The previous post made a case for building your own desktop. The argument was philosophical: removing multi-user accommodation eliminates substantial complexity. This post is the tally. The bottom line, before the details: +3.5 hours of battery time on my Dell XPS 14, a fan that is mostly silent, and a terminal stack that fits in 691 KB instead of 109 MB. All numbers below come from the actual binaries on my XPS 14 today, measured... Read more!

I put my own spin on Ja, vi elsker — Norway’s national anthem — and pushed it a couple of notches harder than the brass-band version you usually hear on the 17th of May. Out on Spotify now. Find me on Spotify as Geir Isene. The full back catalogue is on the Music page. Read more!

For the first time in twenty-five years I’m sitting in front of a computer where almost every program I touch was designed by me. One tool at a time, the off-the-shelf option got swapped out for something a little closer to how my hands wanted to work. (I wrote about the start of this a couple of weeks ago — that post laid out the early swaps; this one is the view from the other... Read more!

Three weeks ago I posted about bare, my login shell in pure x86_64 assembly. It was the start of a sprint. Now the whole stack is mine. bare is the shell. glass is the terminal emulator. tile is the window manager. strip is the bar. show is the file viewer. bolt is the screen locker. All in x86_64 assembly. Single static binaries with no libc or any bloat and with minimum CPU cycles. Built with... Read more!

From 1978 until summer last year I had been programming in 30+ different languages, including Assembly and lots of Ruby. Then I got going with Claude Code (CC). Since then I have ported most of my Ruby tools to Rust and then started moving my most basic tools over to pure Assembly. I haven’t typed code in the past 9 months. I am a long-time tweaker of my setup. Running Linux since 1999, I used... Read more!

Siv reminded me of something important a couple of weeks ago; “It is more important to make the other person feel good than it is to be right.” This was reinforced by a couple of comments by Morten Lind-Olsen the other day. This can be debated, and you can easily find counter-examples. But let it sink in just a bit. If the other person is not feeling good, then any right you may have or... Read more!

After more than 40 years of research into Free Will and Mathematics, I have released my work on Trans-Existential Grounding (TEG). The academic paper was accepted on PhilPapers, marking a step toward a popular science book, “The Freedom Proof”. I’ve written several articles on Free Will over the years, including the OnePageBook. But last summer I got the real breakthrough. Since then I’ve been busy formulating the mathematics and ensuring it is sound, and in... Read more!

Three shells. Three languages. One obsession with going deeper. And faster. I started with hand-crafting rsh. Written in Ruby over a few years. Now 4,048 lines, full-featured, comfortable, slow. 300 millisecond startup. Fine for a scripting language, frustrating when I open lots of terminals in quick succession. Then I decided to rush to the next level. Rewriting rsh in Rust. Rush has 4,280 lines, same feature set, 26 millisecond startup. Part of the Fe2O3 suite... Read more!

Nine months ago I stopped reading code. I haven’t read a single line of code since July 2025 - including all my main projects like my shell, file manager, my TUI library and all the other terminal tools I use every day. And in those nine months, I have produced far more software than in any comparable period of my 40-year programming career. The Numbers Since July 1, 2025, working with Claude Code: 1,224 commits... Read more!

“Dad, I sent you a message.” “Where? Discord? Messenger? Insta? WhatsApp? Email? Telepathy? Where??” Back in 2007 I had an idea. Collect all messages from all sources into one communication hub. Email, chat, RSS, forums, news, everything. Then create special “views” into all of it, like a “family view” or a “project X view.” When you answer, it replies on the incoming channel. Simple concept. I never built it. Too complex, too much effort. Until... Read more!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the use of AI in programming. And I’ve had an epiphany that I believe explains a lot. When I do low-level programming on my HP-41 calculator, the fun is in the coding itself. Not the result. It’s like my collecting of old HP calculators - the joy was never in having a collection. It was in the collecting. If somebody would simply offer me a complete collection for... Read more!

It’s getting cold in Oslo. Had a dinner with the boss two days ago, should have been dressed better for the biting cold. Instead I got a cold. With fever today and a stand-up meeting from bed, I wasn’t much for work. So I decided to build a bootable 64-bit operating system from absolute scratch in a single session. A real x86_64 OS with a working Forth interpreter using Claude Code. My Assembly skills are... Read more!