2025 Resolutions Review

We are about (okay come on, already past) halfway through the year, so it's a good time to assess progress on my resolutions for 2025.

Family and friends ✅

As in 2024, this is my main purpose, the one I don't want to fail under any circumstances, it is the core for everything else.

• I devote a lot of time to my children. I am there when they get up and when they go to bed. I've taken them to school every day, and I've picked them up many others. I play with them a lot, we read books, I teach them all sorts of things, we go to parks....

• I've introduced my oldest daughter to programming with Scratch. For now she doesn't do anything on her own, but I introduce her to the core concepts and above all I try to get her interested so she likes it. I have yet to set her up with her own computer (a Raspberry Pi 500 is my first choice right now), then she could experiment on her own.

• We took a family trip to Colombia for almost 3 weeks, and it worked out great. We also went to the mountains for a few days, and even hiked 10 kilometers. The kids are definitely ready to travel more, so we will be planning more trips in the coming months, some shorter and some longer.

• I spent a weekend geekin' out with friends. Pure laughter therapy with lots of board games and 4-player video games. We were all left wanting more, so I hope we will repeat in a yearly basis or better.

• I have supported my partner in her life goals, and she has made incredible progress in less than a year.

In short, even if the year ended today, I think I would take this resolution for granted; but I will continue to keep it in mind, it should be a constant and not something you work on for only half the year and forget the other half.

Lose weight ⚠

My goal of losing a pant size was achieved at the beginning of the year: the pants I wore every day tore and when I went to buy a new one the one which fit me was one size smaller.

However, the path has not been straight, there have been times during the year when I have gained some weight, and then I have let it go. I also haven't managed so far this year to reach my all-time lowest weight, although I think I have more muscle than ever, so the lean weight should be higher.

In any case, I have to find and maintain a routine that works for me, and avoid big jumps in weight.

I won't be able to consider this resolution successful if I don't end the year several pounds lighter than I was at the end of 2024.

Blog ❌

This purpose is easy to see that it is not being achieved: this is the third article of 2025, when it should be at least the seventh. And the thing is, I've had two articles in draft for months now, but I never sit down to finish them, I get distracted by other topics.

The distractions come from two sides: on the one hand I think my ability to concentrate has been reduced by the use of the smartphone, and I do not use any short content platform like TikTok or Instagram; but on the other hand, many times I try to focus on the blog or another subject, only to be interrupted a few minutes (or seconds!) later with some request.

I am writing these lines in the summer, and with the kids at home it is not the time to focus on big projects (see the first resolution), but from September I will try to block time every day and put limits to the interruptions in order to be able to concentrate.

Even if I'm not going to meet the one-article-a-month resolution, I will at least try to finish the year with 12 articles or more, distributed as time permits. My hope is to gain an inertia that will continue into 2026.

New house ✅

The process of reforming the new house has been accumulating delays, between planning, budgets and, most painful because of the impotence, bureaucracy.

Personally, I can rest assured that I have dedicated all the time and effort that was needed on my part, so the delays are not attributable to me.

I hope that the construction will start soon, then I will have to be on top of it to supervise the work.

Home-labbing and domotics ⚠️

Since the renovation of the house has not even started yet, I have not been able to make much progress in this aspect.

I have spent a lot of time researching different options, refining the installation I intend to do.

I am going to install Home Assistant in my current apartment, even though I have almost nothing to automate, to learn it and play with it a bit.

Artificial Intelligence ⚠️

I 've been continuing to keep up with AI developments (which could very well be a full-time job), and experimenting with some things, but less than I would have liked.

I've been using Venice.ai (link to referral) for over a year now, both for textual queries and for generating images. I really like that it is based on free software models, with a good interface, but above all that it is private, i.e. it does not record conversations. It can be used for free and without registration, but for the more powerful models a Pro subscription is required.

Locally I use ollama, but only occasionally. My purpose was to find workflows that I use on a daily basis, but this is not the case today.

To generate images I was trying StabilityMatrix, but I had difficulties running it with firejail. After several weeks stuck I decided to abandon it and focus on ComfyUI, which is one of the most powerful environments and I think it will continue to be developed in the future. I also had some difficulties due to firejail, but I managed to overcome them and finally have it working.

I have in mind a project that would automate creating LoRAs of people from a set of photographs with recognized faces. My idea is to be able to point it to my photo collection in Digikam or Immich, select one or more people with recognized faces in the database, and have it generate a LoRA for those people by extracting the faces from the photographs for training. Then I could use the LoRA to generate images that use those people specifically.

I will try to write articles about all this, so I can motivate myself and also progress with the purpose of the blog.