This month in Victoria is always chaotic, loud. The docks where I winter are downtown, it is where protests, parades and marathons occur, where cruiseships and ferries unload their passengers. I love wintering in this city, but every year come May I yearn for quiet. As I am writing this, Devine & I are anchored in Glenthorne Passage. Our ear drums are content. For the first time ever we skipped Sidney when going north, sailing 34 NM, carried by a good breeze and good current. It's so quiet here we can hear bald eagles, purple martins, kingfishers, Canada geese and oystercatchers. Unfortunately this month I accidentally corrupted Arch, and had to do a fresh install. Every time that happens I learn what not to do for next time. I did not lose any important files, at least none that I can think of.
WEBSITE. I updated the remove ai page to include the search engine that I currently use: Startpage. I also added many more commands to my spellbook, as I tend to do after corrupting my computer. After a fresh install I now always refer to my own notes to fix re-curring issues, like with VLC, when installing SDCV, or when setting up SSH keys for Github and Sourcehut.
ART. I worked on a lot of commissions this month, like a set of cute dead robots for Caleb's upcoming personal website. I also illustrated a family portrait for Andrew. I also drew this year's design for the IWP9 conference in Victoria. I am really grateful that Ori too thought it a good idea to dress up Glenda as an orca.
MOVIE. My friend Karin recently told me about Kanopy, a streaming service available to library card holders. It is possible to watch films on it for free, although there are so many "tickets" available per month. Some movies are worth zero tickets, some 2, or 4. I have discovered a lot of great movies and documentaries through it. One of my favorite watches so far has been the Hannah Arendt PBS documentary, although it is not an easy watch.
READING. I finished Maria Coffey's Sailing Back in Time, published in 1996. Maria and her partner Dag travel aboard Luna Moth, an open dory, alongside the Farrells, aboard China Cloud, to Desolation Sound. Both vessels are engineless, wooden sailboats. Thoughout the book there are mentions of what life used to be like in B.C., back when there were still steamships delivering interisland cargo, when the shores had fewer homes and docks, with no private signs to prevent passage on foot. Despite not having experienced this version of the B.C. coast, I too bristle at affluence, loud engines and "private" signs. It really would have been awesome to order parts from Vancouver and have them arrive via steamship in Nanaimo. I highly recommend this book, it is full of stories about other boat builders on the B.C. coast, as well as early homesteaders, and other crafty and creative people. In this book I learned about the term "Teetotaler," which refers to people, like Allen and Sharie, who abstain from drinking(teetotallism). I had never heard this term before. The "tee" refers to a capital T, to mean that those who abstain from alcohol do so, with extra emphasis, in Totality.
Aren't you supposed to be intellectuals?" Will asked when the two men had emerged again and were drying themselves. "We do intellectual work," Vijaya answered. "Then why all the horrible honest toil?" "For a very simple reason: this morning I had some spare time." "So did I," said Dr. Robert. "So you went out into the fields and did a Tolstoy act." Vijaya laughed. "You seem to imagine we do it for ethical reasons." "Don't you?" "Certainly not. I do muscular work, because I have muscles, and if I don't use my muscles I shall become a bad-tempered sitting-addict.
Aldous Huxley (a passage from Island)
Baluchon's Sailing Path, follow along Yann Quenet's around-the-world sail aboard a custom 4 m sailboat.
James Barry, "Was I not a girl I would be a Soldier!", the Wiki[edia page of Barry, a surgeon, who concealed his gender from the British Army for over 40 years.
I've made some changes to wom. One of the largest one was getting rid of passing arguments when spawning a process. With arguments, we had two ways to pass data when starting a process: through the arguments or through files. I realized that we always want to use files. Without the program reading its state from its files, we have no way (simple) way to restore it when the OS is saved as a quine. A non-simple way I experimented with a bit was to save the arguments in a `prog` file, to be replayed on reboot. But then the argument file had to be kept in sync. And, if we have to use an argument file... we might as well just use files. So files always win.
I've updated the spawn syntax to allow passing initial data for files, which basically give keyword argument for free, without even needing arguments at all. So to spawn a directory at a path, we can just do `dir path=/foo/bar`.
All of this made me realize that processes are a lot like actors. They are responsible for their own work. But instead of exposing a single inbox, they expose files that the outside world can write to or read from.
I added a `ERR!` clickable label on the window when the process it runs has an error. Clicking on it will open the proc's err file. That file is never wiped. If you want to discard that error, you can erase it. Since wom is browser-based, the main goal of errors is to indicate that something failed. The browser's dev tool is the debugger you'd then want to use.
dir, the file browser program, will select the program to open based on the extension. Here's how it works: if you click on `myfile.foo`, dir will aim to find a `foo` program (in /bin) and will start it with a path file that will take the value of the file you just opened.
I changed other things as well, such as `bat`, the program runner. I'll talk about one another time!
I am not too proud to say I'm wrong when I am, so there, I was, I'll admit it. Against my most cynical reservations, television did turn out to be the university in every home that it promised, and the telephone also did end loneliness.
It worked best of all once we turned it off, went next door, and invited our neighbors over to teach us stuff. Someone always brought food. Hunger, unsurprisingly, was also just a logistics problem, and the logistics were embarrassingly simple. Nothing, not mandatory office playdays, not outlawing aloneness, no sociability programs, was even remotely as effective to bring people together as forcing people to get audio and video working in digital meetings. But first, we had to build it all so we could shut it off.
We stopped buying all of that shit and, more efficiently, started to meet. Self-obviation? Yes, it even lived up to its promise of emancipation, instead of cluttering our lives, it taught us that if we stack it all in a pile and never turn any of it on again, we'll be alright and we'll be safe.
I said it would never work, and I'm getting a lot of I told you sos. I deserve them.
After over a month of waiting for the voucher to appear in my email I finally have my new bike.
I took it out for a test ride on Friday and ended up going all the way to the nearest town in a 15.5 KM loop. I was not expecting to go so far but the assist on the bike made it a much easier ride.
On Saturday I decided to see how long it would take to get to work. That ended up at about 30 minutes which is only 10 mins longer than if I took my car. Then as I was on my way home I decided to see how far I could push myself and ended up doing a big loop around the villages where I live for a total of 51.11 KM. Of course, I was absolutely shattered the next day.
Overall I’m very happy with the bike and over time I will add stuff to it to enable me to go further, as it is currently there is nowhere to mount a drink or snacks so I’ll need to get a top tube bag or something.
Back in January, I received a message asking something like: "How did the permacomputers predict-?" I forget which self-inflicted calamity it was referring to, but the question has stayed with me. I don't think permacomputing is about predicting anything, especially not collapse. The idea driving it is based on a simpler observation: our culture will either figure out how to live sustainably, or it won't.
Daniel Quinn put it like this: "If there are still people here in two hundred years, they won't be thinking the way we do, because if people go on thinking the way we do, then they'll go on living the way we do, and so there won't be any people here."
This reads, to me at least, as both a reminder that minds can change and an invitation, that if we're paying attention, we can already catch glimpses of a new holistic thinking emerging, one that positions human culture as a participant in a wider ecosystem. Maybe we're collectively holding our breath, just as people did before each renaissance, tending an ear for the sound of something that'll tear the Middle Ages wide open.
The Sibylline Books offer a similar wisdom: We can either willingly learn about the world the better to participate in it, or reach that same knowledge from merely getting caught and swept into its tempers. The knowledge is coming either way, but nobody is ever predicting the future.
E pur si muove.
Added signed arithmetic and comments support to Heol.
April started with changing weather, but otherwise quietly. I've been writing down some notes about the Scheme programming language in the same format as a Learn X in Y Minutes tutorial. Turns out it's a good pretext to try out a bunch of implementations and see how they compare. In turn, that yelded useful insights.
All of a sudden it's Easter (mid-month for us). I'm looking at static site generators again, for no particular reason. Found a couple that deserved a second look, but frankly? They're still not worth it for the most part.
How did we manage to mess up web development so badly? I was just talking options with some friends who would rather avoid handcrafted HTML... except most other options are worse. All those apps we've built to make it easier for non-technical people (not to mention ourselves) somehow do nothing but add mental overhead.
So I'm working on a SSG of my own again. Amazing how little code you need when you just try to fill your time, have fun and get something useful working instead of trying to magically solve all the world's problems with a piece of software. In a first for me, this one is hosted fully on Codeberg, including the website, and doesn't have my legal name anywhere near it. People liking the logo I designed for it, my first in a while, has been a nice bonus.
It's been good to see the Neon Kiosk pick up again lately. We're not done quite yet.
Linux app of the month: Wike, a stand-alone desktop client for Wikipedia that's so lightweight it doesn't even register in top. Good for those who want a distraction-less environment but still need to do research while writing.
