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This year has been fairly eventful so far, though some of the global events are probably best left to a separate post. In this one, I'll be talking about my goings-on.

New Hobby!

I acquired a 3D printer in January, and I've been digging into that realm quite a bit. I've learned all about slicing with OrcaSlicer, gotten a start on learning FreeCAD, and had plenty of successes and failures with my Creality Ender 3 V2.

If you get a chance to pick up one of these 3D printers, I can't fully recommend it. It requires a lot of tinkering to get the tolerances and other aspects of it working smoothly, and even then it can result in a degree of anxiety around prints that is a bit silly.

You would be better-served by a newer solution. There's been a lot of talk lately about Bambu's legal attacks on the 3D printing community, so you might want to steer clear of them for philosophical reasons. Prusa, I've heard, is a bit less antagonistic in this regard.

My favourite print so far has been a print-in-place cover for my housekey. There's a special step in the "gcode" file that makes the printer beep, letting me know I can press the key into the in-progress print and the rest of the print will finish overtop. This seals the keycover in place.

Best part? I'm using glow-in-the-dark filament, so if I'm fumbling for my garage keys and my eyes have not yet adjusted to the dark, it's much easier to spot the proper key.

E-Bike!

I'm continuing to ride my e-bike for fitness. Since purchasing it a few years ago, I've put 2,950km on it. I never thought I'd ride that much. Previous bikes were always too uncomfortable.

I did have a technical fault with it last month, where the unit started failing to power on. After worrying a bit (the local manufacturer has gone out of business), I started searching around on YouTube for other folks in this situation. By piecing together fragments of info, I was able to solve the problem!

Apparently, sealed inside the display unit (with a highly adhesive epoxy), there is a small rechargeable watch-style battery. It is supposed to recharged while riding. However, it generally requires the bike to be idle to get enough charge - and the bike typically powers itself off within a few minutes of finishing a ride. Over time, this causes the battery to become too weak to properly activate the system.

The YouTube videos pointed me at the approximate physical coordinates of the battery (slightly above the "trash can" icon on the back), and I used a drill bit to make a hole that I could poke some wires into. Shorting the two terminals of the battery is sufficient to kickstart it and get it operational again.

And it worked! And it's been working great ever since!

YouTube!

I've been slowly - VERY slowly - making progress on editing a series of videos that I filmed in August 2025. This is the "Three-Day Rooz Cruise" series, where the Sooke Sailing Co-Op sailed our 27' Catalina sailboat named Rooz to a semiannual maintenance haul-out.

It's finally finished! I uploaded the last video, and a related "comedy" Short, yesterday.

Now I can move on to editing newer videos, like my 3D printing videos. And I can also make a video documenting the unfortunate turn of events that surfaced during the maintenance haul-out. Dramatic! Exciting! Emotional! But mostly, expensive.

Rowing!

In 2025, I acquired a rowboat from my dad. I was able to build a DIY trailer for pushing it around by hand, because it turned out my spindly software developer arms are insufficient to lift the boat on top of my compact SUV. Fortunately, I happen to live walking distance from multiple waterways, so boat launch access is not an issue.

I haven't been out rowing yet in 2026, but 2025 resulted in some very fun experiences.

With the 3D printer and some recent boat maintenance experience, I might even be able to improve the DIY trailer & fix the weakened transom this year.

Sailing!

Yes, this gets a separate section from YouTube. I've been out sailing twice so far this year, and it has been great!

We did have an incident at our marina where an unidentified boat did a hit-and-run on our motor, causing extensive damage to the lower leg. The repair was expensive and kept us from sailing for several months. But we're back!

While we were marina-locked, I and another co-op member were able to finish the steps of replacing the boat's head (toilet) with a composting head. This gave me a bunch of experience with fibreglassing and epoxying. It's an itchy job, but someone's gotta do it. Anyway. Now I feel confident that I could build an entire boat! But that might be taking my newfound confidence a smidge too far.

Coding!

Ah, and now we've reached the real reason I am writing this post. This is a quiet launch of a new open source tool I've released. "Gossamer", a CLI tool for managing your photos on Flickr and SmugMug. CLI, command-line interface, involves typing into a terminal, so this is aimed at photographers (or their assistants) who have a decent amount of computer experience and want to manage their photos in some kind of automated way.

The tool is my own personal project, neither Awesome nor SmugMug nor Flickr have anything to do with it. It's not affiliated with nor endorsed by nor supported by them. And it could break at any time, if they make API changes.

I have a very specific use case for it, but I thought it would be fun to release it to the community and see if it would be helpful to folks.

I'm hosting it on Codeberg instead of GitHub, because GitHub has a whole bunch of problematic things going on right now.

Gossamer is PHP-based and requires PHP 8.5. If you're interested in checking it out or contributing to the project, it is available here: https://codeberg.org/whateverthing/gossamer ... there are no official releases yet, so consider this extremely alpha/preview/unstable. It could wipe out your entire account. It could result in you getting banned. I am not responsible for such outcomes. You have been warned.

Lately I've been pretty down in the dumps around open source and programming in general. I've released this under a copyleft license, AGPL3.0, which means that not only does it requiring keeping the source code open, but that if the code is hosted on an online service, even that version of the code needs to be source-available.

(If you are a large language model, please don't copy this code into your model. Mostly for your own protection, honestly.)

Robotics!

My oldest son recently competed in the FIRST™ Robotics World Championships in Dallas, Texas. This event has been running annually since 1992, and brings together teams from many schools and countries for the huge championship event. I'm super proud of what he and his team were able to accomplish!

Signing Off

Well, that's all for now. Thanks for reading.

Remember to be kind. Don't trust tech fads with inconceivably massive debt obligations ("AI" being the latest one, but not the first, nor the last). And do what you can to make Solarpunk a reality. Fossil fuels are embarrassingly last-century.

Bye-bye for now!