Photo by my good friend Trond Alexander Tune (Zander). Our King died yesterday. He represented Norway in a transition from the old and formal to the modern age. His warmth and inclusive mindset helped shape Norway to what it is today. He was funny and serious, down-to-earth and yet royal. He did most everything right. He even died at the right time. Missteps by other members of the royal family had been weighing down the... Read more!

I started programming when I was 13. Basic, then lots of work in FOCAL on the HP-41 calculator, then OPL, Pascal, MCODE, Assembly, Visual Basic, Ruby, Fortran, Python, Forth and more obscure languages. Lately with the use of Claude Code it’s been a massive amount of Rust and Assembly. I’m starting to lose track of it all, and being a somewhat visual guy, I decided to make a map of most of my programming projects.... Read more!

Been doing digital art since the mid-90s. Since I am living in the terminal, I decided to improve the ascii part of image displays. Usually I get images to show inline in the terminal via the kitty protocol, but now and then I am on a server via ssh and still want to see some images - or at least what they look like. Hence an update to my graphics engine. Kitty on the left... Read more!

I’ve always been drawn to the really big and the really small. From astrophysics and cosmology to particle physics and quantum mechanics. I am fascinated about what happens at the edges of reality. I started wondering about the elements beyond 120 when I was a little boy and the structure of those nuclei and their break-downs. I read frontier articles on astronomy and wondered what a 6-star system would be like. The books and the... Read more!

I love our sky. I love the terminal. Now they fuse. My astro app has always shown a star chart for the hour I pick. It fetched it from a website, as a picture, one per hour, converted through ImageMagick and cached on disk. Now it draws its own… in braille. What it draws 9,096 stars from the Yale Bright Star Catalogue, and the constellation figures. The sun, moon and planets where they actually are... Read more!

Two days ago I posted five new tools. Yesterday two more. That puts 27 apps in the Fe₂O₃ suite, and I am starting to lose sight of all the wonderful apps. So the suite got a front door, simply called fe2o3. The grid Every app as a card: its logo, what it is, one line on why. Arrow keys move. Enter runs it in the same terminal, and when you quit you are back on... Read more!

Yesterday I posted five new tools. Today there are two more, and they are both science. My mother got me going when I was 8. She pointed to the sky just above the apartment building where we lived (Tveita, Oslo) and said, “Do you see those three stars up there? That’s the belt of Orion”. I was hooked. Four years later I was hanging out at Oslo University bugging professors in astrophysics with questions about... Read more!

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!