It’s the last full week of the year! (Yes, I know, next week is 50/50… I will probably start my week numbering over for 2026 next week though.)
Sunday afternoon, after posting my weekly update, I headed home to visit family for the holidays.
Sunday evening I gave my sister one of her gifts: a cold brew coffee maker, which we promptly had to try. Spoiler alert: she loved it. 🎉
Monday and Tuesday I worked remotely for a few hours in the mornings, and otherwise spent time with family.
Monday evening we made pizzas for dinner, which turned out spectacularly!
Wednesday was my first full day of vacation. I spent time with family during the day, and in the evening we went to the Christmas Eve service/children’s performance at the church I grew up in.
And on Thursday… Christmas! We always go to Christmas Day service at church to start the day, then have lunch with family, and open presents. And this year was the same!
Thursday afternoon my sister and I made rum cake, which turned out surprisingly well. My dad even enjoyed it, and he’s normally not a cake person!
Friday was round two of Christmas food for us. We had planned on doing a turkey on Friday (taking after mom’s side of the family), which gave us more time for prep, and ham and scalloped potatoes on Thursday, which was easy to prepare and a traditional meal on my dad’s side of the family.
Saturday was my parent’s 39th anniversary! I wished them a happy anniversary early, then went to my sister’s office to help with a computer backup (yes, I’m sometimes family IT, but I don’t mind - it’s interesting as long as it’s in small to moderate-sized doses).
Saturday afternoon, my sister and I tried our hands at making crème brûlée, which turned out shockingly well. Unfortunately… I forgot to take a picture to share!
Saturday evening we’d planned to go out for dinner, but my mom wasn’t feeling well, so we ended up ordering in instead. I got pizza, and for dessert, Buckeye Cheesecake 😋
And once again, we’re to Sunday! Sunday morning started with Divine Service, followed by lunch with family, and then spending some time wrapping up anything else I wanted to do before returning home (and writing this blog post!).
I delayed posting this until this evening, so I could add a picture from dinner: Apple Strudel. Thanks mom!
Potpourri
On Christmas Eve I ran across a post on rats in the toilet from One Foot Tsunami. Weird, but kind of amusing.
Christmas Eve also saw a (very infrequent) post from Linus Torvalds on GPLv2. I don’t follow him as closely as I once did, but seeing his thoughts on a legal ruling was interesting.
I also saw this fun thread on BlueSky (well, technically reposted on Mastodon, but 🤷♂️) of Christmas movie posters, but with Muppets.
On Saturday, I ran across a video from MKBHD showing the scale of transistors on modern electronics, which was interesting enough that I had to share. As someone who works with MCUs/MPUs, I have a general idea of just how impressive the scale of modern tech is, but seeing it in video form that is easy to understand was super useful.
I also saw an opinion post on The Register (via Slashdot) on how memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat. While I don’t think that hyper-focusing on memory efficiency is the right tradeoff to make all the time, it is true (as the author noted) that memory usage seems to have been steadily climbing for years, and it would be worth it for software developers to examine if there are some easy ways to reduce their memory footprint. I don’t focus on software development as much as I once did, but many others at work do spend time every year making sure our products function well, and one aspect is managing memory in a constrained system. Viewing desktop platforms as a constrained system from a memory standpoint might be worthwhile. 🙂
And finally… PhotosExport. I haven’t used this yet, but I frequently think about what I would do if I wanted to leave the Apple Photos ecosystem, as I’ve put a substantial amoutn of effort into metadata there. This looks like a handy tool if I ever need to make a full backup/export of my library.
