2025 in Review PART 2: Blog and Articles

Hello and happy new year again everyone!

2025 was a very rough year (both personally and professionally), and I wasn't able to work as much as I wanted on my projects and my blog. The end of the year went better, and I was able to write some articles on my blog and work a bit on my free and open-source software projects.

Last week, I published the first part of this article, which was about the evolution of my free and open-source projects in 2025. Today, let's talk about the articles I published.

## Introduction to the DICOM Medical Image Format

I started the year with two articles about the DICOM format, which is used in medicine for scanners, MRIs, etc. They explain everything you need to know to start working with this format and how to generate or read it.

• Découverte de DICOM, le format d'imagerie médicale - PARTIE 1 : la structure (fr)

• Découverte de DICOM, le format d'imagerie médicale - PARTIE 2 : les données (fr)

## Series About Self-Hosting Your Own Music Cloud

I continued my series from last year about self-hosting your own music cloud based on Nextcloud Music.

The first article I published this year, on August 31st, is a review one year after leaving Spotify. I explain why I'm still happy with my choice and why Spotify is getting worse.

• Un an après mon départ de Spotify, petit bilan de Nextcloud Music (fr)

In the second article, published in September, I explain how I find music for my cloud. I list platforms I use and why I use them.

• Où est-ce que je me procure de la musique pour mon cloud musical ? (fr)

The third article, published in October, is about tagging music using the MusicBrainz database and the MusicBrainz Picard software.

• De l'importance de bien taguer sa musique, découverte de MusicBrainz Picard (fr)

And the last article in the series, published in November, explains what audio formats are, their specificities, and when to use them (for what purpose). I also explain why I chose Opus for my cloud and FLAC for for archiving.

• Quel format audio choisir pour son cloud musical ? (fr)

Not in the series but related: I also wrote a more technical article about how I automated tests for FLOZz Daily Mix, my playlist generator.

• Comment j'ai testé FLOZz Daily Mix avec Nextcloud Music (Docker), Pytest, Nox et GitHub Actions (fr)

I must also mention that I loved drawing the cover for this article. You can find on it the Docker whale, the Nextcloud logo on the container, the colors of Pytest, and the mysterious vial of Nox:

## I Got a New PC!

I ordered a very tiny PC, the GPD MicroPC 2. It reminds me of the netbook era, and I really love it! I wrote a loooong article about it in just one weekend to give my feedback and explain how to install Ubuntu on it (and how to fix all the issues you may encounter).

• Premières impressions et installation d'Ubuntu sur le GPD MicroPC 2 (fr)

## SPAM SPAM SPAM... I Hate Phones!

In the last quarter of the year, I started getting A LOT of SPAM on my phone, which I couldn't filter efficiently. It forced me to set up a whitelist of numbers allowed to call me, and I wrote an article about it... because I was angry and I had to talk about it!

• Je ne suis plus joignable par téléphone⁽¹⁾ (fr)

## No, You Do Not Need a VPN

This is the last article I published this year. It's about VPNs (what they are, how they work) and why you probably don't need one (and in which cases you may actually need one).

• C'est quoi un VPN, et en avez-vous vraiment besoin ? (fr)

It took me three months to write it, but it's the longest article ever published on my blog, and I made a lot of drawings to explain the concepts. I had a lot of fun drawing them and coming up with the most ridiculous names for the protagonists in my examples.

## ... and More Articles

I wrote a few more articles, like one in March about backing up data to a Synology NAS using BorgBackup. This article is one of the most visited of the year!

• Sauvegarder ses données vers un NAS Synology avec BorgBackup (fr)

When I worked on the DICOM format, I discovered a very nice hexadecimal editor called ImHex... So I wrote an article about it, and more precisely about its pattern editor, which is great!

• Découverte de l'éditeur hexadécimal ImHex et de son éditeur de pattern (fr)

And finally, I also published an article on Wanadev's blog about extracting and backing up passwords from LockSelf using an open-source tool I specially wrote for the occasion:

• LockPass : automatiser la sauvegarde des mots de passe (fr)

That's it for 2025. When I started this review, I thought I hadn't done that much this year, but in the end, it wasn't that bad. The year was difficult, especially the first half, but I was able to accomplish a bit more in the second half.

I hope 2026 will be better and that I will be able to do more... We'll see! :)