Projects for 2022

content/blog/2022-01-04-projects-for-2022.gmi

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+---
+title: "Projects for 2022"
+---
+
+I'm not a fan of new years resolutions, but now is as good a time as any to
+enumerate some existing projects I'd like to devote a bit more time to this
+year, along with some green-field stuff and body projects. It's not all
+software!
+
+## Existing projects
+
+### Ordoor
+
+=> https://code.ur.gs/lupine/ordoor Gitea project
+
+This is my fun 2D game project. All the assets from a 1998 game are just sat
+there, waiting for me to decode them and write a game engine that can use them
+to replicate one of my favourite retro games. I've made considerable progress
+with the assets, and had started piecing gameplay together:
+
+=> /img/ordoor-main-menu.gif GIF showing current state
+
+The project stalled because I ran into some issues with my (hand-written) UI
+library - in particular, clicks weren't captured by the topmost widget, but
+propagated through it to underlying layers as well. This convinced me that I
+needed a more featureful game engine than Ebiten, which morphed into a desire to
+use Amethyst, which morphed into waiting for the Legion ECS rewrite of that to
+complete. That culminated in Amethyst being abandoned by its developers, so it's
+back to the drawing board on a way forward.
+
+=> https://ebiten.org Ebiten
+=> https://amethyst.rs Amethyst
+=> https://amethyst.rs/posts/amethyst--starting-fresh Amethyst abandoned
+
+Through an email from Brazil, I learned that the Chaos Gate game engine - with
+many customisations - actually serves four different games, and I got somewhat
+distracted by trying to get it to load the assets for those as well. Honestly,
+decoding the assets is the most fun part for me. The gameplay bit is fiddly!
+
+I rate my chances of making some progress on this project quite highly; I've
+left it at a fun point and I've had long periods of inactivity on it before and
+always found it in me to return. I might abandon the rewrite idea and just try
+to fix the immediate problem by tweaking the horrendous UI library.
+
+### Purple Plugin Delta
+
+=> https://code.ur.gs/lupine/purple-plugin-delta
+
+I use Delta Chat as my preferred messenger. It's IM over email, and although
+that sounds ridiculous, it works really well. When both sender and recipient
+have control over their own email servers, the security characteristics are also
+really good.
+
+The official desktop client is an Electron application, which I'm not a fan of,
+so I've spent some time working on various alternatives to that. My settled
+approach is a libpurple plugin, which allows Pidgin (and several other
+messengers, including Chatty in Phosh) to send and receive messages. Support for
+multiple clients on the same account is very well-advanced, so this leads to a
+great experience where I don't need to use my phone keyboard to chat with
+friends when I'm sat in front of my laptop.
+
+This one is stalled on a Rust rewrite. You might think a trend is forming here,
+but the rewrite in this case was more or less forced on me - my plugin is a very
+thin wrapper around the deltachat core library, which was rewritten in Rust
+recently. It stil has C bindings, but using them introduces all sorts of
+impedence mismatches, and I'd really rather be writing Rust than C, any day of
+the week.
+
+For a long time, the OpenSSL license meant that distributing the plugin broke
+the purple license. However, with the advent of OpenSSL 3, this is no longer
+true; by default, the deltachat build embeds a version and the last bit of work
+I did on this in the Rust branch was to get it to embed OpenSSL 3. Switching to
+Rust means I can embed that, along with deltachat itself, into my purple plugin,
+rather than pidgin needing to find both the deltachat .so and the plugin .so and
+just hoping that a non-violating OpenSSL was used in the deltachat build.
+
+Chances of progress here are also pretty good - I'm using the C version of this
+plugin every day, and it has a lot of bugs and shortcomings that grate on me.
+
+=> https://delta.chat Delta Chat
+
+### Relocate back to Yorkshire
+
+This is already well-advanced, but is going to be something of a production - we
+have a baby, two animals, our important possessions, and ourselves, to move. The
+ferry is already booked - we're locked in for February - and the destination is
+sorted. We do have help getting the animals and some possessions down, but it
+still leaves a lot to work out in advance.
+
+Once we're moved, the place we're going to needs no DIY at all. I expect to
+enjoy that feeling for about a week before I get an urge to demolish something,
+but fortunately, my sister's house needs a fair bit of work, so I'll be heading
+pver there to sort that out. We do need to dispose of the Shetland house as part
+of this, as well.
+
+Absolutely a dead cert that this is happening. The only question is how painful
+it will be.
+
+### Parenting
+
+It's fair to say I'm a rank amateur at this. Right now, his needs are simple,
+but he's bound to get more complex as he ages. Language and mobility are key
+early learning goals, and I have to keep him clothed, fed, clean, and happy
+throughout.
+
+I get no choice in this one!
+
+## New projects
+
+### Stock ticker / Gemserv plugins
+
+In general, anytime I find myself obsessively refreshing a website, I feel like
+finding an alternative or frontend in Geminispace. This is something that I
+couldn't find.
+
+I've written a little about how I want to implement this one in a Gemserv issue;
+I could whip it up as a dedicated binary in very little time, but waiting for
+plugin support (or adding it myself) introduces a stall. Frankly, I'm just being
+lazy about deployment, but I think I'll stick with this approach if I find any
+time to work on this one.
+
+=> https://todo.sr.ht/~int80h/gemserv/9 Gemserv issue #9
+
+I rate my chances of picking this up as low, though. Designing the plugin
+architecture is a big chunk of work.
+
+### Gemini traffic statistics
+
+I'd quite like to know how much traffic my capsule gets. Gemserv is great and
+outputs logs that are pretty close to commonlog format, but I expect it's not
+*quite* close enough to use existing tools for the job.
+
+Rather than being a Gemserv plugin and picking up a stall as a result, this can
+simply be a daily cronjob that processes the log and writes the statistics
+somewhere.
+
+I'm a privacy-conscious person, but even I don't begrudge site admins the
+ability to see what level of traffic they're getting. Chances of working on this
+are reasonably high - it's a nice, low-effort project, and well-bounded.
+
+### Masters degree
+
+I got my undergraduate degree in 2008, and was accepted onto a masters course,
+but was unable to actually take up the place due to impending homelessness -
+and unlike previous times where this threatened, there wasn't a save available.
+My only option was to decline the MSc and enter the world of work. I still
+want a postgraduate qualification, though.
+
+My degree was biology; I failed to enter that field in 2008, so fell back on my
+hobby of linux administration and software development to get an entry-level job
+at a local ISP. I've never wanted to do software or computers in an academic
+sense, though. I'm also far too rusty in biological stuff to consider jumping on
+an MSc in that field, with the possible exception of a computational biology
+topic - but to me, that's just software.
+
+Instead, I went off-piste last year, and signed up to an MSc in Green Building
+with the Centre for Alternative Technology. I pushed back my entry by a year
+when it transpired we were getting a child, so I'm now due to take up a place in
+September 2022.
+
+=> https://cat.org.uk/courses-and-training/graduate-school/courses/green-building/ MSc Green Building
+=> https://cat.org.uk/
+
+I'd love to build my own sustainable house sometime, in true Grand Designs / Ben
+Fogle's New Lives In The Wild fashion, and I view this as a concrete (or straw
+bale?) step in the right direction.
+
+I already have the place reserved for this, so my chances of doing it are high,
+but not guaranteed - if parenting is too difficult, I may have to give it a
+miss.
+
+CAT also do a range of short courses, and I'm hopeful I can take on at least one
+practical one before the MSc begins; the academic side of it doesn't worry me
+too much, but I'm definitely under-educated in construction generally!
+
+### Trip to Cuba
+
+I've been talking about this one with a couple of comrades since before the
+pandemic. 2022 feels like it might be my best opportunity in the next decade.
+
+The Cuba Solidarity Campaign organises trips that could be described as touring
+the revolution, handled through a company called Havanatour UK. 
+
+=> https://cuba-solidarity.org.uk/tours/ Cuba Solidarity Campaign tours
+=> https://www.havanatour.co.uk/ Havanatour UK
+
+I've done a lot of reading about Cuba, and spent some time chatting and hanging
+out with Cubans - both in favour of, and against, the revolution - and seeing
+it for myself has been a priority for a few years now. It will also make for a
+very nice holiday on its own terms! I love to dance salsa, hot beaches are a
+huge win, and I'd love to go see the Escambray mountains where my coffee is
+grown.
+
+=> https://www.cubadirecto.com/cuba-coffee/exotico-green-cuban-coffee-beans Cuba Directo
+
+One can do all those things in less-controversial places, but a trip to Cuba
+will help me to learn more about the reality there. I'm also very interested in
+Cuban agriculture and the organopónico system - I've been involved in some
+organic growing in the UK with Transition Turriefield, up here in Shetland, and
+it would be very interesting to compare approaches and learn some lessons.
+
+=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organop%C3%B3nicos Organopónicos
+=> https://www.turriefieldveg.co.uk/ Transition Turriefield
+
+Of course, life in Cuba is hard, and it won't be a traditional tourist
+experience, no matter how hard the operators try. I'm hopeful that I can
+contribute more than I take away while I'm there, but if nothing else, people
+will finally stop asking me, triumphantly, "if you love Cuba so much, why don't
+you go?"
+
+I'll rate this one medium. A lot depends on the continuing pandemic, after all.
+
+### Español
+
+He estado aprendiendo español hace dos años - principalmente en linea, aunque
+unos clases antes del pandemico. Quiero continuar en 2022 y leer y escribir más en
+español también. ¿Tal vez unos articulos en español aquí?
+
+## Body projects
+
+### Losing weight
+
+This one's always at the back of my mind. I'm fat, and I'd rather not be. I've
+had success addressing this in the past with running, dancing, cycling, and
+roller skating; for one reason or another, I've not managed to get any of those
+going while in Shetland. A diet-only approach doesn't work well for me; I grew
+up in a starvation environment, and my input controls are not good.
+
+This is another one for "once I'm back in Yorkshire". Chances of making progress
+are probably in the medium-low range also.
+
+### Laser eye surgery
+
+This one's been on my radar for years. I'm short-sighted and astigmatic. Without
+glasses or contact lenses, I just can't function at all right now, which is not
+a state I enjoy being in.
+
+Several needle-free techniques appear to be available these days - no need for
+injected anaesthetic - and I now have the money to do this without feeling
+guilty, so as soon as I'm relocated to Yorkshire I'll be looking into this. It's
+pretty much a dead cert, as long as my prescription is amenable to the process -
+I just have to decide between a bunch of ridiculously named variants of LASIK,
+and find a surgery that isn't going to blind me.
+
+Real shame it's not available on the NHS.