Well that didn’t turn out as planned. February 1st I put out a Calamares release and started looking for my ski-goggles, with a vacation planned for the end of the week. Two lines on a COVID-19 rapid ag test put a stop to that and have fairly delayed all kinds of other things.

Scan of a panel of Asterix
Scan of a panel of Asterix

Here’s a panel from the Dutch translation of the 2017 Astérix album “Astérix et la Transitalique”. Dutch title “En de race door de laars”. A not-particularly-funny name then, although in the bastardized Latin often used in the Dutch translations you could interpret it as “crowned man”. Spoiler: this is relevant to the plot of the album.

Two weeks later, three of four peeps in my home have had it. One person has managed to avoid the virus. While none of us were really sick, it’s been real slow to entirely recover. For my day-to-day activities I sit at a computer anyway, so it’s hard to tell Ade-is-working from Ade-is-hobby-hacking from Ade-is-doomscrolling.

Things I managed to get done anyway:

  • NymphCast is an audio/video streaming client and server for turning a TV into a device you can cast to. I bumped into it on Twitter, packaged it up for FreeBSD and fixed some minor issues along the way.
  • CopperSpice showed up on my radar, so I did some packaging work on that – it was removed from FreeBSD ports a few years ago, but current releases build just fine. More notes on that some other time.
  • Managed my local badminton club’s “oh, I played yesterday but tested positive today” stream of messages. It doesn’t seem like we had a big outbreak though.
  • Documented a C API with Doxygen. Learned some more Doxygen structuring commands.
  • Some days, just getting out of bed was enough.

So here’s my wish for all y’alls: stay safe, don’t get it, and if you do I hope it may be mild for you. We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when, but let it be some sunny day at a Free Software conference.