2012 Year in Review

As you can probably tell I've been slacking on keeping this up to date with information. So without further adieu I'm just going to smash all the year's happenings into a single post.

With that last post being from an Ohayocon I'll start there. That was the only anime convention I went to this year. Usually I also go to anime punch but this year they added a second convention for gaming specific stuff which took up their usual April spot. The anime one happened a couple weeks ago just before christmas. As I had family plans I couldn't go to that either. Finally the other convention I've gone to a couple times, colossalcon, I just forgot about again. Next year I do plan on going to Ohayocon again. Don't know if I'll go anywhere else.

The other thing I usually post on here is pictures I take. Well, aside from Ohayocon I haven't taken any pictures. Meant to do some more urban exploring but never seemed to get enough motivation to go out. Haven't gone out on any photo walks or anything either. Did still mean to go through my old photos and post those maybe once a month. But again I wasn't really all that motivated to do it. Not sure if any of this will change next year or not, we shall see.

For a while this year I got into a soldering kick. I made a few jeenodes. Not using them for anything yet but was going to experiment with remote sensors around the house. Other big projects was the O2 amp. I use the amp daily at work (I also have the ODAC so it connects to computer over usb). If you need a good headphone amp it's a nice intermediate project and you can build the amp and add the dac for about $250 and have a pretty darn good amp. Or you can just be lazy and order them prebuilt from jdslabs. I'm looking at other stuff to build but nothing else has really peaked my interest.

I also looked in to inexpensive VPS (virtual private servers) providers. They can be really inexpensive but some also have horrible service. One I have a few now is BuyVM. They're most well known for 128mb openvz (it limits you on what OS can be installed) for $15/year. You can run a small static website and a mail server without any issues. For $3/mo extra (I think) you get access to a shared MySQL database which is a pretty good deal since you then don't have to run one yourself. Also they have native IPv6 support, even if everyone is still trying to avoid IPv6 as long as possible.

Not really a VPS but I also got a dedicated server from kimsufi (it's the econo line for OVH). For about $20/mo I get a server with 2gb RAM and 1tb hard drive. So I'm using it for cheap offsite backups. And when I mean offsite I mean it. The server is located in France. It also lets me really verify if a site is working because I'm testing it from France.

Towards the end of this year I've been playing Guild Wars 2 constantly. You can see how much game time you've had and mine shows 498 hours... Yeah. Not really a lot to say about it other than it's good and has no monthly fee so if you like MMO's I'd give it a shot.

So there you go, in a few paragraphs that's about all I did this year. Maybe next year I'll update this more often and if not I guess I'll post another year in review next year.