After some months of relatively high mileage running my estimated Vo2Max has increased to 55ml/min/kg, a value I have never achieved previously in my whole life. Despite a few setbacks due to some short periods of minor illness I managed to stay in peak shape. As for coding I looked into Scala and brushed up my functional programming knowledge a bit. Added e-mail forwarding and stock value tracking to my telegram bot, which made several apps on my phone superfluous. Spent quite a substantial amount of time on studying and playing chess, then reached yet another plateau. Inflation and economy in Austria still not rosy. Europe is currently experiencing heat waves, not a good sign for coming years. My daughter will start a new school in September. She managed to finish her last four years with the best grades only making her dad proud.
Today the website received a little overhaul. Among other things I added this blog page. So far the contact form has proven its stability as I received a lot of spam in the last couple of months but no real inquiries. Turns out that forms on the web are still an attractive target for spam bots. I'm not trying to protect myself from spam through any CAPTCHAs on here as this never ending arms race is a waste of time. Mail filters usually perform this duty much better.
Through decent investing in the stock market I managed to keep myself afloat. Frugal and healthy eating choices have saved me tons of money and also helped me lose the 8 kilos I gained around Christmas time in 2023. The last months were the best of my life. I reached new peak fitness levels. Last autumn I achieved 260W on a 20 minutes FTP cycling test. My current Vo2Max is around 52 ml/min/kg (Garmin guesstimate). I'll hopefully be able to run a full marathon soon. Last weekend I already finished a 24 km training run.
The Fachkräftemangel in Austria (German for skilled worker shortage) doesn't seem to be as bad as they say on the news. IMHO it is basically a hoax repeated by the media to keep employees poor and the upper class rich. I would be readily available for software projects basically any minute, using any toolset.
As many probably expected 2024 will be the year when our country is going through a mild recession. Back in 2022 when I quit my corporate job the economy was already on its way downhill. Inflation is still way too high compared to other countries in the European Union.
Another hardware project: I built a Sudoku console, including joystick and an E-Paper display. Right click video above to start playing. The most annoying part of the display is the poor refresh rate. Even using partial refresh, which took some time to implement the refresh time is now bearable. The power consumption of the device is almost non-existent. My father didn't seem to enjoy his Birthday present later in the month as the fonts are too small for him to read. Nevertheless it was extremely fun building and programming this device.
As my predictions for the economy are all bearish I looked into options trading or rather put options warrants, as they are commonly used in Europe. The only company stocks that are rising at the moment are driven by the AI hype, which in my opinion isn't going to last. Sure, there has been made a lot of progress with text, video and image processing but these algorithms can hardly be called intelligent. AGI is still way out of reach and probably will be my whole lifetime - Thank God.
Did a Gameboy original restoration. The repair kit was quite cheap, easy to use and also came with the necessary screw driver. Maybe I will also exchange the display some time in the future, as I couldn't get rid of the banding despite trying my best with the soldering iron across the display cable.
After finishing my swiping app I ventured into hardware design. Tinkering with an old Arduino set, which included a lot of sensors, at home, I decided to let JLCPCB manufacture my first hardware device. My plan was to design a USB dongle which would act as an intermediary between my keyboard and PC. I'm using the Dvorak layout for typing. Tired of constantly changing the default settings in Windows and other operating systems, I decided it was time for a hardware solution. It proved to be quite simple to design a PCB in easyEDA including two USB jacks and a microcontroller flashed with custom firmware, which enables me to translate keystrokes in realtime. The HID standard makes it possible, plus the microcontroller also has basically unlimited macro capabilities, which I will look into in the future. Maybe I will also design my own custom keyboard some day. I looked into 3D printing and product design because my chip would also need a nice case. This lead to me studying FreeCad and KiCad. It is truly amazing what a single person with a little knowledge in electrical engineering and computer science can produce in a couple of weeks, with just internet access, a little money and simple tools.
In terms of digital media production and publishing books I didn't finish any more projects so far in 2023. I have been mastering DaVinci Resolve for the last couple of years. I started writing a book on Life Long Software Engineering, but couldn't find enough motivation to finish it so far. My book sales on Amazon have been decreasing steadily over the last months. Apart from the AI hype, there is little to no progress in computing / computer science. Of course GPUs and chips are getting faster still, but fundamentally things haven't changed. The race to the cloud has ended and when everybody and their mother will have implemented a GPT clone for some sort of purpose, a new hype topic will have to be found.
Spent some time learning to program with Android Studio. The emulator is quite decent and deploying to my old Huawei P30 phone was also a piece of cake. I wrote a Tinder clone from scratch including the back end - see screen recording video above. Everything was production ready but I decided against publishing it on the Playstore, as Google is changing its requirements for apps weekly and I would soon become their slave. Meanwhile earning very little from the app and continuously needing to write new improved code to satisfy their never ending data privacy rules and terms of service additions. I wanted to avoid even the slightest risk of law suits as the Match Group has basically patented any swipe based matching. On top of all of that I hate dating apps myself and another app for the same purpose, even if completely free would not save dating in 2024. Online dating basically died around 2016. The sole purpose of this project was the joy of programming across platforms using the latest and greatest technologies.
Recently spent some time studying tax laws and tax return forms. Running a business in Austria is actually very simple. Accounting is simple. Implemented an online form for PDF invoice generation for my company. No idea why some people waste hundreds of Euros on tax advisors (Steuerberater in German) and overpriced accounting / book keeping software. Still I have to admit: taxes are annoying, technical and tedious. I can understand anyone who doesn't want to invest his/her precious time in this topic.
Created a chess calendar with difficult/critical positions featuring my own online chess games.
Wrote some python scripts to generate the chess boards and then put together a Word document in open office.
The formatting wasn't as easy as expected, as I wanted all the pages to be turned 90 degrees.
Addendum: I sold quite a few on Amazon in the weeks after publishing it.
