# Year end 2023

It's hasn't been the best year and I don't feel that I have made much
progress. Below is a summary of what I feel have been the most
significant points of the year.


## Stuff

I managed to get rid of some, but nowhere near enough, of my hoard of
old computer parts and electronic relics via Ebay. Fortunately I
recovered more money than expected on some of the items.
Unfortunately I haven't gotten around to advertising the bigger
items, which I will make an effort to do in the new year.


## Computing 

There have been quite a few changes:

 * Migrated all my systems to OpenBSD
 * Migrated linux VPS and services from home to OpenBSD.amsterdam[1]
 * Migrated to a low power (16w) i386 atom PC[2] as my daily driver
 * Migrated from fibre broadband to 4G broadband[3]

Not running a computer 24/7 and switching off all the networking gear
every night has made a noticeable saving on electricity[4]. The
change from our previous broadband provider to the current 4G sim has
also saved us an additional 16.00 GBP a month since October.

I also made an attempt to further reduce my software footprint[5]
after switching to running OpenBSD on my daily driver.


## Phone

I had incorrectly assumed that PAYG was good value, as I only paid
for what I used when I used it and I rarely used it.
However, when I downloaded my card statements and did some awk maths
to add up what I'd spent on various things, the sum of the 10 GBP
phone top-ups was 80 GBP for the year. When you're pre-paying 10 GBP
here and there you never really think to add it up! The result is
that I've now changed network and will pay 2 GBP per month for 100
minutes, 100 texts and 750 MB data. 24 GBP per year is a bit
different to 80!


## Gardening

Tomatoes, lettuce, carrots and beetroot were a success. Unfortunately
half of the potato crop got some kind of blight and were unusable.


[1](gopher://gopher.icu/0/phlog/Computing/openbsd.amsterdam-vps.md)
[2](gopher://gopher.icu/0/phlog/Computing/Low-power-computing.md)
[3](gopher://gopher.icu/0/phlog/Computing/4G-Challenge.md)
[4](gopher://gopher.icu/I/phlog/energy/energy_usage.png)
[5](gopher://gopher.icu/0/phlog/Computing/Do-more-with-less.md)