Happy Holidays!

It's that time of year again. That time of the year in which the Pengutronix marketing team gets out the arts and crafts supplies and goes into recluse to come up with this year's hand crafted Christmas cards!

Well … actually that time of year has been months ago. It takes quite some time to get from idea to finished product, if you want to do something special each and every year. [1] But now is the time of year where we get to talk about it.

With the right hammer everything looks like a nail - or you always tend to use the tools you know best. For us these tools are ASCII text, monospaced fonts and solder paste stencils [2].

What works for our terminals and PCB manufacturing should also work for Christmas cards, right? So that's what we used to make them this year.

The cards were printed on the rig we normally use to apply solder paste to our prototype PCBs or small batches of Linux Automation GmbH products.

The font to use was chosen based on a little poll we held at Pengutronix about our developers favorite monospace fonts. In case you wanted to know, these are best monospace fonts (according to those Pengutronix developers that actually have a strong opinion about monospace fonts [3]):

1. mononoki
2. Hack
3. Inconsolata
4. JetBrains Mono
5. Source Code Pro
6. Monoid

The card also contains a little gimmick. A piece of code that does … something. It's in perl, so there is no way of knowing what it does without running it. If you are brave enough to run it but do not want to type in every character all 80s game magazine like here is the code. Ready to be copied and pasted:

:license: GPL-2.0, 2024 Pengutronix, Roland Hieber <entwicklung@pengutronix.de>

echo E9QQGTRE9QhhIhhE9QQCDTFE9QQLQHE9QLWGQHE8QLYQQbYHE8QLQQGWQHE7QLQGdQQfQHE6QL\
     YW3QYHE6QLQgWYQQbQQH9QQQnUXXVE5QLQb0QgWY0QH8QnbZNBUVaSE4QLY5QgWGYHE4QL2Qd1\
     QYWPH9QQQdE3QL2QYYGhWg1QH9QLHE2QLYGWhgc4QMOQYH7QLYYHE2QLgWGY1Qb5QH6QTbYbQT\
     0QE1QLQQdQQPghWGY2QdQQH5QTTYLQTE0QL9QPgWhGY0QH3QLL0QHQHQEQQLQQb4Qf5QgghhH1\
     QKT2QTQAQEQQ7cT1cT6c0QLFHY0QYLFHE9QT1YT9QH0YAeK0YLEE0QE | perl -pe "s: ::g;
     y:PENGUTROnIXABCDFHKLMQSVWYZabcdefgh:'"'\ni.a|,}H+p)d´`\\(/{ !y~_lso^*=J"-:
     ;s:([0-9])(.):$2x($1+3):ge'

We wish you a happy holiday season, whether you received one of our 223 hand crafted artworks this year or not, we're looking forward to working with you in 2025!

Oh, and one more thing: For those of you eagerly awaiting a new a new Kernel Panic podcast episode: We have prepared something for you. Be prepared for a little Christmas present.