gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2024-01

The year's end is an opportunity to wind things down and enjoy time with the family. With the daycare being closed until today, I actually had little choice in the matter. The kids were staying home and that had to be the primary focus of attention.

As 2023 was getting incremented to 2024, the weather around these parts in Finland was — at best — a chilling -18°C (0°F) which meant a lot of time was spent indoors enjoying each other's company. Our kids, now 4 and 1, were certainly getting cabin fever towards the end. Not the most relaxing holiday I've had but not disastrous either. At least everyone was in relatively good health!

Alas, corralling the children left little time for productive programming hobbies. My hope was to catch up on a few movies and TV shows I missed in 2023, but there was no suitable time for that either. I could've gone with the good old late evening timeslot, however when you're forced to wake up at 6 thanks to the toddler, prioritizing sleep seems like the more attractive option.

This time of year always surfaces childhood memories of gathering in the living room to try new C64 games with my brothers and dad. The Commodore 64C was our Christmas gift, many years ago. It was a magical time of wonder and exploration, a new digital frontier... These memories are permanently intertwined with the smell of the Christmas spruce and the taste of chocolate pralines, and even today as I'm working on finishing the last of boxes of Christmas chocolates, the sensory memory connections bring back images and scenes from my parents' house.

Sadly, I've lost track of my original 64C and Amiga 500, and they're likely not in operating condition anyway. The reminiscing did lead me back to retro emulators. I downloaded a new version of RetroPie and (after some technical difficulties with Linux audio 🙄) got it running quite nicely on the Raspberry Pi 400. It was a blast getting reacquainted with Impossible Mission and other old favorites, on a device that somewhat resembles these veteran computers of the late 80s and early 90s.

Holiday Nostalgia