2024 has been an exciting year. Personally, I believe there have been several key highlights. This is one of those sorts of sentimental look back at the year moments, particularly from my point of view. I mainly make these so I can look back, since a blog is kind of like a journal anyway.
First, in January, I launched my new balf.io platform. balf.io is an external way to view things like my slideshows and documents (DragonSlides and DragonDocs, respectively). It also acts as my URL shortener and redirect system. Overall, balf.io has simplified things that I do on a daily basis. Speaking of DragonDocs, January was the first year my new DragonDocs AI was released, allowing DragonDocs to mark answers provided automatically.
Also, in January, I released ZPE 1.12.1, which brought the critical changes that made room for LAMEX2.
In February, I updated my smart home to be entirely local for the first time since I built it. Nothing relies on the cloud, making it more streamlined and faster.
The Internet turned 35 years old in March 2024 - a historic moment.
ZPE 1.12.2 was also released in February and was one of the most significant updates in a long time, with LAMEX2 being included, offering up to 4 times the performance of the previous versions and having a much lower memory overhead. LAMEX2 became the standard LAME in version 1.12.3.
In May 2024, I released my first fully functioning ZPE transpiler, ZenPy, and I fixed the plugin system within ZPE (and then split ZPE's core so that parts that were not necessary became plugins). June saw the introduction of breakpoints to ZPE.
In July, we had the first election in over 14 years, which did not result in Conservatives and ended up with the Labour Party instead. ZPE finally got namespaces in July. In July, once again, I went to York, this time with my mum and dad. It was nice once again and I made some critical decisions about my life and what I'm planning on doing in the near future whilst on holiday this year.
In October, my oldest/longest friend got married. It was a spectacular day up in Dunkeld (I stayed for three days), and the wedding itself was out of this world. Also, in October, I finally got back into YouTube and want to continue to do it again. I also finally updated my house infrastructure to use 2.5GbE for everything.
In December I got my routine MRI scan of my head and spine and all was clear. To top the year off, I went to my very first gig. I saw Travis in Glasgow (my second favourite band). It was exciting and one of the best events I have ever attended. Once again, I went with my mum and my dad came along as well (he's not a fan of Travis the way I am, or my mother even, so he didn't enjoy it the way we did).
All I have to say now is that let's hope 2025 is a great year, too! Happy New Year when it comes.
