First and foremost, let me wish you a Happy New Year for 2026. I hope everyone was able to take some well deserved time off and have recharged the batteries to make the most of 2026.
In this post, I am outlining my plans for 2026 — both at a personal level and in terms of what to expect in the near term on this blog. I plan to broaden the topics available on the blog, beyond a technical-only focus. This includes my experiences with investing money, my love of board games and recent branch into playing card games. But fear not, I will be continuing regular technical content as well. I already have plans for a few things I want to write about in these areas.
Personal Focus Areas
Making better use of savings
I plan to improve how I use savings by focusing on investing with Trading 212 and tracking what happens over time. I may write about this topic, but it will only cover my personal approach and results and it will not be financial advice.
Discovering new ways to enjoy games on the move
I love board games, but big boxes are too awkward to take with you when travelling or taking day trips. They can also be very expensive for what they are, while the parts are often fragile, susceptible to damage.
I asked for and received decks of cards for Christmas as I feel there are lots of incredible games that can be enjoyed with them. I will be investigating these as an option to playing larger board games because they are small enough to pocket, can be obtained for a very low price, and also have lots of good looking options available. I have been particularly enamoured by Bicycle branded cards, who make lots of design options and sell worldwide.
New Non-Technical Content
Investment updates
As already mentioned, I would like to update you on the progress of my investments. I am new to this journey, so I’m learning and you cannot use what I say as advice. Only a financial advisor can advise you on financial decisions. I just want to document my own journey.
I feel this is particularly important in Britain (where I live) because we have a problem with investing. The UK government recently announced that they will be cutting tax free cash savings from the current £20,000 limit per year down to £8,000 per year. Meanwhile people will still be able to invest the full £20,000 if they put it into stocks and shares, but many people don’t have the confidence to do this. I hope to prove through my own experiences that this isn’t as scary as it looks.
These will be additional to the usual weekly posts as I definitely don’t want this content to interrupt the usual topics. The only exception will be if it has taken me a long time to explain what’s going on. Mostly they should be simple updates of what I’ve done and how it’s going.
Board game guides and reviews
I have a vast board game collection and feel it would be good to cover a quick how-to-play guide on some of the best ones. Alongside this guide, I will write about my own experiences with the game and how I rate it. It’s worth noting that my preferences for games may not align with yours, but if you’re reading my blog because of my technical content, I expect our preferences align.
Playing card game guides
I will also cover classic card games that only need a standard card deck and a small table. Some games require jokers and others do not, so ideally you’ll have a deck with them in and can remove them if you don’t need them for a particular game.
I will be covering one, two and multi-player games as I learn and try them out.
Technical Roadmap
Writing Up The Apple Reminders Plugin For TRMNL
When TRMNL was a new piece of hardware, the ecosystem was new and they were looking for people to build plugins for the device. I ordered a TRMNL — but later cancelled my order because I was impatient. While I was awaiting delivery, I wrote a plugin to be able to visualise Apple Reminders. This has been popular in the community, with over 500 people forking the plugin for their own use.
I want to write an article explaining how the plugin works and how you could write your own plugins if the device looks interesting to you.
More with LangGraph
I will publish more articles on things you can do with LangGraph and lead you into a final article where I explain how I am using it to help write blog posts like this one.
A home chat server on Raspberry Pi 5
I have a Raspberry Pi 5 as a home server. It runs my home automation, blocks advertising on our internet connection, notifies me when someone presses the doorbell and now it also hosts a chat system that behaves similarly to ChatGPT.
I will walk through how I set this up, what it is capable of, what I haven’t yet done but would like to, and how you could do this as well for much less money than the monthly cost of ChatGPT.
Building a local security system with Frigate
Over the Christmas period, I decided to try replacing the camera recording I was previously doing on our Synology with a Frigate based system. This is also running on the Raspberry Pi 5 and uses a Google Coral device to infer objects and people in the video feeds from my cameras.
My main reason for doing this was to try to separate myself from the Synology system a little. In the future, when this Synology stops working, I want to be able to move brands as I don’t agree with all the moves Synology has made recently. Now it’s just storing and serving files, using standard Samba file sharing and WebDAV for internet based access to the files. The back options are still Synology specific, but I believe that’s the case no matter which type of NAS you buy.
I will write about how I made Frigate work and the gotchas I’ve experienced. I’ll also talk about how I integrated it into my Home Assistant system to get instant notifications of critical events on the cameras.
Further work on the Python Sudoku Solver
I will publish another one or two articles on the Python Sudoku Solver to capture some of the remaining low hanging fruit for puzzle solving.
Making a Super Mario Land clone in Godot
I would like to write about my experience creating a clone of Super Mario Land in Godot over the Christmas break. The series will focus on the approach, what worked, and the lessons that carry over to other small game projects.
Publishing Cadence And What To Expect
The core rhythm will remain a weekly post as I’ve found that works for my available time. When I have more content available and it doesn’t take long to produce, there may be more posts than this.
Wrapping Up
The plan for 2026 is to widen the conversation while keeping the blog’s technical DNA intact. If you have a particular topic you want covered, please do contact me and I’ll schedule it in if I have the experience to write about it!