I was given one of these little Xte Ink readers a few months back. I put some books on it and carried it around, and I tried to like it, the way I tried to like my Pinebook. I have something against electronics rotting in drawers, so I kept trying, despite the feeling that the people behind it did not care for it one bit.
Unlike the Pinebook, it's well built; it only needed a not-terrible operating system. I've jumped through these hoops before, and it's no different from working on any other embedded platform, except that this time I only had to write the thinnest Varvara emulator I could get away with, and only ever flash the device for critical changes.
Since the firmware is just a ROM, I wrote and debugged it all in Uxn11. The device emulator only had to pass the tests, and once it did, whatever I ran on my laptop ran on the device. The result is a document viewer that works equally well on everything with an emulator!
I'm not sure exactly where this device fits in my life right now, but it will help with one thing: bringing tickets and QR codes to events, which is always a headache for me without a smartphone or a printer. I might as well have something to read on the way there.
2026-10-08 cryptology - a
For the past month I've been buried in cryptology. Rarely can a thing grab and keep my attention like this. All my tabs were about hand ciphers, one-time-pads, etc. I've been drawing a lot of tables my hand, requiring a kind of precision that really tickled my brain. By the end of September though, with the days getting shorter, I found it harder and harder to document my findings on Rabbit Waves. By then I had done all of the research and had written out all of the pages by hand on paper, but did not have enough power aboard(from solar) to scan and process all of the content. Thankfully, a friend allowed us to use their slip(equipped with luxurious shorepower) for a few days which permitted me to finish the work. The timing was good because by then we had also run out of propane, being at a dock meant we could use our induction plate.
Then, a few days later, we sailed south back towards our winter moorage spot. On the way, we ran into friends aboard their wooden boats, also heading to town, and they shot amazing footage of Pino(Mastodon).
WEBSITE. I wrote a page about processing analog artwork, detailing how I digitize my scanned art.
COOKING. I am very proud that over time I've been able to ween myself off of ingredients that I used to rely on, like nutritional yeast and gluten flour. Nutritional yeast and gluten flour both serve a similar purpose in plant-based meals, they simulate either flavor and/or texture of non-plant-based ingredients. Overall, I do not like to rely on ingredients that are expensive(they both are), hard to find, and that most people are not familiar with. To replace nutritional yeast, say I am preparing a recipe with a "cheesy" taste, I make a mixture of tahini(sesame paste), miso, dijon mustard, garlic powder and apple cider vinegar instead(it is possible to omit the miso). I use this for when I make mac and "cheese" and pizza and am really content with the result. I used gluten flour to make seitan but I've since been grinding rice, lentils, and chickpeas into flour in my grain mill and cooking them together(with a liquid and spices) to make a sort of sliceable savoury loaf. The texture isn't as light as with seitan, but it is very tasty, it has a better nutritional profile and the base ingredients are inexpensive and easy to source.
ART. I finished a page about One-Time Pads for rabbit waves. This was one of the harder pages to assemble, as I had to test a lot of my own ciphers to make sure they work. I also had to do a lot of rewrites to make the text as easy to understand as possible.
I am not the most organized person, I’m trying to change that. I spent a morning making a little custom folder to store paper project files(got one for rabbit waves, another for hakum). I also made templates for both comic pages and for writing text(to have straight and well-spaced text for the RW knowledge pages). The idea with this is that I want to make as little modifications digitally as possible, so the nicer I can get the original to be, the less time i spend on the computer(I have relied on digital editing too much in the past). I realized I have an infinity of patience to do things on paper, but not digitally.
This month I am participating in Drawtober, see them as I make them here.
READING. Last fall I picked up Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird in a street library, I started to read it early last month and finished it very, very quickly because it is a very compelling read. I encouraged Devine to read it too so we could talk about it, and they did(finishing it fast fast). After reading it, I thirsted for integrity and accountability in the people that govern countries, that operate businesses anywhere... in every one, really.
I am re-reading Bram Stoker's Dracula aloud to Devine again, it is rare for me to re-read books, but I am enjoying it(my Renfield is really just a shitty impression of Peter MacNicol's Renfield in Dracula: Dead and Loving it).
MOVIES. I've been on a Sean Baker movie-watching streak. This month I watched both Anora and The Florida Project, and loved both films. The characters feel so genuine, I was shocked at how good the child actors were in Florida Project(i was crying at the end). We secured tickets to see Odyssey at the Imax at the end of the month, I am looking forward to it (Devine has been listening to the music for a few weeks now). I would have liked to go see a special showing of A Simple Machine, but I am trying to limit outings per month(we're on a spending budget).
Fixing a thing yourself protects one from narcissism.
Mark Alan Hoffman, A Simple Machine(film)
GREAT FINDS OF THE MONTH
The second batch of apricot jam tastes even better. We ended up with six jars this time. Been going through old journal entries, too, updating some old links and removing others. The site is really winding down by now.
In other news, summer is finally ending in Bucharest. We've been enjoying the last days of warm weather, for once without regrets. Also reading and learning new things, for example about the GemPub format for e-books. Even updating my other-other site for the first time in more than half a year.
To conclude September on a high note, I wrote a new story called Metal in darkness: a short robot war vignette half based on a dream. Not sure what all is going on there, either, but people seem to like it.
Just like that, it's the last day of the month, and nothing much happened since Monday. Then October arrives lurching, shambling, or crawling (take your pick) and suddenly I'm busy again. Wanna hear something scary? Been making ePub files again, for the first time in years, now just for fun. Check out my cyberpunk stories, or if you prefer something different, my interactive fiction articles.
Speaking of which: I keep saying this website is now largely archived, yet I keep finding things to update. Guess hobbies don't really die. That, and I care about keeping web pages alive / useful. Links in particular need regular checks. If you last visited a site ten years ago? Make sure the link still works!
Time flies. What do you mean, 2011 was fifteen years ago?!
Hi R,
Before I could make up my own mind about it, I accidentally spoiled it for myself by reading the comments, there were some very good replies. Obviously, a lot of the answers to What is still exciting in tech? align with that which also interests me, seeing folks fight for their right to repair, open hardware, sabotage of AI infrastructure, personal computing explorations, permacomputing, etc. you know the ones.
But there is something I'd like to add, first, I am very oddly positioned to answer this. I only hear as little about tech as I'm willing to look for. It's not forced onto me through a day job, and nobody close to me is even interested in the topic, so it rarely comes up in conversation; if I'm not actively searching for tech news on my own, I'll miss out entire boom and bust cycles of new operating systems, frameworks, apple conferences, languages and all that.
From where I'm standing, it feels like tech moves at a glacial pace, and once in a while, it even feels like it goes backward a bit. How many months went by been between the volume control program being deprecated and fixed in Manjaro? Months. So the question, hasn't even occurred to me, since everything is still to be done, everything is still broken and everyone is distracted with other things. There is a LOT that excites me in tech, but it's nothing that I can wait for, because nobody would or even could do them for me.
Someone could make me a new mail client to fix the broken one I use, but it wouldn't help. My appreciation of technologies often relies on my understanding them from a foundational level. So, there's no cheating myself from that understanding by downloading an app, or changing OS. My technological journey is like a fitness journey, sending a machine to workout in my stead defies the whole point, downloading a new version of a program? delays the inevitable and I'll have to try to understand it for myself at some point anyways. I can only really appreciate something by understanding how it works.
This is half a curse, and half a blessing. Sure, I'm cursed to reinvent wheel after wheel, but it shields me, at least in part, from the cynicism that'll look at tech and think it utterly fucked. I understand why someone would think that, but I can't say that I do, because I'm constantly excited about what's ahead!
I'm excited to know that I might be on the cusp of understanding something critical to multisets, I'm excited to think that in a few days I might have a better understanding of how to encode numbers in SICs, I'm excited to imagine how that email client I build will work. Each time, someone tries to sell me onto some new gizmo, you know what I do? I secretly implement it in my own little crappy language, see what it's worth, and often enough, it's a genius idea! And knowing that these come regularly is exciting me most of all. So, I'm hyped, because I feel like my work hasn't even begun.
- Released a new version of Donsol.
- Writing a presentation on Fractran & Rejoice.
- Added I/O capabilities to Tote.
- Enjoying Alcest's Les Chants de l'Aurore.
August has been a busy month, and it's not over yet. With one week left, I'm flailing around for something to do. Still feeling tired.
A weekend passes. I randomly remember having a capsule on Flounder years ago. It was even pretty well regarded, but then I deleted it, because reasons. Still following Alex on Mastodon though. And who knows? One of these days I might go back to try one more time.
Exactly one week after the big trip, it's time for another batch of jam. This time, apricots. The fruit wasn't great, but worked out well enough. Yum! Ended up filling four or five jars, not counting what we ate before moving it. Love it when that happens.
Early into September, we go on another day trip, this time to visit different relatives. A good pretext to discover Câmpina, a city that deserves to be better known. Bonus points for perfect weather despite the forecast. And yum, fresh plums from my cousin's backyard. Only photos were a bust.
Long read of the month (from half a year ago): Humanities in the Machine.
Oh! Did I mention starting to write fiction again? Because it's finally happening, after a hiatus of several months. Not expecting a lot of progress for a while, but it's a good feeling. Especially the praise.
Otherwise, school has started, we've had the first weekend of real autumn and a stroke of luck netted us the very last apricots of the season just in time for one more batch of jam.
