2025 Roundup

It's the end of the year again, and time for another "year in review" post! (Just a quickie, to get it in before the end of the year - I'd intended to include a photo collage with this post, but don't have time + energy to put that together)

 

Highlights:
* First trip to Canada  (Vancouver + Okanagan Valley)
* Getting promoted to Principal Software Engineer + Getting to apply a release to the live system
* Staying overnight at Tekapo for the first time + capturing a lunar eclipse there
* Creating my "MediaSlurper" tool for automating backing up Camera + Phone data (which I've since been using *heavily*, multiple times a day)
* Formally wrote up a spec for "WhioDoc"
* Celebrating Dad's 70th birthday
* Getting my pretty ball dahlia
* Switching to new standing desk setup  (+ including a proper "Luxo" style lamp)
* Seeing one of RNZAF's retiring C-130H Hercules doing a short-field landing at the Airforce Museum in Wigram (i.e. its new permanent home)
* 1st full year living with a heatpump in my room! 

 

Canada Highlights:
* Treating Mum + Dad to High Tea at Empress Hotel
* A&W
* Victoria Tour day
* Capturing pair of Osprey at Vaseux Lake
* Spotted Lake
* Meeting relatives + family friends for the first time - Most notably, meeting a frail elderly relative who had a bad fall + subsequently passed away a week after our visit (!), along with getting to see see some others again for the first time since covid / or for first time in 30 years.

 

Challenges:
* Dad getting hospitalised + being out of action for ~2 months with a badly infected leg (+ subsequent slow recovery) - To say the least, it was a highly stressful, scary, and very sobering experience. I'm very thankful that we are all still able to celebrate the end of the year together!
* Disruptive Uncle staying with us for a month - Ugh... yeah, let's not mention this again. An even more stressful experience, but for different reasons...
* Losing my old desktop workstation to PSU failure (but *still* haven't managed to get around to fixing it)

MediaSlurper - December Updates

Merry Christmas!  It has been years since I've posted stuff here on Christmas Day, but since this is a personal project, this doesn't really count as "work-stuff" (and besides, I haven't been feeling that burned out this year by this time that I need a complete break)

This month, I added a bunch of quality-of-life tweaks to MediaSlurper to address a few issues I'd been increasingly running into, and couldn't delay addressing any more. Oh, and added a cute-as seasonal variant of the mascot, in homage to the VLC icon (which I also adore seeing at this time of year!)

Maybe one day I'll have everything generalised enough to release this tool for others to use too. But in the meantime, it's still only really for my own personal use... Expressions of interest may expedite when I consider making a public release possible...

Linux Migration Attempt 2 - Part 3 - Bare Metal Tests, Tangles with Secure Boot, and Rethinking Distro + Setup Choices

This update covers a whole bunch of milestones, including finally testing + getting a working LiveUSB Linux distro running on one of my desktop machines, and a whole bunch of new learnings about not only distro choices, but also the impact of different KDE Plasma versions, and also configurations that I like and/or install steps needed to get various distros ready to use. All in all - lots of interesting learnings since the last update!

Scott Jenson's Talk At Ubuntu Connect 25.10

Quick post that I'll probably expand upon in followup posts eventually, but this is one of the more inspiring talks I've heard in a long time! 

"Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? | Ubuntu Summit 25.10" -- Scott Jenson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTOjd_bOQ

It's been a while since I've been reminded of what got me into HCI research in the first place. *THIS* is the type of stuff that I love doing TBH. It's really refreshing hearing such a senior industry figure talking about trying to get innovation in these areas happening again.

 

Another interesting point:  The following interesting link from the end of the talk to some folk doing some very interesting stuff!

https://www.inkandswitch.com/

Ooh... now we're cooking! I've got a few project ideas that overlap quite heavily with some of these headlines on their landing page 🤓 

(The main challenge currently is just finding the time + energy to actually work on these things... not to mention that fundamentally, making the prototypes I want to make is currently constrained by the tools I want not being in place)

 

Late Night Birding Rabbit-Hole - Alternate Maori Names for Silvereyes

I was rearranging some files when I came across the pukupuku videos recently, and was reminded of the alternate Maori name for Silvereyes: "Pihipihi"

TBH, I've long disliked the standard one that textbooks often refer to (i.e. "Tauhou", as I've always found it hard to figure out the pronunciation of, and just didn't like the meaning either). Granted... tonight I have managed to narrow it down to sound like "Tau - Hor" (i.e. rhyming with, "Chow Hor" - i.e. fried thick rice noodles, such as "Beef Ho Fun" 😋)

But "Pihipihi" - well that I can certainly pronounce (and the name does have some links back to the sounds they sometimes make - e,g, when they hopping around the undergrowth, making contented vocalisations from all the feasting they're in the midst of... or maybe it's another way of expressing those rapid "fleeing triplet calls" - i.e. "cli cli cli" / "chie chie chie")

In addition, it turns out there are a bunch of *other* names too now that some tribes may have used. In particular, the ones that stood out to me are:
* 1) "Poporohe" - Yeah, that one sounds easy enough to remember + pronounce again
* 2) "Pikariahe" - Slightly less convenient, given the macron on the first i (which I won't be using)

* 3) "Whiorangi" - Given that I now have a code-documentation system named after the "Whio"   (blue-duck), calling them "blue-ducks of the sky" is a tempting idea!

I'll have to do some more research into all of these to double-check what's going on, but don't be surprised if I start adopting these names for various purposes going forwards  (e.g. for a photo editing + management tool being the most likely beneficiary!) 🤓