Blog

I finally decided to write the following post as every time I have an acute episode of my chronic vertigo and mention it to people, I have to explain my situation and symptoms again. So I decided to write it down here to just be able to link people to it instead 😉. This is not an attempt to get attention or pity, so please spare me that! 😅 I have had a chronic vertigo since fall of 2000 now. It’s not a case of issues with low blood pressure (“blackness in front of the eyes”) or some light-headedness or something like that, but rather a case of the same sensoric input being generated somewhere between my vestibular system and my brain as if I was on a roller coaster or sitting on a merry-go-around. During acute episodes which last hours to days (and sometimes even weeks) this leads to unstable walking, a very insecure feeling when standing and sometimes also nausea and nystagmus, not to mention exhaustion while trying to compensate for all of that. Thankfully, it’s “just” vertigo, my hearing is perfectly fine. ...

For a couple of years now I’ve had the sneaking suspicion that I’m neurodivergent. And while I still don’t have a diagnosis, there are several things I use to cope with my brain constantly going BRRRRRR, thinking (and worrying) about everything while forgetting important things, and I thought some of those might also be helpful to others. Thus, here are five of my favourite lifehacks that I’ve been using to cope with the weirdness that is my brain. Some of them I’ve used for years before I ever suspected something, some of them I only discovered after reading up on neurodiversity. Maybe you find something interesting for yourself! ...

I decided to try my hand at my very own 2024 retrospective to give myself a chance to see more of the good things I managed to get done or that I experienced. And as the news continue to be all doom and gloom I figured why not do this in the shape of a blog post so that a) it’s more easy for myself to revisit that again in the future whenever I get dragged down and b) y’all maybe also get some positive vibes. ...

The other day I was taking care of a fresh mosquito bite with the heat-it that’s part of my EDC (“everyday carry”), and that reminded me that I’d been meaning to do a quick write-up about my EDC for ages. On top of my keys (with some meds and my second factor tokens) and my phone (currently a Pixel 6a) I usually carry a little pouch with me as pictured above. ...

I’m on day 4 of my desperately needed summer vacation1, and twice already I got pinged on my personal social media accounts about OctoPrint related stuff. This happens on every vacation that I take, and during shorter breaks like weekends or just after hours as well, so much so that I’ve pinned a post about it to my Mastodon account (that now also cross references this very blog post): Gina Häußge @foosel@chaos.social Friendly reminder: This is my private Mastodon account which I also want to be able to read after work, during the weekends & other time off without getting dragged back into work 😉 ...

As hinted at to be my plan in my post about my first proper gamedev experience back in April, I recently took part in my first ever gamejam, Go Godot Jam 4, and during that built a game called “Pew Pew Pew: Danger Zone!”. The jam required all submissions to be built in Godot Engine, which was one of the reasons I chose it - I just recently got my feet wet in game development with Godot 4 and wanted to get some more practice in. Since my partner was otherwise committed, I entered as a solo dev. ...

In my last post I told you that I’ve been very much interested into video game development for a while now, and just never got around it until the personal Gamejam gift from my partner. Due to this interest I’ve also been subscribed to a bunch of game design and documentary specific YouTube channels for a few years now, and since I consider their content pretty interesting – even if you are not interested in game development and just games in general! – I thought I might just share my list here. So let’s go! ...

For my 40th birthday a few weeks ago, I got a pretty amazing gift from my partner: a coupon for a personal 4-day Gamejam/Gamedev experience, just the two of us. I’ve been a gamer pretty much my whole life, I’ve been a coder pretty much my whole life, but I never so far managed to combine these things. Apart from copying some Star Trek game code in BASIC from a book in my teens, the probably quite common tinkering around with the parameters in gorilla.bas, and a Snake clone in GLUT in preparation for a 3d graphics course in university, I never so far got into game development. It has been something high on my bucket list however, and I’ve been fascinated by the concept of gamejams like Ludum Dare, GMTK Jam etc., where you build a game matching a provided topic within a set time limit (usually between two to ten days) and within a set of rules (e.g. do you need to do everything yourself, including graphics and music, or are you allowed to use certain existing assets, do you need to use a specific game engine etc). Add to that the fact that these days I’m way more into playing indie games than the AAA stuff from the big players1, a love for learning new stuff and the release of the latest major version 4 of the fully open source Godot Engine that has made me curious for a while now, and you might see why this really WAS an absolutely amazing gift by my partner. ...

When Valve announced the Steamdeck back in summer of 2021, I was immediately sold. At that point my primary gaming device - despite owning a quite capable PC with enough computing and graphics power to run even the latest AAA games at a decent enough quality - was my Nintendo Switch, simply because I was not particularly happy about spending my after hours in front of the same PC that I already spend my working hours on. Sitting on the couch and playing something in handheld mode while my partner was playing something on his gaming laptop or the PS4 turned out to be an “alone time together” scenario we both enjoy very much, and was an additional reason I didn’t want to spend hours alone in front of my PC. So, when the reservations opened on July 16th 2021 at 19:00 CEST, I was prepared and spent the next 22min frantically trying and finally succeeding to reserve my spot in the EU 256GB queue. And then the waiting began. ...

I originally published this in October 2020 as a Twitter thread. Even though it’s been a couple of years, the points still stand, so I decided to preserve it here as a short blog post. It’s easy to only see the success and also to only share the success in our journeys. But success is usually just the end of a long path of struggle, compromises, setbacks, failure. Over the years, I’ve talked about my journey a lot. About the kind of measures I took and continue to take to protect my physical and mental health from the effects of running a project like OctoPrint. ...