Just an ordinary looking virtual kiosk. There are journals in it!
; Getting there! And the good news is that it's technically the weekend. Also, I'm writing this from a really old monitor that I wasn't sure was going to work, but works perfectly. That's cool!
; I'm now mostly made of coffee.
; Woke up way too early today. Wasn't able to keep sleeping so I just woke up. I fiddled around with my emacs config, rewriting it to remove as much as possible. Lots been on my mind lately and it distracts me.
; Behold the glorious m15o-html-mode! It doesn't do much right now except very simple syntax highlighting and a way to close the open tag.
; I've been re-learning elisp over the last few days. My goal is to write a simple html major mode that makes writing HTML Journal easier. Is that Yak Shaving? I think it is!
A few days ago I became aware of the new HTML Journal spec by m15o, a new way to easily format blogs for aggregation. My first reaction was to turn my nose, because it goes against accessibility best practices for use of headings in web pages, and also because it relies on ISO dates, which some people dislike.
Except it turns out that's not true: an informal poll quickly received unanimous support in favor of the format. Go figure! As for the other issue, it's still valid HTML5, and trying to "help" screen readers often makes things worse. Hopefully a future update will allow the use of level two headings for entries, as is proper.
Besides, it's so much easier to make a new entry here than with any SSG.
Added a link to the Neon Kiosk, an HTML Journal aggregator.
Started a software (and services) I like list.
A quick note 4u, I made a mini zine that will be for sale at the Glasgow Zine Fest on the 3nd of July 2022 (Corrected! its Sunday 3rd only!) DO NOT MISS IT!
I wont be there, but it will be available at the Plaintextdistro stand run by Emreed, so please be nice if you meet her and ask for Melon's Zine :^}
I had a very relaxing day. It was trippy.
I did gym workout stuff. Trying to be able to surf.
Brunch with our couple friends. Played Catan for fun.
Added the tools page, which includes a parser for HTML Journals, and the sources of this website.
I've had a bit of fun today and put together the Neon Kiosk. It's an HTML Journal aggregator. Anyone can submit their journal, and Main Street passerbys will be able to read it on their way to work.
16M ; I hate to think that we will, at some point, have to sail south to re-supply, we've both decided that we shall stretch our supplies for as long as we possibly can. We will soon run out of fresh produce, but we have prepared enough preserves to last us for months.
Just released HTML journal, a format to write journals. Just like this one!
Looks like this is close to being ready! Worked on the validator and the website's layout. I'm also adding the update section which uses the HTML Journal format. Cool! Let me use to validator to see if it works. Edit: it does. Niceee.
I'm not sure how much I want to use this journal to write stuff that's outside directly new pages on the site. But I think it would be fun. Also, a journal is there to write stuff, right? Well, Hello then! I'm currently at the bar with 0 internet connection, that's ok, I can work offline. I'm writing a little program that could translate this page (the journal) into a normal atom feed. I've also written about subscribing to a journal page, which explains how we could write journal pages in html and subscribe to them!
Wait. So if I start writing stuff here, does it mean this page becomes a blog? Darn. I've already got a blog. No, that's a journal. We all know that journals are much different from blogs, right? right? We're also two people in the bar right now but hey, it's my favorite place, the music is good and the beer is bad, which is good. This place was what inspired me to create the Midnight Pub. Maybe at some point I should make it a real bar? Would you come visit? Hope you would!
For real though, I'd stop my work in tech to open the Midnight in a heartbeat. Let's make that happen at some point. Man, this journal entry is very long compared to the other ones. Oh well. Here's to long journal entries!
Just added a page about the technical stack I'm using to build my projects.
Wrote a page about the small net.
I'm having a little too much fun adding pages. In particular, just added riku status cafe, ichi and much more.
16L ; We've arrived in Desolation Sound and met up with friends. We spend the long afternoons rowing the dinghy along the shoreline and exploring the thickly forested coast. I went ahead and assigned a glyph to each Uxn opcode, to make an Uxntal Alphabet, it adds a wonderful conlang aspect to the project. I'm hoping to turn this into a little graphical assembler at some point.
16K ; I just couldn't stop thinking about a potential Uxntal Sign Language. So, Rekka and I began assigning hand gestures to numbers, operators and modes. I'm also thinking that I might like to assign glyphs so an assembler that does away with English altogether could be envisioned.
I've just added an atom feed that I'm manually updating for now. I could generate it automatically but there's something nice about just writing it. It doesn't add that much effort. I've also added a page on feeds in general, because feeds are awesome. If you don't have one, you should make one!
16J ; We are finally making our way north toward Desolation Sound and the Broughton Archipelago. We are spending these late spring days anchored between high mountains, revisiting ideas for projects we had concieved of this last winter, but decided to leave for a later time. I've been fascinated by how an entire computing paradigm can emerge from the primitives of combinatory logics, my recent thoughts have been populated by these strange talking birds.
I'm currently re-writing this site with nini. It's a new project I've started, which is the evolution of ni. Nini focuses only on html and is made for the web.
Oopa! Many years ago I wrote a post with help for making your own site, who knows where the time goes, but here I am again with a new guide for you!
I hope you're doing reaalllyy cool! This is the lame time of year when we have to wait like 6 WHOLE months until its Halloween, but hang in there! Here is a a 90s song 4u!
16I ; Aquired a couple of slide rules from a retired teacher, and figured out how to use them, my plan is to gift them to people we meet in our travels. I've spent the better part of the week plotting shapes on paper with the help of the slide rule, while also experimenting with a line-plotting engine, inspired from Turtle Graphics, for creating procedural graphics.
My problem with SolarPunk is, a sustainable future has no room for grand halls of brass and crystal filled with exotic plant life. Hopefully we won't all be dirt-poor farmers living in huts either (I dread the prospect), but we'll still have to tone it down. Like, way down.
In fact my biggest fear is that a sustainable future has little room for anything like modern computing. There's nothing sustainable about microchip manufacturing. Or even TTL chips. Or even discrete transistors. All those rare metals.
Some people put their hope in extending the useful life of existing devices, but that's a slow death, or rather it would be slow if they weren't designed to break down quickly. We're hosed.
It's been a while since my last tour of the wiki community, and things look... mixed. On the one hand, CommunityWiki seems well and truly dead, though of course wiki deaths are much like those of superheroes. On the other hand, I just discovered Melanocarpa, Bouncepaw's digital garden. Plenty of things to like there. I had no idea pipepunk was a thing, even though many of my stories feature scenes that belong in the genre, or thereabouts. And while my personal wiki has been dormant, I've been editing others, maybe more than before. So there's hope.
16H ; I felt frustrated by the development of Uxn this week. I was thinking back on the creation of Orca, especially about the period when the last few operators were being finalized. A handful of livecoders and myself were already using it as the remaining rough edges were still being figured out. I recall people in the chatroom who would raise hell each time operators were moved around. Looking back, I'm glad that I didn't freeze the specs then, or Orca would not have its current operators and symmetries, I had to remind myself of that.
I knoooooow, updates have been a bit slow this month. I was super overworking for months and I got a bit burnt out and now I have covid :^S Which is a really pain because there are so many exciting things happening and cool ideas I have. Sometimes I wish I had a team of people to do everything I wanna do!
Anyway if you missed it, I launched a NEW site last month! It's called TextureTown and it hosts many excellent textures for you to download! Why not give it a visit!
Also happy easter! I got a big egg made of chocolate; the box was cool too, I found it could be worn as a helmet for kitchen battles :^O
16G ; Inspired from the Cuneiform Tablets paper, I considered realizing the paper's point of implementing Smalltalk72 on a UVM, I spent a few days experimenting with the ST72 environment — Only to realize that, like the ChifirVM, it is poorly thought out and fundamentally irreconcilable with smol computing.
16F ; We gave our talk at LibrePlanet 2022, and it went very well. During the Q&A, we talked about living without a fridge, from food preservation to sprouting, and we were delighted to see so many people interested in that stuff. I guess the intersection of computers and gardens is slightly larger than I thought.
16E ; Took a deep dive into the various experiments in digital preservation(PADI, CAMiLEON, Domesday, etc..), didn't really find anything worthy of note, but it did inspire me to rewrite some of the content on permacomputing. I've also spent the past couple of days improving Noodle, and adding support for tga images.
16D ; Rekka is putting the finishing touches to the Wiktopher novel, and asked me to design a game that the people of Iridi could be playing. I thought a dice game combining the capture mechanism of Go and the randomness of the Domino draw might be a good fit, learn to play Hako.
16C ; Our upcoming keynote for Libre Planet 2022 has been announced, we've built a little slideshow program for the presentation. I've revamped the Orca documentation and added a reference page, as well as fixing a few bugs in the Uxntal implementation. Toying with wireworld sucked much of my time, again.
16B ; Rekka and I completed Yufo, our entry for the Virtual Pet Jam 2022, we also added a Serbian and Polish translation to Thousand Rooms. When I wasn't playing with primes, or reading, I was noodling in wireworld. Ah! Also, Uxn turned one year old.
16A ; To kick off 2022, I've decided to write 3 documents for the Uxn project, in which I'll save my design notes, the first one is about the virtual machine itself, the second one is about a personal computer and the last one will be a simple operating system. Hopefully, by the end of this year, this project will have have matured into something that is more easily definable.
15Z ; Began the second week of December by learning about the tga format and implementing a viewer for Varvara. Time to revisit the notes I've collected on paper computing and reflect on this massive year that is now closing.
As a kid in school, it seemed obvious to me that some teachers were mean to us simply because they could; because we couldn't get away, or tell anyone, so we were designated victims. In other words, they were overgrown bullies.
As an adult, I know for a fact that it was 100% true.
Nobody in a position of authority, no matter how small, can be trusted one iota. That includes myself. And I'm only ever able to avoid causing too much harm in my position of authority, at least the kind that can't be fixed, in two ways: one, due to close oversight, and two, because like the Tin Man in Oz, I'm keenly aware that I have no heart and can all too easily hurt someone without noticing.
Ever ate sunflower seeds straight from the flower head? I have, while sitting on the fence between a wheat field and a concrete plant, with another kid I didn't know. It didn't matter. Sums up my childhood pretty well, really. On one side, a pack of stray dogs; on the other, the constant rumble of concrete mixers making the ground shake as they drove by. Sounds dangerous? Funny how I was only ever hurt by other people.
Nowadays the whole area is still a perpetual construction site, but the wheat is long gone. And bread just got more expensive.
15Y ; Spent the first few days of December solving the Advent Of Code puzzles in Uxntal, got bored, and started thinking about displaying little pictures inside of Left, as well as rewriting Marabu. I've also spent time experimenting with the Subleq virtual machine.
The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny prominently feature the Pattern: a long, tortuous path that folds in on itself, but you have to walk all of it from end to end: no cheating, no going back, and no stopping. If you succeed, entire worlds become open to you; but fail, and you won't get another chance. It's hard; at times it will feel like trying to walk through a solid wall. But persist, and you'll make progress. Even if it doesn't feel like it for the longest time.
A similar sentiment is expressed in Gattaca, when the main character is confronted by his brother: you can't go back. Going back is simply not an option.
Romanian fairy tales, too, teach the same lesson. And many videogames as well.
15X ; Was away from Pino to visit family, spent evenings catching up or watching movies. Received a replacement keyboard for Ayatori, it's good to be back on the Thinkpad.
15W ; Wrote a little brainfuck interpreter in Uxntal while traveling. My toughts have been drifting back to primes and fractions for computing, I've been considering a twist to fractran where fractions with a zero as nominator or denominator might be used for as jump operations, but I have yet to implement this.
15V ; Decided to stop doing daily drawings and port Donsol instead. I had it all planned out in my head before starting, I went ahead and completed the port within just a few days. The work was done on a Pinebook Pro, revealing a few issues with Left, so I spent some time optimizing the text-editor so it would run faster.
15U ; Spending the month of October between daily drawings, and various food preservation projects. As I work on a picture, I'll occasionally stop to improve Noodle in some way or correct a bit of friction. The near totality of my computer activities(drawing, composing and programming) are now done from within the Uxn virtual machine. I couldn't be happier.
15T ; Rewrote Dexe to be compatible to the latest changes to Varvara. I'm unsure what to do about Oscean's twtxt and RSS feeds, generating them in Uxntal will be hard, especially the date conversion. Maybe I could build the now page's body from the twtxt feed, but if I did, I would loose the Arvelie timestamps and links. Picked up Moogle again, cleaned up the codebase.
15S ; The grey weather gives us only a few hours of solar power each day, so we alternate between cleaning and doing other things, such as origami. I've been optimizing Orca, trying to make it run faster, following in the line of optimizations of Noodle.
15R ; Currently rewriting Oscean in Uxntal, as an experiment to see how far I can push Uxn, and what a wiki-from-first-principles might look like. A few features have yet to be ported, but the main components are done. We're slowly sailing North toward Vancouver to see friends, we left Saturna for Ladysmith and Silva Bay, Pino has engine problems, again.
15Q ; Anchored near Saturna, it has been nice to be working offgrid again. I've started porting paradise in Uxntal, it would be nice to port Oscean at some point too. I'm considering stopping to keep a daily diary now, it has been 16 years, I think the experiment has run its course.