2024-07-19 A Halo Around The Sun

The inlets we find ourselves anchored in are worlds of their own with inhabitants that, as transitory as some may be, are affairing themselves with happenings that extend to the shores of the lagoon, but no further. A strange new thing has come into the sheltered water and disrupted its hubbub, now everyone looks as if caught in a gasp, at its skyward pointing wing, at its opaque lifelessness. Through the oblong eyes of the vessel, like under a diving bell, we peer back in wonder.

There are as many days to our bow without connectivity than those that lay between our stern and Prince Rupert, where we were last able to make contact. In these secluded days, I am reminded of a passage from one of Thoreau's journals that reads the inscription on a Swedish inn:

• Progressed toward a Markl prototype.
• Improved Uxnfor to better handles OOP style.
• Designed a calligraphy system for Solresol.
• Wrote for Malleable Systems Collective's Fearless Extensibility.
• Reworked tbsp's tea timer.
• Took care of many small tasks for the wiki that I had been putting off, such as improving categorizing and removing redundant pages.

2024-07-12 Southward

We twice waved farewell to Sitka. A few hours after untying the lines, the engine that normally cycles water through itself to cool down decided that it would not do that anymore. The problem appeared to have gone away after some tinkering, only to return further down the coast, precipitating an emergency arrival in some questionably-sheltered flies-infested inlet hidden past but a few jagged rocks that the ocean breakers have as of yet unsuccessfully softened. We dropped the anchor, slept, slept some more, once our strength returned, we had to seriously take things apart and figure shit out.

For as long as Uxn has been around, I've meant to resume and complete a puzzle game that Rek and I wanted to build after Oquonie, called Markl. During these recent night passages I've spent my watches playing the game out in my head, and arrived to an exciting place with the design. I've started implemented it the moment we reached port.

• Wrote a track for a Diablo tribute cassette.
• Added binary data pasting to Left.
• Enjoyed the haikus from Santoka's teacher Seisensui Ogiwara.

2024-06-25 A sensibility for the useless

We have sailed as far north as we are willing to go this year. As the summer weather settles, heading further would mean crossing longer distances with decreasing chances of favorable winds, less sailing and more motoring, which does not appeal to us one bit. We'll head to Sitka before making our way back down to warmer waters and enjoy what remains of the summer free of foul-weather jackets.

Spend enough time in the esoteric programming circuit and you'll come across the usual suspects: self-generating programs, polyglot programs and quines; but until this week I had never heard of ambigram/palindrome programs, which that can be evaluated from either directions. Naturally, I had to have a go at it, and I've added it to my growing collection of labyrinthine programs.

• Improved the sitemap.
• Added selection tool to Oekaki.
• Added step-by-step evaluation to the Uxntal playground.
• Enjoyed listening to Rek read West With The Night from the companionway.

2024-06-14 Endless summer days

Alaskan summer days are long, the sun wakes us up at 4am, and it stays bright until 11pm. By 5am, the batteries are already topped up from solar, if we were very motivated, we could solar-cook every meals each day.

I occupy the few moments we have between sails by knocking down tasks I had in my notes for a while, like making a disassembler and cleaning up the web emulator enough that I can use it to show programs on wiki pages, like bifurcan and wireworld.

• Added custom brushes to Oekaki and alpha graphics to Adelie.
• Also, made lots of near imperceptible changes to the wiki.
• Enjoyed reading the RA2K race updates.

2024-05-30 At the Alaskan border

Sitting aboard Pino in the last port in Canada before entering Alaska, thinking about how odd it is to be sailing straight from the south and having to change timezone. We've been moving every day of the past two weeks, making use of the favorable wind to jump from anchorage to anchorage. During these long passages, I try to write the talk for Handmade in my head.

Abner, who organizes the conference, asked me specifically to explore other ways to live with the attending creatives and developers affected by burnout or the mass layoffs. I've had Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem in mind these past few weeks, it goes:

• Made lots of tiny improvements to Notepad and Oekaki.
• Enjoyed listening to Alcest's L'Envol.

2024-04-27 String rewrite III

We've stowed away our 120v devices, untied the lines and begun our sail north to Alaska! During the next few days, we will sail through the inside passage and out the northern tip of Vancouver Island.

As we hop between anchorages, I'd like to try exploring the question: Is a graphical environment running on top a naive string rewriting computer possible, or even usable?

• Started work on Thuesday.
• Enjoyed listening to Rek reading Andy Weir's The Martian to me at night.
• Is Orca dead?, no, it's just finished.

2024-04-13 String rewrite II

Rek and I are completing the remaining projects on our pre-departure list and provisioning for our sail to Alaska. Over the winter, we've strengthened critical parts aboard Pino, replaced experienced pieces of the rigging and simplified the habitat's life-systems — Hopefully, this will all make the journey safer, and dryer.

After exploring Wryl's Modal language further, I decided to write an implementation to better understand how it worked, mechanically. This sparked a renewed interest from the original creator, attracted members of catlang community to explore string rewriting and has given me long and delightful evenings pondering about how to crack various programming problems with it.

• Implemented Modal in ANSI C.
• Wrote Tic-tac-toe in it.
• Returned matching parentheses to Left.
• Enjoyed following progress on Uxn FPGA.

2024-04-02 String rewrite I

We are waiting for a few parts that we had machined, to return to us from the local fabricator. While we wait, I spend most of time playing with esolangs, one that has especially interested me lately is Modal, which is a simple string-rewriting scheme similar to Thue, but with the added feature that it allows for variables, and recognizes scope delimiters. It's a brutally simple idea that allows a program to be shaped as to mimic nearly any programing paradigm.

I had been reticent to expanding the Uxntal macro system because of how it creates disjointed fragments of code that couldn't be properly optimized, but after talking to people writing programs in which macros were definitely the right tool for the task, I've decided to rewrite the implementation and make them more robust.

• Made a Uxn bot, for the Concatenative Discord.
• Implemented some of Mikael Patel's minforth primitives.
• Collected a list of named combinators for stack machines.
• Enjoyed listening to the Tipping Point podcast.

2024-03-21 Catlangs

As days are getting warmer, we can begin to tackle some much needed maintenance topside like changing old lines, varnishing the oars and inspecting the rigging. After a whole winter of getting up in the dark to do weight training, I feel it was well worth it as my back pain is gone, I sleep better and feel more overall physically capable. I have a month left of gym membership and plan to make use of it as much as I physically can before its expiration, and our casting off.

I've spend the idle hours of these past few days improving Left, thinking about concatenative programming and trying to better understand what makes a language concatenative. To try and answer this question, I've asked members of the catlang community to add example programs for the various flavors. One of these examples was the Tak Function which was new to me, and found it to map surprisingly well to stack programming.

• It's just been too nice outside for any more computer musings.
• Enjoyed Henrik Karlsson's Third Chair story.

2024-03-10 Left revamp

We took Pino's chainplates off and while the new ones are being fabricated, we reinforced the area where the chainplate meet the deck. It makes for a momentarily uninhabitable place to live, so I haven't had much headspace to do creative work these past few days, but it will be well worth it considering the places we're hoping to venture into.

Whenever I get to reclaim my desk from the pile of tools and materials that took residency on there, I fool around with UTF-8 encoding support in Left. Looking into how diacritics can be appended to other glyphs, I've begun to consider if I couldn't possibly encode the Uxntal Alphabet entirely from pre-existing glyphs within the two-bytes range and use diacritics for modes.

• Made a few improvements to Left's support for UTF-8.
• Rewrote the uxn.js, it now passes the opcode tests.
• Added example programs to the concat wiki.

2024-02-25 Hello, Dot?

Our plans for the summer are coming into focus. It looks like we'll depart early, head as far north as we can make it, and see if the boat and its crew can weather the cold. This ought to give us taste of what we might expect would we decide to make it further into the arctic next year.

Someone found an interesting undefined behavior in the assembly of Uxn code, where the nesting of child labels could be implemented in one of two ways, leading to an incompatiblity between assemblers. I've explored this further and found myself pulled me into a concatenative object-oriented programming rabbit-hole.

• Released Potato, added to uxnemu and uxn11 emulators.
• Added Latin Accented support to Left.
• Enjoyed reading Bosun Bird's sailing beyond the rapids.

2024-02-11 Conlang Weekly

Other than doing improvements aboard, it has been a month of playing with conlangs and conscripts. I begun exploring variable length glyphs in Left after adding support for the Lambda(λ) character last month, and went further still by supporting the Shavian alphabet. I had been looking for an alternative alphabet for a while and loved its 48 letters, the symmetries in the glyphs and how easy it was to learn it.

• Added a dark mode to the wiki.
• Dodo soldosisol larelafa solmisimi.
• 𐑒𐑮𐑦𐑱𐑑𐑩𐑛 𐑖𐑱𐑝𐑾𐑯 𐑪𐑯𐑕𐑒𐑮𐑰𐑯 𐑒𐑰𐑚𐑹𐑛.

2024-01-26 Back to music

I've originally started looking into virtual machines to build a target to host some games, a handful of tools and my wiki — but instead of stopping once I had done so, I kept pushing further and became obsessed with this programming language design stuff, and along the way, I lost track of why I was even doing it all in the first place. After a two year detour, I look back and I've almost totally ignored my other interests as a digital artist and musician. It's about time I find my way back.

• Finding my way back.

2024-01-13 Maintenance

The forge that we use at Hundred Rabbits has been taken down by DDoS attacks and is struggling to come back online, the event reminded us that we ought to also have mirrors and release versions of these source files available elsewhere. I've begun to host copies across our various websites. The builds are still accessible through itch.io.

Until we regain access and release the changes of the last few days, keeping with the spirit of improving the resilience of the tools we use I've taken a moment to write a kind of pocket version of the console emulator and self-hosted assembler as to see how many lines are needed to start from the seed assembler and replicate it. A copy of the pocket emulator, the source for the assembler and its hexadecimal representation have been added to the wiki.

In the meantime, if anyone is looking for a specific file that is currently unavailable, get in touch!

• Revamped the permacomputing page.
• Enjoyed watching the mini series L'Effondrement(2019).
• Thankful for Sourcehut's tireless work on resolving the issue and communication.