Just like last year I’ve decided to sit down today and write my very own retrospective. The year has been difficult in several ways, but whenever I took another look at last year’s post it put a smile on my face, remembering the good things about life in general.
In the hope that this will continue to work, here we go with the same look at cool stuff that I did or experienced in 2025…
I started the year with my by now traditional deep clean project, this time taking care of my hallway and the built-in closet. That also included recycling my first ever 3d printer with which everything OctoPrint started - a step I had to do for space reasons, but which still felt weird.
Continuing my start-of-the-year clean-up project tradition (for last year's project see https://chaos.social/@foosel/111687404140972445).
Today I tackled the hallway shelf and the built-in closet. Filled up several garbage bags once more. Ouch, my back 😅
I also decided to throw out my first 3d printer that was still stored in the closet, as much as it saddens me. It's no longer working & it's taking up too much space for that. But I'll keep the front plate & Pi 😊
No before pictures for you bw - too embarrassing 😬
I painted all of the (core) miniatures of my copy of “Sub Terra”, making sure to also use a bit of UV colors for some special effects under black light.
It's been years since I last painted some #miniatures, and since then several #boardgames have moved in that come with some.
As I find painting quite relaxing (it allows me to focus on something I'm doing with my hands while making my brain shut up), I recently decided it was time to get back into it. I also wanted to try something new and got myself a set of Army Painter Speedpaints.
I started with the core game of Sub Terra yesterday and am quite happy with how things are looking now 😊
And since this is a game that can be played in the darkness under UV light, I decided to add a little extra too...
That also prompted me to finally kit up my painting stuff on a small cart that fits into the freshly cleaned up built-in closet.
As it is also becoming traditional by now, I spent some wonderfully calm days with my partner in the southern Black Forest again. We spent the days taking long walks/hikes through the snowy landscape, and the evenings playing through “Rise of the Golden Idol” - quality time! 😊
Spent a beautiful week with my partner of now five years in the southern Black Forest, to celebrate our anniversary by taking a short time out in nature 😊
While I'm admittedly not too thrilled to return to work again tomorrow, this was the kind of reset I needed and it did a lot in topping up my energy levels 🥰
Apart from hiking and a wellness day in a spa, we also played through Rise of the Golden Idol in the evenings 😊 #relationshipGoals
Back from that, I finally found the time to frame the bits of my first 3d printer that I kept and hung them in my office - that way it’s not fully gone but taking up way less space than it did before.
At the end of January, I gave my first talk in front of a live audience since the start of the pandemic, at a local Women in Tech meetup. To say that I was incredibly nervous about this would be an understatement, but everything went smoothly once I got started 😊
Another one for the collection to remind me that I in fact now CAN give talks without turning bright red thanks to crippling stagefright 💪 It was a long process ^^
Slides are now also up on foosel.net!
Thank you Christian for the picture!
Using my vinyl cutter I created some custom Mass Effect merch! Happy to say that the design indeed held up through several washes now - this thing has become my favourite hoodie and I’m actually wearing it as I’m typing these lines.
Took care of a #project I had planned since before Christmas and turned a hoodie off mine into something a tad nerdier. This is now my favourite hoodie on the citadel!¹
¹ I just hope it survives the laundry, still my first steps with HTV 🙈
I also created two more shirts, and another hoodie for my partner:
When the world becomes too much, I tend to make things...
Paragon shirt and Cerberus Normandy SR2 hoodie for my partner, Renegade shirt for me 😊
I finally played through “Dredge” and had a blast doing so!
I bought a new vacuum and immediately fell into love with it, so much so that I printed a whole bunch of holders for its adapters 😂 Peak adulting ^^
For the record, my new cordless vacuum arrived early last week and I'm really in love with that thing 😅
And after printing some holders yesterday and today, I now have it hanging in the built-in closet with all the adapters right next to it, ready to go every second 👍😀
I started on my journey to reduce my footprint on US clouds:
- I switched from Google Drive to a NextCloud instance hosted at Hetzner in a german data center
- After adding some more storage to my NAS I migrated all my pictures from Google Photos to a self-hosted immich server
- I switched my homelab’s backup approach from Synology’s proprietary stuff to Borg/borgmatic
I started playing “Starforged” and for journaling my adventures built myself a traveler’s notebook.
Currently learning how to play #Starforged and as I apparently enjoy the journaling part of it I just built myself a traveler's notebook 😊 Apart from two notebook inserts, this also has an insert for holding my character sheet and my assets, plus a move cheat sheet.
#making #leatherwork #solo_rpg #ttrpg
This in turn led to me starting a Bullet Journal in an A6 sized self crafted traveler’s notebook, and that’s been used daily since. I’ve been meaning to write a post about that, I really need to do this asap…
After really enjoying using the traveler's notebook I built for #solorpg use recently*, I've just now built a smaller version for regular note taking. While I'm a huge fan of @obsidian, not everything needs to be digital and I want to try some analog brainstorming and possibly journaling again.
* see https://chaos.social/@foosel/114191126595846444
On Easter my partner surprised me with a self-designed Lego Brickheads kit of us, which I had a blast building together with him.
I finally bound a book again, creating my first ever paperback!
I haven't bound a book in a while but wanted to turn my copy of The Perilous Void into something physical for use on my #Starforged adventure. Originally I planned to go with ring binding, but the printout didn't leave enough space for that so instead I went for a double fan bound paperback. Not perfect, but I'm still quite proud of it 😊
I upgraded my Framework 13 Intel 11th gen to a new AMD Ryzen AI 300 mainboard. It’s my daily driver that I use for basically everything, and so I also put all the RAM in there that it supported: 96GB, which back then cost me 180€. Given the RAM prices now (the same kit now is getting sold for 900€), I am incredibly happy about this foresight 😬
During an evening walk through my partner’s home town with him I made an incredible find in a “book closet”: A book about home computers from the mid 1980s.
Auf dem Abendspaziergang gerade dieses Kleinod in einem Bücherschrank gefunden und ich bin hin und weg. Das hätte ich gerne als Kind gehabt! Geht richtig tief in den Erklärungen und ist finde ich sehr schön aufbereitet. Ich bin gerade total glücklich über diesen Schatz und werde es in Ehren halten!
Und ich glaub ich gehe Mal auf die Jagd nach den anderen Teilen 😅
Ich hab noch keine Jahreszahl gefunden, aber die PLZ des Verlags ist noch vierstellig, also wohl vor 1993.
*edit* Wohl ~1985 😀
The rest of the evening was spent reading through it quite excited, and hunting down some other ones from the series on ebay 😂
I went to PyCon Italia - my first conference since the start of the pandemic - and not only went climbing with some fellow Pythonistas but also met Jacopo, who’s been helping me a lot with OctoPrint’s security!
For the past few days at @pycon I got to hang out with Jacopo Tediosi, who has helped me a lot in improving OctoPrint's security over the past year. It's always great when something like this happens!
I’ve already got my ticket for PyCon Italia 2026 😊
The refactoring work on OctoPrint since late 2024 finally paid out and I was able to print from the in progress Moonraker Connector Plugin for the first time.
Have been spending the week so far working on a plugin for #OctoPrint's new comm layer that will be part of 1.12.0 & as of earlier today I'm able to print on Moonraker enabled Klipper based printers😁
This went faster than expected thanks to all that refactoring that I started shortly before x-mas, and I'm incredibly happy that the architecture approach I had worked so well & actually makes adding support for a different connection type this easy!
Plenty of bugs to fix ofc, but it's ALIVE!
I went to EuroPython in Prague again, and this time even gave a talk! Of course, support plushy Timothy was there too 😊
In August I went to WHY2025 - my first camp in the Netherlands since 2009. We took the Datenzwerge with us of course and deployed all 10 of them across the camp grounds. It was some very intense but awesome days!
Some pictures from #why2025 ...
While at WHY I met Erika Heidi whom I so far only had known virtually through GitHub Stars. We nerded out SO MUCH about tech, bouldering and 3d printing, it was a ton of fun :D
For my partner’s birthday, I created yet another custom shirt utilizing the vinyl cutter and some HTV, this time with a logo from Dead Space. The design was based on in-game graphics, and weeding it was a bit of a nightmare 😂
I also got my partner an OLED Steamdeck for his birthday, and therefore also had to create new custom buttons. While at that, I also finally created some green ones for myself, and also created a whole new mold for the digi pad. Now my Steamdeck is also nicely customized 😊
Finished my custom buttons and d-pad and put them into my #SteamDeck 😊
Had to sand the d-pad on the center spike as otherwise it didn't work well, but I think now things are fine. Almost ran out on the rub-on letters too, my last X is now on there 😅 I'm thinking about getting a custom decal sheet made.
During this time, I also played through my personal Game of the Year, “The Drifter”. That also spawned a whole Point-and-Click-Adventure phase for me again 😂
Over the course of October I took part in another month long daily art challenge, “Cosytober”. I once again painted 31 pixelart pictures, this time limiting myself to 64x64px and the ENDESGA77 palette.
And that's a wrap on #cosytober2025 for me!
I'm very proud that despite everything I managed to do one every single day throughout this month! And I'm also very happy with the drawings, I think I improved a lot, and am really enjoying doing pixelart!
Like last year, I compiled all of the drawings of the month into a wallpaper and you can find that below.
Do you have any personal favourites? I'd love to know!
cc @RosieSoCosy
I also started taking part in the Pixelart Dailies during October and kept that going well into November, when I ran out of energy.
During Cosytober I also got myself a used Surface Go 2 tablet off of ebay and turned it into a pen enabled Linux based tablet, perfect for working on pixelart from the couch 😁
I've been back to Linux on the desktop for several years now. For the longest time I was wondering how Linux on a tablet would work. So say Hi to this Surface Go 2 that I bought used on eBay for cheap and liberated from the Windows 10 that it came with. 😬 #EndOf10
It now runs #Bluefin, and pretty much everything worked out of the box. The only a tad annoying thing is entering my password via the touchscreen. Amazing tablet for #Aseprite! 😊
More detailed blog post when I'm back on my feet 🤧
And yes, I know, I still owe this blog post 🙈
In early December this year’s hotsauce finally got finished and labeled. The chillies were planted in February and the fruits harvested in early October. As always, it was a project that was in progress throughout most of the year!
May I present? The result of our #ProjectHotsauce2025: Firestarter 😁
We continue our run of naming the yearly sauce after a song 😉
Also in early December, I fell completely in love with the game “Mars First Logistics”, which I can only recommend if you are into Lego Technic.
Choooo choooooo!
And finally, shortly before Christmas I tried my hand at making Vanillekipferl for the first time, and greatly succeeded!
I also tried my hands at Vanille Kipferl for the first time in my life!
And that’s a wrap on 2025 I think! I probably once more missed some fun stuff or awesome stuff I did or experienced, but reading through all of that written down here it feels like less of a crappy year already 😬
Like last year, this list was compiled with the help of my Mastodon account and my picture gallery 😄 I’ll see that I do one of these again in a year’s time. For now I wish you a happy and safe 2026!