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The old year is now old and the new year is still — relatively — new. Which means it's time for me to look back at my old year's resolutions from 2024, review them, admit my failings and then, as if lacking any form of self-awareness, make resolutions that I think I might keep in 2025.

This being the fifth instalment you know the drill and I'll try to keep things brief. So let's get straight to my list from 2024.
   

1. Start working through "Information Theory: A Tutorial Introduction" by James V. Stone.
2. Do something practical in Rust.
3. Make twelve incremental ecological improvements to my life.
4. Go to at least three events or exhibitions at the British Library.

Starting from the top, I'm happy and a little astonished to say that I did start working through James Stone's introduction to Information Theory. Working together with a couple of friends, we got through to Section 2.3. The book has nine chapters in total so that really is only just the start. But at least it is a start.

Second we have my resolution to do something practical in Rust. I've continued attending and following the Rust reading group at work, but I admit that I've yet to find a practical outlet for the skills I've been learning. This falls entirely down to lack of motivation. If I really wanted to I could have found something, but the fact is it's much easier to work in a language I'm already proficient in. I don't plan to move it to my 2025 resolutions — there's no point in forcing it — but I'll keep it as a general goal. Doing this would offer real personal benefit.

Third is my desire to make twelve incremental ecological improvements to my life. The idea was to try to find roughly one per month. In practice and, somewhat to my surprise, I came within touching distance of achieving this. Many of the improvements were small, but that was the point: continual small improvements that could accumulate to become bigger aggregate improvements over time. I tried to keep track through the year:

1. I planted our family Christmas tree from last year and miraculously it's still apparently healthy in the garden twelve months on.
2. Joanna and I looked seriously into buying a new car, but decided that it would be better to keep our existing, 15 year old, car instead.
3. I avoided using the dishwasher for 12 months. I've replaced it with washing up by hand, being careful to keep water usage low enough to be more efficient than the dishwasher would be.
4. When I take a shower I now intentionally reduce the heat. Previously I always showered with the maximum, now I reduce it by quarter of a turn. It's a small win, but has the potential to be improved on in 2025 with an extra turn of the tap.
5. At the recommendation of a friend at work I'm now buying only certified shade grown coffee. Apparently this is much better for the environment.
6. This year I made special effort never to travel by plane. Given my previous years' failings I have plenty to make up for here. But I succeeded in making zero flights this year.
7. When choosing my new home server, low power usage was a primary requirement. The device I ended up with is fanless and averages around just 12 Watts.
8. I've also made a special effort to travel by train. Joanna will attest to this, as she's been very supportive when travelling together.
9. Between June and August I cycled to Cambridge and back for my work commute seven times out of a possible 13. So there's room for improvement, but still better than the five I managed in 2023.
10. Last January I offset my carbon output from 2023 with 10 Certified Emission Reductions.

As you can see, that's actually only 10 items. On top of this Joanna and I also made active moves to get solar panels installed and to switch our hob from gas to induction. These are still works-in-progress, but are also longer-term goals. So I think I can only claim this one as a partial success. On the positive side, I'm convinced it was only my commitment to this resolution that made me do some of these things, which makes me feel this process is worthwhile, even if I don't always succeed.

Finally, I committed to going to at least three events at the British Library. In this I succeeded, visiting the Fantasy: Realms of Imagination, Beyond the Baseline: 500 Years of Black British Music and Medieval Women: In Their Own Words exhibitions. Honestly, all three were fantastic; better even than I'd expected. So I'm glad I committed to this.

In total then for 2024 it's 2.83 out of four: a pretty good result in my world. So what's in store for 2025?
 
Here are my planned resolutions for the year ahead:

1. Prioritise Codeberg over GitHub.
2. Do something fun outside the house at least once per week.
3. Read at least one paper per week.

I've kept these descriptions brief so let me break them down a bit. I've never been a huge fan of GitHub. In its early years it was clean, focused and welcoming to open source projects even if it wasn't open source itself. More recently it's become bloated and messy. More seriously it's approach to AI data collection has become — in my opinion — actively hostile to open source.

Given all this, I'd love to move off GitHub for my personal projects. The obvious alternative right now seems to be Codeberg given its strong open-source and community credentials. So I'd really like to resolve to move all my projects there. Unfortunately moving existing projects to a different platform can be destructive (for example with loss of issues and open pull requests). I'm therefore resolving to start all new open source projects on either Codeberg or my self-hosted git server. I should also start moving existing projects, but that'll have to be on a best-effort basis.

Next up I'm resolving to do something recreational outside the house at least once per week. This might sound strange to a normal person, but I spend so much time inside and online that I can easily go an entire week without doing something recreational in the real world. Of course, I often leave the house for work, shopping or other non-recreational activities. But the plan here is to do something fun. It could be going to the cinema, visiting friends or just going for a walk in the local countryside. But it should be something. I've run this past Joanna and she's on board with this: it'll be a combined effort.

Finally I plan to read at last one research paper each week. This is an idea I stole from Dr Esther Plomp, a researcher I know through her contributions to The Turing Way. Dr Plomp committed to reading one paper a day but I've diluted this to one per week to suit my own lower standards. I'm also keeping my definition of a "research paper" pretty loose. If I end up reading a book chapter instead, that's fine.

So those are my three resolutions. I thought about including several others, but I think it's important to stay focused. Here are a few that didn't make the cut:

1. Complete "Information Theory: A Tutorial Introduction" by James V. Stone.
2. Complete all the exercises in Linear Algebra Done Right by Sheldon Axler.
3. Add Cambridge live bus info to an app.

I dropped these either because I expect I'll do them anyway, or because I suspect I have no chance. I'll leave it to you to decide which is which.

With my home server back up and running I feel in good shape for the year to come. So, roll on 2025! See you in twelve months with the results in Part VI.