Welp, 2025 was pretty awful. From an American prospective, a bunch of idiots thought to themselves, “I guess I can accept a little fascism, as long as my property taxes don’t go up.” And then the other half of the country voted for it with enthusiasm. Now the entire world is in disarray and I’m constantly thinking, what’s the point.

*sigh*

moving on…

What actually went well in 2025….⌗

KiCON US⌗

One thing that did go well was my third attempt at a KiCAD workbench for FreeCAD. I tried this once with KiCadStepUp as the basis but as it was too monolithic I had trouble hooking into it to use as an API. My second attempt used the KiCADs SWIG bindings. This went decently well but a conversation with Wayne, project lead for KiCAD I figured I should wait for KiCAD v9 and use its new long term API. I started this project late 2024 and spent most of January hammering on a prototype that I was satisfied with. This became KiConnect

With a prototype+ I decided to submit a talk to KiCON in San Diego. It was accepted and in March I hope my bike 800 hundred someodd miles from western Nevada County to San Diego. More on that below.

KiCON itself was wonderful, caught up with a couple friends and met a handful of new ones. My talk was well receive and provided great feedback and much needed motivation to push towards a v1.0, and while I missed the August deadline I’d hoped for, I have managed to make significant progress since.

KiConnect and streaming⌗

With not much in the way of work for most of the summer, I was doing semi-weekly live streams while working on KiConnect. The goal was to bring in a small amount of donations to keep the project going, which I had some success with, even getting a few regulars tuning in. Probably did about 10 in all before scheduling conflicts messed up my routine. I plan to get back to this soon.

FPA Grant to work on KiConnect⌗

Between lack of consistent work and some wonderful encouragement from all star cheerleaders and contributes to FreeCAD, Jo Hinchcliff and Brad Collette I applied for a FreeCAD Project Association grant to work on KiConnect. Which was accepted just a few weeks ago. Here is the proposal but the crux of it is a 100 hour commitment to push towards a polished v1.0 release around March/April.

FOSDEM⌗

In addition to being awarded the FPA Grant to work on KiConnect, they also helped me with a travel stipend to attend FOSDEM. I’ll be joining the CAD/CAM/Hardware working group and giving a talk on the status and future of KiConnect.

Mental Health⌗

Between the death of my brother 2 years ago, and a load of stress brought into my life by a self centered friend, the start of 2025 was bad. Like real bad. I couldn’t socialize without near panic attacks, I couldn’t motivate myself to do basically anything and it eventually led to me getting fire from my (terrible) job in February. It became clear, if I didn’t do something about my mental health, it was going to do something for me.

I started in therapy several days later and was on anti-depressants within a month. Something that I should have done in my 20s. Better late than the alternative. And while not a magic fix, not suffering from bipolar episodes every 3rd or 4th week has given me some much needed stability that has allowed me to complete more projects and shelve things instead of just abandoning them. I’m increasingly of the opinion, with the wretched state of the world, no one “doesn’t need therapy”. Did you know you can pay someone to listen to you complain?

NOTE: This isn’t the goal of therapy, but I’ve had plenty of sessions that went like that. I assure you, it beats constant complaining at your partner or randos on the internet.

Volunteering at the library.⌗

After about a year of threatening to, I finally signed up as a volunteer at my library. We do a weekly event called Tech Drop In where we offer free tech support for a mostly older audience. This is both infuriating and gratifying. The infuriation comes from $ilicon Valley’s complete and total disregard for consent. Ever other support request is “I did an update last week and now everything is different”. Seriously, fuck Apple and Google, if you work for either* of these companies, you are contributing to this problem. This has only hardened my resolve to support Free Open Software and help people get away from these actively harmful companies.

Since starting we’ve already made the first push into setting up a 3d printing lab, with a keen interest coming from the weekly Dungeons and Dragons group who want to print miniatures. Additionally I’ve start accepting laptops to refurb and redistribute with Linux installed. Over and over again they say, ‘All I need is to check my email and watch Netflix’. I hope to start handing those back out in the next month or two.

*) AAAAALLLL OF THEM

Getting back into game development⌗

Over the years I’ve peaked at Godot but never more than a couple hours here and there. Around May I was talking with one of my nephews about game development and it prompted me to give it another shot but this time I just kinda jumped it and had a basic FPx engine in a few weeks. Oh course, it was terrible written because I was learning and discovering new features as I went. But I’ve regularly put work in on it over last 8 months.

This also prompted me to try Blender again, and to my amazement, I got kind of good at it! I can work with some basic materials, I finally learned to mix materials using Texture Painting, I stumbled into Geometry Nodes and took to them pretty well, even using Texture Painting to draw and mask out nodes out too!

I don’t intend to release anything anytime soon, this is mostly just a long fun experiment. If/when I do decide to release something, it’ll be after the first total rewrite (which is already being planned….). But in the meantime, I am thinking about doing an occasional live stream for Godot/Blender work in the future, in addition to starting a game dev group at the library.

Work life⌗

Around July I started discussions with a former employer about coming on as a high-level technical lead. After much back and forth, I started in November. We worked out part-time flexible hours for the first year as we try to get a stable footing with some of the new projects. The flexible hours will allow me to continue to work on KiConnect and hopefully increase my direct contributions to FreeCAD.

Bike Stuff⌗

Sadly in 2025 I didn’t ride nearly as much as I usually do. The aforementioned social issues just kind of soured it for me and where riding used to be my release, it just made me more angry and unfortunately, it’s something that still needs to be dealt with. Removing toxic personalities from your live is great, but when they still lurk in your community it’s harder to deal with. But the good parts!

Not having toured for a while, I’d hoped for a nice spring tour down to San Diego. Weather had a different idea though. My first couple of days through the valley were painfully hot, breaking 100F even at night. This forced me to change course and ride through the night from Santa Nella to Fresno. The total day was something like 160 miles with ~3 hours of sleep. But I caught a friend near Kettleman City and we rode together for the next 3 days. Currizo Plains are so extraordinarily beautiful, in particular as we were entering at sunrise for fear of excessive heat, though the heatwave thankfully finally broke. Highway 33 between…. nowhere and Ojai was an absolute treat. Will all of the tourists coming from the west and turning around at the top, we only had something like 12 cars until we summited and began what I believe is the longest road decent I’ve done in California. 10 out of 10, would do again.

Parting with my friend in Oxnard I took the train to DTLA (Downtown Los Angeles) and road to San Piedro where I caught the ferry to Catalina. Best. Choice. Ever. Not only was Catalina stunningly beautiful, it allowed me to bypass all of LA, San Bernardino, and Orange Counties. I spent 2 and a half days on the island before taking the southern ferry to Dana Point where I was (shockingly) ahead of schedule and only had 70 some-odd miles to go.

That was the big tour of the year, I also did some local overnights to some very beautiful parts of the northern Sierra. I hope to write more on these trips soon, with pictures! Once I revive another old blog, No Lonely Guinea Pigs.

AND TO CONCLUDE⌗

that’s about it.

Keep an eye our for live streams, possibly starting as soon as next Thur (15/01/2026), announcements will be made on morgan@leds.social. Look forward to FOSDEM in just a few short weeks (wowowwoof!) and hey, maybe the collapse of capitalism! Fingies crossed!

kthx byeeeeee