Well, I’m still not back on a boat as I was in 2023… Where to start…
Lightbug
I havn’t written a whole lot about Lightbug yet on this blog, but its still been a fun year of new developments at, and I think it’s time to share some of them with pictures ;)
We released small handheld RTK device, with programmable ESP32 onboard, giving high precision accuracy, in a nice small package.
I’v enjoyed seeing how folks have been using these devices, from tracking lane changes in cars, to finding accuract path positions, or traking things around race courses.
You can find the documentaiton to read through on the docs site, a fancy looking marketing booklet on the website or look at some of the code examples for the programmable ESP32 also on the docs site.
Hopfully this year I’ll get to the point of writing my GPS, RTK, phone etc comparison blog post, comparing the tracks recorded from a bunch of different devices to compare accuracy etc.
Given my open source / open data interests, I do wonder if this will end up being useful for the OpenStreetMap community.
Now we also developed and worked on the ZCard device, though this has primarily remained inhouse, or for show and conferences and workshops. So much so, that there isn’t even a picture of one on the Lightbug website yet, but here is one sitting on one of our tshirts bak at MWC earlier this year, where we had a demo application running on it, allowing basic interactions from a web page.
Think of it kind of like a Flipper Zero in a way, but running the same hardware and firmware stack as the rest of the Lightbug devices, at a fraction of the price, focued on developers. Buttons, Lights, Eink screen, but more importantly, cellular connectivity (GSM LTE CAT 1), LORA, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and more.
The primary processor, and high levels SDKs take care of the complexities of connectivity, power management and eink screen renderings, and give you a high level API for interacting the the device in many ways, such as drawing on the screen, communicating over LORA, or connecting to a server to send and receive data.
Wikimedia
Meanwhile, in my non work Wikimedia volunteer time, I have the privilege of attending both Wikimania 2025 in Nairobi, as well as the Wikimedia Hackathon 2025 in Istanbul, Turkey.
I spent a fair while at the hackathon showing and working on one of my tools, wikicrowd. And after the event I managed to put in place some of the ideas that came up during all of the conversations.
A big part of that was allowing for custom grid generations, and to control the backend generations via a file on wiki.
And as a result, since May 2025 the tool has shot up from around 163k edits in the previous 3 years, to over 1 million edits in total, just from the second half of 2025.
I spent some portions of the year talking to various people at Mediawiki and Wikimedia focused CLI tooling, primarily focused around the tool that I still maintain, and finally started the move from mwcli to wmcli (very minor but it gets away from a naming conflict).
I also look forward to seeing where the development environmetn part of wmcli endd up as part of the Developer Satisfaction Survey 2026 which is not yet published, but is underway.
Even though the code repo is under the “releng” grouping on Gitlab it doesnt get too much work on by the releng team at all. Though there is now a task to draft a proposal for TP/DevEx incetment in this CLi tool! Which should be exciting if it all pans out.
Frankly, I spent a lot of time moaning (hopfully constructively) about many things Wikibase, though I believe I am primarirly repeating myself, I managed to come back around with some real data and things to point at…
That would be:
- Visualizing Wikibase connections, using wikibase.world queries
- Visualizing Wikibase ecosystem, using wikibase.world
- How much is “Wikibase Suite” (and deploy) used
I’ll be excited to get to the point where the Wikibase ecosystem has the ability to fully flourish, but it sure is nice to have visuals of it slowly developing and expanding.
Metrics
Every year I take a look at all of my blog posts, and try to gauge which areas I write in seem to be both the most interesting for me, as I write the posts, and which areas seem to be the most interesting for anyone reading this site.
2024 saw me write 18 posts, but 2025 brought this back up to 23 throughout the year. So its safe to say I end up in the region of one to two posts a month.
Top 10 for 2025 were:
- WSL2 COM port pass-through with usbipd (firewall issues) (was #6 ⬆️)
- Installing Android Studio on WSL2 for Flutter (was #1 ⬇️)
- Add Exif data back to Facebook images – 0.10 (was #5 ⬆️)
- Altering a Gerrit change (git workflow) (🆕 new in the top10, written 2022)
- If you have a sandwich and cut it in half, do you have one or two sandwiches (was #3 ⬇️)
- Your own Wikidata Query Service, with no limits (was #10 ⬆️)
- Smart home: Starting with OPNSense Router, Eero Wi-Fi and a pile of cables (was #2 ⬇️)
- Reading from USB COM port in go (🆕 new in the top10, written 2024)
- Dependency injection in go using fx, and replacing services for test (🆕 new in the top10, written 2023)
- READ FIRST: Installing kubuntu-desktop on WSL2 (🆕 new in the top10, written 2024)
My open source contributions have increased (according to Github) in 2025, up to 1618 from 1073 in 2024, likely down to the fact that Lightbug has some open source repos these days.
And it looks like this past year, https://github.com/WallOfGreen managed to make it to a complete wall of green once again! I wonder how long that repo will go on for…
Until next year! Let’s see what I have to say then…