I keep building the tools I use. I know, the world doesn’t need another calculator, but I do. My Fe₂O₃ suite of Rust terminal tools has swallowed almost everything I run in a day. Over the last five weeks it got five new members. I have an itch. I scratch. Or I get an urge, and by evening it was a binary in ~/bin. elements The periodic table in the terminal. All 118 of them,... Read more!

For a couple of years I have used one task as my litmus test for AI models: Create a fantasy font suitable for the Kingdom of Amar, my role-playing world. I want a TTF file I can install and write with. Every model has failed. Say hello to Fable. Why is this hard? A font is pure geometry. The model must place every point of every letter by numbers, blind. It cannot look at what... Read more!

I have spent more than forty years researching free will and several years on the Freedom Proof, a mathematical argument that free will grounds existence. There is a presentation, an academic paper and a companion paper on Petri nets. Heavy stuff that could use a simple introduction. So I made a four minute track. It walks the whole argument in plain words. Everything that exists has properties. Where do the basic properties come from? Gödel... Read more!

On my quest to own my software, one foundational piece kept itching… the X server. The underlying graphics engine, the thing that puts pixels on the screen. X11 is 4 million lines of code, a beast very few can claim they understand. So I did the reasonable thing. I wrote my own, in Assembly. It is called frame. No dependencies, no libraries, no garbage collector. No hot paths, no unnecessary wakeups. When it is idle,... Read more!

Back in my consulting days I toyed with Petri nets to map business processes. Circles hold tokens, bars fire, tokens move. It could be used for finding bottlenecks. I never could find any serious application for them, filed them under useful engineering and moved on. For years I have worked on the Freedom Proof, a mathematical argument that free will grounds existence. Recently I got the hunch that there could be a connection here to... Read more!

On my quest to own my software, I am in the process of adding an X server to CHasm. That means reducing the 4M lines of code in X11 to the exact set of functionality I need in a fraction of the size and in pure Assembly. I spent the weekend getting a functional X server running but then hit a wall. After getting GIMP to run on frame, there were serious issues with getting... Read more!

I started programming on calculators in the late 70s. Always fascinated with the HP-41 that came out in the 80s. Did a huge number of projects on that beauty, including lots of Assembly programming. That led me to create the XRPN programming language back in 2022 - an extension to the RPN language of the HP-41. But I have been toying with the idea of a really simple programming language since the mid 90s. A... Read more!

A few weeks ago, I embarked upon a journey of creating my own desktop environment in pure Assembly. A tiling window manager, a terminal, a shell with nothing between my keystrokes and the kernel, all in x86_64 assembly, no libc, the whole desktop measured in kilobytes. Then I replaced my main tools with my own Rust equivalents. An email and messaging center, a new text editor, a calendar, a Spotify player, an astronomy program, and... Read more!

About ten years ago I made my first phone app. It was a simple browser for d6gaming.org, the wiki for my Amar role-playing game. A glorified web view. It worked, barely, and I never built anything more complex. Real apps — with their own logic, their own data, their own storage on the device always felt like a mountain I wasn’t going to climb. Then tasks happened, in a single evening. And once that mountain... Read more!

There was this one itch yesterday; I’ve been using Hyperlist for my todo list since 2007. And with scribe now smoothly handling Hyperlists natively, I was really happy. But not quite overjoyed. While calendar events do show up on both my laptop and my phone via various cloud calendars, my Todo Hyperlist was stuck on my laptop. But first I need to rewind a bit. A few days ago I added an AI feature into... Read more!

For five weeks I’ve been chasing more battery life for my laptop. I’ve been churning out several projects every week to replace my old desktop setup. Two suites make up the endeavour: CHasm and Fe₂O₃. They are now grouped into one project: Watt — The Lean Desktop Project. Why? Pick the metric. The reason the fan went quiet, the battery now lasts 19 hours, and the desktop now fits me perfectly… it’s all the same... Read more!

With Terminal User Interface (TUI) for everything fiesible, my XPS 14 now idles at no more than 3.6W (sometimes even below 3W) with the screen at 70% brightness. The battery is 70 Wh. That gives: 70 Wh ÷ 3.6W ≈ 19.4 hours of idle battery life. A full workday and then some, on a single charge, screen on. With screen off (lid closed but laptop not suspended), the drain is around 1.5W. How I got... Read more!