, forget to finish/publish them, and then the following Sunday morning, I start another week. So here we are again.

Family

December is LEGO advent calendar month in my household. Our recently turned three-year-old participates for the first time with the LEGO® ǀ Disney Advent Calendar 2024, and our seven-year-old picked the LEGO® Star Wars™ Advent Calendar 2024. Even if you are a grownup, these are fun, and you get some cool LEGO mini-figures.

House

If you ask our three-year-old what she wants for Christmas, she defaults to “Rainbow lights” because I didn’t put any lights up outside. Between our Thanksgiving trip to Chicago and two weeks of everyone in the house cycling through the crud, here we are, but at least the Christmas tree got put up.

Community Work

My community cups ran over a bit this week. This is due to my being new to the DSF Board and various end-of-year and before-holidays “things” that pop up.

Community work cut into some of my open-source projects, but I’d like to catch up over the holidays.

I also ended my week with my last Office Hours of 2024. This week was a little too non-profit and community-heavy, so I will balance that better. With the DSF having its own office hours, I want to keep solving those problems in the proper space.

Side projects

Side Quests

Writing

2024-12-20: 🗓️ December 21, 2024, is Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day 

2024-12-19: Default Apps 2024 - Here are my Default Apps 2024, which builds from my Default Apps 2023 post.

2024-12-17: 🤷 Why do the Django and Python communities use so many Google Forms? 

2024-12-14: New project to shorten django-admin to django because we are not monsters - I didn’t realize this idea would kick a hornet’s nest, and yet somehow it did.

Entertainment

We picked up Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind and finished it last week. It was fun, and we like these retro games, but it’s not TMNT’s level of replayability. The game has three hours of gameplay. I’m hoping future updates address this.

I read mixed reviews on G.I. Joe: Wrath of Cobra, but my son was pretty excited about the new Power Rangers game, so we picked it up as a beat ‘em up game we could play over the weekend. It’s buggy in ways that make me wonder how this game has been out for a few months and still has this level of bugs. The controls are bad, but we somehow played through to the last stage before we both shrugged and decided to call it a night. I would give it a two out of five stars type of game. If it weren’t for the nostalgia from my youth, I’d give it one or one and a half stars.

New gear

My NanoKVMs arrived a few weeks ago. I quickly ran out of ports, so I ordered some short HDMI cables, Cat6 cables, more UBC-C cables, and a cheap 8-port switch.

I also lost my Home Assistant machine again, so I swapped out RPis and still ran into issues. As impressive as Home Assistant, running, maintaining, and keeping running is a pain. I have been debating switching to one of their yellow box hardware solutions to support them financially and hoping that I won’t lose my box once a year because it’s so hard to troubleshoot and fix.

I also picked up a 50-foot sewer cam (for looking in walls and vents), an under-desk walking treadmill, and a smart garage door opener to replace our smart Chamberlain garage door opener because they dropped their API.

Next week

This week is Christmas, which means a little bit of travel. Both kids are out of school and preschool, and we both are juggling jobs and deadlines.