log
A list of changes and updates to our projects.
- RSS feed, regular updates.
- Newsletter, monthly updates.
- See log archives for 2021, 2020, 2019, and 2018.
November 2022
- GrimGrains, added a quick grilled cheese recipe.
- noodle, updated the guide, and added app icon(Mastodon) to the about modal.
- nasu, added app icon(Mastodon) to the about modal.
- store, added sheets of Ecosystem Rabbit Stickers(gen2) to the store.
- Uxntal, created a list of Uxntal examples with equivalent C sources, you can find them here.
- wiktopher, made a progress bar (50% in the correction process) on the project page. We have finished processing chapter 5, and are currently applying corrections to chapter 6 & 7.
- donsol, updated GBA rom with a few fixes.
- Soroban, made a little desktop graphical abacus(Mastodon).
- uxn, ported to DuskOS(SourceHut).
- Dexe, redesigned and much faster(SourceHut).
We put some red lights on Pino, to help combat winter gloom. We also started growing another lion's mane mushroom on board(we grew the same variety last fall), it already has a little tuft!
Devine's talk Weathering Software Winter for Handmade Seattle was recorded, watch it here(Vimeo). The video is for the entire first day of the conference, so for your convenience Devine's talk starts at 1h25min.
A little while ago Rostiger drew an amazing series of illustrations explaining Uxn, and how it works. Ben made a zine out of it and gave us a copy. Make your own Uxn zine using this PDF[1.38 MB].
Pino book club
We're reading Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, and How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm.
October 2022
- TinyBASIC, implemented TinyBASIC in Uxntal.
- left, added a variant of the Smalltalk-76 font.
- Hakum, released a short comic sequence called Chase.
- Wunderland Rabbits, added a new rabbit pic.
- 100r.co, updated galley plumbing(serviced our water pump) and curtains(modified the design). Added lazy jacks.
News
Pino is in Victoria again, and we're diving back into our favorite fall activities like pumpkin carving (see halloween pumpkins), and fruit picking. The boat is now filled with apple jam. October was a drawing month for the both of us. Devine participated in drawtober and completed 28 drawings using noodle. Rekka finished a sequence for the ongoing comic project Hakum.
For those in the Pacific Northwest, Devine will be giving a talk called Weathering Software Winter at Handmade Seattle on November 16th.
As you know, we share a community online with a fantastic group of people. Some months ago Lizbeth designed a burgee for Merveilles and this month we decided to make one for Pino. See the Merveilles burgee.
Pino book club
We're reading Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams, and What The Doormouse Said by John Markoff.
September 2022
- uxn, updated Playdate implementation to the latest core, started emulator for Arduino.
- left, added lots of little improvements for various reported drawing bugs.
- Bouc, wrote a document reader.
- orca, added monochromatic mode.
- CCCC, added monochromatic mode.
- Catclock, added monochromatic mode(Reddit).
- 100r.co, added lifelines in boat projects.
News
The days are getting shorter, and so is the time that we can spend on the computer, due to our batteries depleting earlier a bit each day. So, Devine spends evenings proof-reading the wiktopher manuscript, reading and messing around with the Playdate, and Rekka continues ink work on an upcoming project(Mastodon) (no project page yet).
While cleaning up the boat, Devine found two small black notebooks. We started paging through them, to see if we should keep them. The notebooks were full of sketches, interspersed with shopping lists, and incomplete logs from earlier sailing trips we'd done. We found logs detailing our very first attempt at sailing offshore, our sail down the US West Coast and Mexico, and our passage from Tonga to New Zealand. We read the logs, and decided to transcribe and publish them online. Read the lost logbook.
Devine wrote a little timer program for the Adafruit Playground.
Pino book club
We're reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
August 2022
- left, added a navigation bar to navigate larger codebases.
- potato, implemented file system APIs so new files can be renamed, copied and deleted.
- noodle, added various optimizations, improved TGA support.
- Drifblim, completed rewrite. The assembler is now used to build all of our projects, with no more dependence on the C toolchain to make roms.
- Uxnlin, added a lot of recipes, making it better at finding possible code optimizations.
News
Pino is back in the land of faster internet, and our boat's belly has been re-filled with food. We returned to the Gulf Islands, and are busy eating as many wild blackberries as we can stomach ('tis the season).
Our last anchorage in Desolation Sound was tenedos bay, a really lovely place with an amazing (vertical) hike, and clear, clear waters. We also wrote a post on sturt bay on Texada Island, a place we stopped on the way up earlier this year, and again when we traveled back south.
As mentioned brieftly in our last post, Devine has been working on an OS called Potato. Rekka drew a mascot, and another illustration featuring Varvara and Potato together. Potato is for the Varvara computer, designed to fill the gaps where a host device might not have an underlying file system, like handheld consoles (many people use uxn on Nintendo DS).
Rekka has been drawing a lot, their winter will consist of scanning and processing a sketchbook-full of art. We are still proofreading wiktopher. A recent stop in Sidney permitted us to print the entire book on paper to make it easier (and more pleasant) to make corrections. The result is 70 (double-sided) pages of text. As of today, we have gone over and marked in red the first chapter (out of 12). Editing books is never easy or fast, but we'll get there.
We know a couple of people have made hako dice sets, so we feel bad for "patching" a physical game, but the face organization of the die has changed somewhat, now, the opposing sides are always of equal value. If any of you are looking for a simple 2-player boardgame to play, try Conway's Phutball. Devine transcribed the rules on their wiki.
Pino book club
We're reading Mathematical Puzzles & Diversions by Martin Gardner.
July 2022
- adelie, added image maps, animation controls, and wrote a guide. Rekka also drew an Adelie penguin mascot.
- Cccc, created a graphical calculator.
- orca, added new font to make it easier to discern letters and numbers from afar (if projected onto a screen).
- noodle, re-designed noodle.
- Minesweeper, completed the game.
News
Sometimes we find an anchorage that is so nice, so ideal, that we end up staying for weeks. We stayed in Von Donop Bay (hathayim marine park) for well over a month. The southernmost anchorage is near many trails that snake and branch out deep into the woods, and the bay is so large that we kept finding new corners to explore by dinghy. The water in the area is warmer than in Victoria, we can dive, and check Pino's bottom without freezing. This is our first real summer on the boat, when we have no big boat projects to do, nor big transits to plan, and it feels amazing.
We have stretched our food stores to the limit (it has been 2 months since we last stocked up in full). A 5 km trek through the woods takes us to a little General Store, they never have fresh produce (or it gets bought out before we get there) but we go once in a while to replenish our stock of potatoes and onions. We are relying on sprouts a lot (see growing food).
This month, we made a Keynote talk for Nime 2022, and Devine started work on a little OS project called Potato, see some footage(Mastodon). There is no documentation yet, but soon.
Pino book club
We're reading The Stories of Ray Bradbury by Ray Bradbury.
June 2022
- uxn, improved the Uxntal reference sheet and improved the Uxntal cheatsheet.
- Dexe, added menu bar.
- nasu, added menu bar.
- noodle, added menu bar.
- 100r.co, updated boom tent, and added lpg refit (backdated update).
News
Pino is currently in Desolation Sound, enjoying the quiet. We've written a few posts about some of the anchorages we've visited, like melanie cove, grace harbour and hathayim marine park. We're updating our track as we go.
Devine has been adding a lot of notes to the permacomputing wiki this month. We also started a little arcade game named Inle, something that we could play together on the boat in the style of Gunbound/Tank Wars... but with rabbits (we finished reading Watership Down last month, so we blame that, haha). We don't have a project page yet for it, but we shared some images on the post for grace harbour, where we started working on the game.
Rekka produced a video about image optimization for the Photographer's Gallery (as part of their Green Hacks video series) last month.
Pino book club
We're reading The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks.
May 2022
- Combinatory Logic, wrote a guide to combinatory logic, using talking birds.
- uxn, released a linter, and optimized uxnasm.
- Dexe, released an updated version.
- 100r.co, added batteries, and regulator.
News
From this month until next October, our updates may be delayed. We are sailing northward, towards Desolation Sound and the Broughtons, where cell towers are few. We will wander in and out of such regions all summer. So far, we sailed up to the Gulf Islands, and over to Nanaimo from Victoria, and then crossed the Strait of Georgia over to the Sunshine Coast(close-reaching in 20-knot winds). This was a good shakedown for Pino, a good way to re-awaken our little vessel. All went well, but we ought to have secured our produce better... some of our potatoes escaped their nest and went out for an afternoon roll around the cabin floor.
Start of May, we had some issues with our batteries. They've been acting out for some time, we think because of a dead cell. We have been operating at half battery capacity for a month, and realized that yet again we don't need that much power, especially in the summer when the days are long.
The combinatory logic guide is the first of many projects we plan to release this summer. We also released an sign language version of Uxntal.
In other news, a version of Collapse OS was ported to Uxn.
Pino book club
We're reading Watership Down by Richard Adams.
April 2022
- Bicycle, released an Uxntal playground. See Varvara riding a Sinclair bike.
- uxn, wrote a linux native implementation of Varvara, as well as an HTML5 implementation of the virtual machine.
- Turquoise, released a little line plotting system.
- 100r.co, added sewing, shimoda, cathedral grove and mini dodger.
- Nebu, working on a spreadsheet editor in uxn.
News
The month of April was a time of boat projects. We built a mini dodger to cover the companionway, and installed a large spindle for floating rope on Pino's stern (marine stores give those spindles away for free, usually). In these waters, it is often necessary to stern tie to shore when anchoring and the spindle will make it easier to uncoil the line.
We also took some time off to visit some ancient trees in cathedral grove on Vancouver Island.
Devine found some slide rules and wrote a guide on how to use them.
If you want to play Catpot, the little Hypercard game we made for Merveilles Hyperjam 2020, you can play it with this Hypercard Simulator (thank you Dan).
Pino book club
We're reading The Stranger by Albert Camus.
March 2022
- 100r, released a guide to diesel engine care.
- Wunderland Rabbits, released a new rabbit image.
- Toys, finished re-creating the classic bouncing ball(Mastodon) for the Amiga for Uxn.
- uxn, released a 23kb implementation of the Varvara emulator in plain X11(without SDL2), started a mailing list & newsletter to document changes, events and exciting projects, released a second devlog, and wrote a little single-file uxntal assembler called Drifblim.
- noodle, re-worked entire tool, added native TGA import(Mastodon), implemented file size loading specified in the pathname(Mastodon), added the possiblity to drag the canvas to resize it(Mastodon), and implemented a floating tool pane(Mastodon) etc.
News
A major update to our wiki is that we've put together a text with our stance on various political aspects. Because of the decentralized nature of some of our work, and because of the overlap of libertarians and right-wing doomsday preppers and our documenting survivalism at sea, there were things that just had to be spelled out quite clearly. See philosophy. We've appended a notice to our off the grid page too, since it gets shared the most.
A lot of our time this month was dedicated to preparing for our keynote talk for LibrePlanet 2022 called Software Doldrums. If you missed it the talk was recorded, watch it here. Rekka illustrated all of the slides for the presentation, gathered here. These images are now scattered on our wiki. Devine built the uxn slideshow program Adelie for that presentation, we plan to use it again for all future talks.
The day prior, Devine gave a short performance(YouTube) for Algorave's 10-year anniversary, alongside over 140+ artists. The event was 24 hours, with everyone playing a 10-minute set.
Uxn was featured on The Verge, in an article entitled These artists are making tiny ROMs that will probably outlive us all. And Devine was interviewed(Medium) for Behind the Screens.
In other news, we finally made some Uxn sticker sheets!
Pino book club
We're reading We Have Always Lives in the Castle by Shirley Jackson.
February 2022
- Adelie, released a program to create slideshows.
- grimgrains, added a new recipe: Bean chili.
- thousand rooms, released Catalan version, a translation by Dani Sevilla.
- 100r.co, added a new project: gravity water filter.
- uxn, Cancel(Andrew R.) released a new version of uxn32 with complete step debugging tools. Added new art for the Varvara docs.
- orca, implemented injections(YouTube), and J and Y wiring(YouTube).
- Toys, released uxn versions of Minesweeper(Mastodon), and Wireworld.
News
This month it was announced that we joined LibrePlanet 2022 as keynote speakers. The annual technology and social justice conference will be held virtually on March 19 and 20, 2022, with the theme Living Liberation. Our talk is named Software Doldrums.
Rekka is putting the finishing touches to the wiktopher novel, and Devine designed a game that the people of Irideri could be playing. The result was a dice game combining the capture mechanism of Go and the randomness of the Domino. Learn to play Hako. Each player has a Sonozai, a set of 4 dice on a rope. Merveillans have been making their own sets:
Rostiger has been making illustrated notes for Uxn, and they are fabulous.
Pino book club
We're reading Underland by Robert Macfarlane.
January 2022
- left, re-wrote documentation, redesigned the UX for save-as/open-as.
- orca, re-wrote documentation, and added the operators manual on launch.
- thousand rooms, released 3 new languages: Polish, Hungarian and Serbian. Now offering book as an ePUB.
- uxn, re-wrote entire documentation, and started a project devlog.
- nasu, improved zoom tool, it is now possible to move between tiles(Masto) while zoomed.
- Yufo, released a small game for the Virtual Pet Jam.
- 100r, added new page: cast iron cookware, and updated medical.
News
On January 28th Uxn turned 1 year old! We'd like to thank everyone who has contributed code, ideas, time and laughs to help this project grow into what it is now. It was a wonderful year for smol ordinators. See an image that Rekka made for uxn's birthday.
We finally released versions of the Uxn emulator for all major systems(Linux, OS X and Windows), with the option of a version bundled with a few starter roms. We simplified the uxn guide too, to make it easier to install and use.
Our lion's mane mushroom grew another full head, we harvested it and made some mushroom pakoras.
In other news, Devine was interviewed on Anonradio, listen to it here. Also, Compudanzas released an Introduction to Uxn Programming book, with a foreword by Devine.
Pino book club
We're reading The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, and The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber.