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!

I’m reading an article with a bunch of words I don’t recognize. I could open a browser window with Dictionary.com. Or I could revert to asking Claude for the meaning of each word. I am reading the article in my newly forged text editor, scribe. What if there was a quick shortcut that would give me the definition in a popup. And only the definition that fits the context. Two minutes later that functionality is... Read more!

Why is the fan so noisy? It’s my brand new Dell XPS 14, and the fan is noticeably, annoyingly, incessantly… there. Not really loud by anyone’s measure. But it’s there. And thus it started. Tweaking the power profile, downloading the latest firmware, tweaking the power profile some more, waiting for new firmware… nope. Still there. What is making it noisy? CPU is heating up. Clocked the CPU down. Still noisy. What is making the CPU... Read more!

It’s been an interesting few days with insightful comments related to my latest developments. The sharpest pushback on my desktop post — the one about replacing my desktop with software I’d built — was a single line in the lobste.rs thread: How is this OSS/FS promise if you have just hard locked yourself into using an insanely big subscription-based closed source software (claude)? You sure that it’s liberating? It’s a fair charge and I want... Read more!

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!