Review of the year 2024
Today is the annual review for 2024 and again it is very warm at the turn of the year, but there has also been a lot of rain, in some areas too much.
First of all, I would like to wish all my visitors to the blog all the best for 2025 and, above all, that you have had a good start to the New Year. The blog is now in its 12th year with many posts, especially on the topics of photography, video and IT.
So far I have still managed to publish one post per week and also a few videos on my YouTube channel. In total there were almost 1,300 published posts, mainly on the topics of photography, video and of course IT. Yes, and the IT area has now taken up a lot of space and video is also becoming more and more popular, but also above all because I am learning and trying out more and more here.
The year 2024 started with a new PC, as my old PC with an AMD Ryzen 1700 was already 7 years old. It was time for the latest hardware and this time I switched to Intel. I decided on an Intel i7-14700. After much deliberation, I chose an NVidia RTX 3060 with 12 GB VRAM as a dedicated graphics card, as this was the best compromise for video editing and Photoshop. And I am happy with the performance of the system.
Another highlight of 2024 for me was the gradual conversion of my network to an OPNSense firewall. It started with a KingNovy firewall appliance with a total of 6 x 2.5 GB connections. It started with the fact that in the first version of this setup the Fritzbox still provided internet access and the firewall was logically behind it. 
Little by little I managed to replace the Fritzbox with a Draytek modem and finally also handle telephony via the firewall.
However, these small firewall PCs are not so quick to get when you need them, and 2 or 3 weeks without internet would be a nightmare. That’s why I later went on an odyssey to find a replacement device so that I could get back online quickly if I needed to. This first worked with a Glovary with a stronger CPU, a HUSN with only 5 ports, and then I ended up with a KingNovy again.
The Lumix S5 IIx is the photographic highlight of 2024. The camera is a logical extension to the Lumix S5, especially in the video area. The better video AF and the Opengate format are particularly worth mentioning here.
But the other formats are also interesting, and the Lumix S5IIx can, for example, record directly to an SSD. Well, the Sandisk pictured above stopped working exactly after 2 years ;-(.
As the Lumix S5 has dropped in price, I just kept it as a second camera, I can use it to record 2 views on YouTube and in terms of photography, the two cameras are no different anyway.
Finally, I tried to reduce my dependence on Windows a little by working with DaVinci Resolve on Linux, for example. But that also comes with limitations and then there’s Lightroom or Photoshop, for which you would have to switch to MacOS. Unfortunately, unlike DaVinci, Adobe doesn’t make any attempts to enable an easy switch between Windows and Mac by entering a path (MacOS) to a drive letter (Windows) in the settings.
In addition to these topics, there were also articles about panorama editing, reducing the size of photos using DNG or focus stacking, and using a flash in macro photography.
All in all, a very eventful year 2024. I hope you enjoyed the articles and remain a loyal reader of the blog.
ciao tuxoche
