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The 6th January is traditionally the day Christmas decorations are dismantled in the UK. In Finland it's the 13th January, partly because the Christmas lights are needed to counteract the shorter daylight hours and partly to avoid angering the Yulegoat. But I'm in the UK so this weekend Joanna and I took down our Christmas decorations.

In previous years we've always tried to get a Christmas tree with roots. Our success rate in keeping it alive until the next Christmas currently stands at zero percent.

This year I went out of my way to care for our Christmas tree, carefully keeping the soil in its pot moist with daily watering, avoiding bumps and bashes, not overburdening the branches with crazy decorative figurines.

It's definitely fared better than any of our previous trees and today I dug a hole in the back garden and planted it solidly.

Here are the three stages of its life I've so far been involved with, from left-to-right: sitting in our living room right after we introduced it; with decorations ready for Christmas; and now transplanted to our back garden.
 

I'm no gardener and I don't rate its chances highly, but I'd love it to survive. Not only would it be wonderful to have a Norwegian Spruce living in our garden, but it would also feel like a real achievement to have a multi-year Christmas tree. I'm also counting this as one of the ecological acts needed to fulfil my New Year's Resolutions.

I'll report back later in the year on how the tree is doing. It feels like its success is now very much down to weather, nature and its will to survive. Maybe that's not the right way to look at these things, but that's why I'm not a gardener.

For the last four years I've been offsetting my carbon emissions. In the long run I accept that offsetting isn't a sustainable way to address the climate crisis, but until my CO₂ output reaches zero I still think it's better to offset than to not. Apart from attempting to address the balance of my impact on the world it also offers two other benefits.

First there's the personal financial cost I incur from having to pony up a hundred quid or thereabouts each year. That's a good way to incentivize myself to reduce my carbon footprint in the future. Second there's the active process of interrogating my consumption: working through the calculations is a great way to focus the mind, confront the consequences of my personal decisions and think about what I could improve on in the future.

Last year it took until April for me to run the calculations and act on them. This year I've done much better. That's partly driven by my New Year's Resolution to make at least one ecological improvement per month during the year. Even though this isn't a new thing for me, when I made the resolution the intention was always to count this as one of the tasks. And so it is.

Here's the table that shows which carbon emissions came from which activities. I've included all previous years so that some trends can be captured. I should emphasise that this represents household emissions, so covers two people, both Joanna and me. For comparison average emissions for individuals in the UK is 5.40 tonnes (10.80 tonnes for two people).
 

Source	CO2, 2019 (t)	CO2, 2020 (t)	CO2, 2021 (t)	CO2, 2022 (t)	CO2, 2023 (t)
Electricity	0.50	0.40	0.59	1.14	1.66
Natural gas	1.18	1.26	1.66	0.81	-0.25
Flights	5.76	2.26	1.90	5.34	1.32
Car	1.45	0.39	0.39	1.01	1.00
Bus	0.00	0.01	0.02	0.01	0.31
National rail	0.08	0.01	0.02	0.00	0.70
International rail	0.02	0.01	0.00	0.04	0.01
Taxi	0.01	0.01	0.01	0.01	0.01
Food and drink	1.69	1.11	1.05	1.35	1.07
Pharmaceuticals	0.26	0.32	0.31	0.06	0.13
Clothing	0.03	0.06	0.06	0.12	0.23
Paper-based products	0.34	0.15	0.14	0.37	0.38
Computer usage	1.30	1.48	0.75	0.93	0.23
Electrical	0.12	0.29	0.19	0.03	0.01
Non-fuel car	0.00	0.10	0.00	0.12	0.92
Manufactured goods	0.50	0.03	0.03	0.05	0.11
Hotels, restaurants	0.51	0.16	0.15	0.10	1.21
Telecoms	0.15	0.05	0.04	0.03	0.05
Finance	0.24	0.24	0.22	0.04	0.02
Insurance	0.19	0.11	0.10	0.04	0.04
Education	0.05	0.00	0.04	0.01	0.00
Recreation	0.09	0.06	0.05	0.03	0.06
Total	14.47	8.50	7.73	11.65	9.25

The headline result is that our total carbon emissions have been reduced compared to last year. That's mostly driven by a large decrease in the number of flights, from twenty in 2022 to just four last year. Twenty flights is a large number, a consequence of living in Finland. This year I moved back to the UK in February. That meant some flights to tidy up my life in Finland, but I've not flown again since then. In 2024 I'm hoping to push that down to zero flights.

Reduced flights was partly offset by increased train and bus travel, largely due to my weekly commute between Cambridge and London for work. I took the journey 88 times, giving me a massive total distance travelled of 19 638 km by national rail. Thankfully trains are also far more carbon efficient than planes, so while distance travelled only reduced by a factor of 1.5, carbon emissions reduced by a factor of 5.75.

One potentially confusing thing about the numbers is that natural gas usage is a negative figure. We switched from a gas boiler to a heat pump, with the result that our gas usage tumbled. But of course it wasn't negative! The negative value is due to our power company overestimating our gas usage as a result of our heating change. The overestimate was included in the figures for last year and this negative figure redresses that.

The following table gives more detail about the numbers used to perform the calculations. After pulling these together I then fed them into Carbon Footprint Ltd's carbon calculator as I have in previous years to generate the results.
 

Source	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023
Electricity	1 794 kWh	1 427 kWh	3 009 kWh	4 101 kWh	5 975 kWh
Natural gas	6 433 kWh	6 869 kWh	9 089 kWh	4 439 kWh	-1 362 kWh
Flights	36 580 km 20 flights	14 632 km 8 flights	25 542 km 14 flights	36 042 km 20 flights	7 233 km 4 flights
Car	11 910 km	2 000 km	3 219 km	8 458 km	8 369 km
Bus	1 930 km	40 km	168 km	133 km	3 080 km
National rail	5 630 km	400 km	676 km	0 km	19 638 km
International rail	64 km	1 368 km	513 km	8 684 km	2 322 km
Taxi	64 km	37 km	100 km	100 km	100 km
Tube	0 km	0 km	0 km	0 km	100 km

As in previous years I've used the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to offset my carbon output. The money will go to pay for improved cooking stoves in Malawi, a scheme managed by Ripple Africa.
 
 

Greetings from 2024! As this is my fourth post on the topic of annual resolutions I think I can now consider it to be a habit. This is where I look back at the resolutions I made a year ago and assess how I did in the cold light of day; and then on the back of what is usually a mixed set of results I go on to pretend there's some value in me doing the same thing again for the year ahead.

But to be clear, these plans aren't supposed to be life-goals, sweeping changes or major reevaluations of the self. Rather they're supposed to be incremental improvements; achievable tasks that help me focus on specific changes I can make during the year that would be easy to overlook otherwise.
 

Before getting into the resolutions themselves I think it's worth reflecting on the kind of year 2023 was for me. The world seemingly had a torrid year and while it's impossible not to acknowledge how traumatic world events have been, I hope you'll forgive me for focusing on only my own small corner of the year in this post.

It was a positive — albeit turmultuous — year for me. Most of the turmoil happened in February when I moved countries, from living in Finland to living in the UK; and changed jobs from working at Jolla Oy to working at The Alan Turing Institute. Although I loved living in Finland and working for Jolla, I still consider these changes to be positive ones, mostly because it means I'm now back living in the same home as my wife Joanna. It's hard to overstate the improvement in quality of life that this brings to me.

February was also the month of FOSDEM'23 which I enjoyed hugely. I'm hoping to have a similarly enjoyable trip to Belgium this coming February for FOSDEM'24. Related to this is the fact that Jolla Oy, which has had its own tumultuous year, now looks to be in a better place. I still use Sailfish OS as my main phone operating system, so I'm encouraged that it's now on a more stable footing.

Although most of these changes were anticipated when I wrote my 2023 resolutions, the real ramifications of them were always going to be unclear beforehand. So my resolutions have to be considered in this context.

So, looking back at my resolutions for 2023, here's what they looked like:

1. Learn quantum programming.
2. Make the most of London with Joanna.
3. Take the bisection work to the next stage.

And how did I do? The headline figure is one out of three, which is less than fifty percent and therefore not the success I was hoping for. But that doesn't mean it was a futile exercise. Let's look in more detail.

First the plan to learn quantum computing. Although I did make some progress on this by reading through "Programming Quantum Computers" by Eric R. Johnston, Nic Harrigan and Mercedes Gimeno-Segovia, I can't really consider it to be a success because I didn't finish the book. That would have been the minimum criterion. Despite this, it was still a worthwhile goal and having it in my list did give me more focus than I would have otherwise.

In practice my move to The Alan Turing Institute brought with it a huge amount of new things to learn and new opportunities for learning them. The institute has a much stronger commitment to continuous learning than other organisations I've worked for — an incredibly positive thing — and consequently I was able to join a Transformers reading group, a Rust reading group and a Linear Algebra reading group. Plus I had to learn the ropes of the job. Amidst all this other learning, my quantum computing plans took a back seat. Maybe I'll make more headway in 2024.

Second was to make the most of London with Joanna. This, I think, was a success. We went to see Hamilton, Matilda, the "Titanosaur" Patagotitan at the British Natural History Museum and a lecture about generative AI at the Royal Institute. We also enjoyed some nice meals out and I met up with friends in London on multiple occasions. So I feel like this was a success and one I should try to maintain in the coming year.

Finally I completely failed to take the bisection work forwards. This was overtaken by my commitment to upgrade Gecko to ESR 91 and publish a daily blog covering my progress. If I'm honest, although I'd love to have wrapped up the bisection work, there was no chance of me doing both and I'm happy with the choice I made. I still hope to get the bisection work published at some point, but not until this ESR 91 work is complete.
 

So what does 2024 have to offer? I don't want lots of new years resolutions, but I decided I do want there to be exactly one resolution from each of four topics that I care deeply about. As such I've split my resolutions into four categories: maths, computing, ecology and fun. I've picked the things that I most want to achieve for each of these in 2024. Here they are:

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.

A little context about these. The first was suggested by Rahul and both Alun and I agreed this would be a great thing to do. I've paused on this until after the ESR 91 work is complete, but if I don't get that completed this year I have bigger problems. I've always wanted to understand Information Theory more and this book seems to include many of the really interesting results I want to better understand: Shannon's Source Coding Theorem and Kolmogorov Complexity for example. It doesn't cover Hamming Distance, so that might require delving into a different text.

As I mentioned I've joined a Rust reading group. That's fun and useful but I need to do something practical to cement the knowledge I've been accumulating. I already started doing some development on top of the existing (but incomplete) rust_gpiozero codebase so my intention is to continue with this work. But if I switch to some other piece of practical Rust programming that's fine too.

My third resolution is to make a series of incremental improvements to my life in terms of reducing my environmental impact. I really wanted to make one of my resolutions ecological, but this was by far the hardest to decide upon. In previous years I've recorded my waste output, we had a heat pump installed and each year I offset my annual carbon emissions. But in order to achieve continual improvement I needed something different this year. I have a list of things I'd like to do: look into getting solar panels installed, commute by bike rather than by bus, switch my bank and pension to use green investment funds, avoid having to get in a plane. If I can make one such improvement per month, then I think that will be better than having just a single large headline improvement that may turn out to be unachievable.

Finally Joanna gifted me membership of the British Library for the year. Since I work in the building I've already started enjoying many of the facilities: bookshop, gift shop, cafés, reading rooms. In 2023 I really wanted to visit some of the exhibitions during my lunch break, but the entrance fee made it uneconomical (£16 for a 30 minute visit just didn't add up). With membership I'll be able to enter the exhibitions at no additional cost, so I plan to make the most of the fact.

The current exhibition on Fantasy: Realms of Imagination looks amazing, but I've held off going in the hope that someone might be generous enough to offer me membership. That will be the first exhibition I go to. As it runs from 27 October 2023 to 25 February 2024 it looks like there's a four-month exhibition cycle, meaning three per year. My plan is to go to all of them, along with other events that might be happening in the library. Sounds like fun to me.

So that's it. Four resolutions which certainly look achievable and which I'll be able to easily assess in twelve months' time. Here's to 2024 and the hope that I have more success with these than I did with my 2023 list.