charles childers is _ _ _ _ __ ___ __(_) |_(_)_ __ __ _ (_)_ __ \ \ /\ / / '__| | __| | '_ \ / _` | | | '_ \ \ V V /| | | | |_| | | | | (_| | | | | | | \_/\_/ |_| |_|\__|_|_| |_|\__, | |_|_| |_| |___/ _ _ _ ___ _ __ ___ __ _| | | _ __ (_) ___ ___ ___ ___ / __| '_ ` _ \ / _` | | | | '_ \| |/ _ \/ __/ _ \/ __| \__ \ | | | | | (_| | | | | |_) | | __/ (_| __/\__ \ |___/_| |_| |_|\__,_|_|_| | .__/|_|\___|\___\___||___/ |_| ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.27 I'll start #DecemberAdventure a little early: starting today I will write some code every day through the end of December. I'm probably not going to stick to a single project though. Today I wrote a small RetroForth & shell script to export text copies of blocks to a file in my ~/forth.works/share dir. This makes it easier to share sets with others. Blocks 4992 - 5023 are set aside for the December Adventure. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.26 Not much to report today. For Konilo on iOS, I added enough of (termina) to allow a little use of catalogue, tuhi, wisp, wiki, the manual browser, etc. It doesn't do color or cursor positioning yet. In December, I'll be partaking in #DecemberAdventure, where I'll write some code each day. This should be fun. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.25 I have now written a multiple ilo implementation. This allows a single process to switch between several (currently 32) ilo instances, each with separate RAM and stacks, but all sharing a common block set. The ilo systems are not running concurrently; only one is active at a time. This is intended to be more useful in the future, with plans to allow switching systems via hot keys on a future hardware device. ilo/native (x86) has better backspace handling now, and I can update the floppy image from OpenBSD now, so future updates will be easier. Now to tackle graphics... ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.24 I rested in for a couple of hours, then kept an eye on emails. Nothing significant came, so I was able to avoid working. It was nice. For dinner I made a split pea soup. Arland roasted the veg & cubed pork, and I did the broth & split peas. 8 cups of water, eight cubes of bouillon, green onion, herb de provenance, salt, pepper, and garlic. It turned out very nice; I'll make it again. I am going to start reading the multiboot documentation more to see if I can get a VGA or VESA display mode working. I also want to setup testing under GRUB2, but have not done this yet. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.23 Thanksgiving today, so I'm off work until Monday. I rested for several hours, then got up. I prepaired and tested a combined update/install kernel, so I will be able to make this all fit onto one floppy. I'll build that tomorrow or Saturday. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.22 I'm really tired today. As I lay unable to sleep, I spent some time considering Konilo on x86. I am going to make some alterations to aid in making it easier to get started. There'll be an "install" kernel that will copy the system blocks to disk, and an "update" kernel that will replace the system blocks (other than configuration ones) with the latest set. This will still require a dedicated machine (or at least drive) and a separate boot disk, but will make it much easier to get started on real hardware. Update: it's 21:46, and I have now created an "install" kernel which copies the system blocks to disk. I'll do the "update" kernel shortly, then make a disk image. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.21 I setup some emulated NetBSD and OpenBSD systems so I could get a few more binaries. NetBSD/pmax (mips) and OpenBSD/luna88k (88000) are now covered. For the luna88k build, this needed a big endian adapted ilo, so I've also added this to the source tree. There are a number of targets I'm interested in. I'd like to do RISC-V, Sparc, PowerPC, and Alpha as well. It'll be a while though. I had talked with Arland in the past about doing floppies with Konilo. I've now crafted a floppy disk image with the image, system blocks, binaries, and source. It's pretty full, but it fits, and seems to be easy to load into emulators. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.20 When working with Konilo, I have to remind myself that this is not a Unix. I have a few things (like nonix) that are lightly rooted in Unix, but it really is a chance to have a fresh start. This doesn't necessarily mean that I can't leverage Unix though. Retro is a very solid system on Unix, and with block support it can let me do some useful things like generating HTML copies of blocks in my wiki, or backing up changed blocks. I can't lean too heavily into this though, since Konilo does run on non-Unix hosts (e.g., Mac/68k, MS-DOS, or native). I feel like Konilo is slowly progressing into a very useful (for me) system. It's going to be interesting to see what changes await over the next year. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.19 I continued to work on huatango (the block tools). The `-titles` and `-locate` are added. Several more of the easier ones will be added tomorrow. Arland has done more work on Braceless C, intending to fix the issue with blank lines in a function. I'll test this tomorrow. With this being Thanksgiving week, I'll have a shorter work week. I'm hoping the week will be calm and quiet. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.18 I've been relaxing today. It's a little cool outside, which was nice after the warm day yesterday. I do love fall weather. This evening I started a fresh rewrite of the block diff tools. The original ones I wrote are functional, but I decided to make several changes that I think will make them better for me. A repository for the diff tools now exists, and I'll be pushing commits to it soon. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.17 Today I worked in my wiki; adding 32 new blocks. I have some rough ideas on locating links to missing pages, so may start writing code for this soon. I've restarted some work on the block editor for ARKS. This will use byte-packed blocks, so will have longer blocks. I think the title line will maintain use of 32-bit characters though, to keep better compatibility with the existing tooling. Following some convention, these blocks will be identified by a few cells in the title line. Arland will be home for a day or so tomorrow, so we may get a fe more issues resolved in Braceless C. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.16 This morning I wrote a decompressor for ulz, a small compression format from @neauoire. This was done in RetroForth. It was a fun exercise. I'm doing some cleanup work on the diff tools and have begun a bit of a writeup on them. I made a small display tweak to (tuhi), so a space is shown both before and after each line, to make it more consistent. Should I write an X11 window manager? I don't /need/ to do this, but since I'm using X11 now, it might be nice to have another piece of /night software/, to borrow a name from Alex Schroeder. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.15 bsd.cafe now has a lemmy instance. I'm registered as crc there. It's FreeBSD 14 release day, so I get to update arneson. This is always a little uncomfortable. Since everything on the system has been up to date, this should go smoothly. Update: server upgrade finished w/o any issues. On the block diff/patch tools: I have the initial code for all of the main pieces done. Still lots to do, but I can make binary diffs now, so I'll start to work this into my backup and fossil workflows. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.14 I have ported several small programs (retro-unu, pali, part of the new block diff/patch tooling) to Braceless C. Doing this has identified a couple areas needing work; I emailed some details to Arland. Update: Arland fixed most of the reported issues. On the diff/patch tool, creation and basic display of patch sets is done. Tomorrow I'll do a textual comparison view, then start the remaining tools needed. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.13 Arland is working on Braceless C; a couple of updates were added today. There's still work to be done, but I'm starting to make use of it in other projects now, so I'll be able to provide feedback over time. I am writing a set of tools for creating and managing a diff & patch set for the block file. After some experimenting today, I have a functional `altered-blocks` which creates a binary file with the modified blocks. Tomorrow I'll do a tool to review the changes, then work on tools to apply the changes. This will get me closer to having a much more space efficient way to store & review changes over time. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.12 I added a fossil repository for Arland's Braceless C. There are going to be a number of things to do before this is ready for use outside of testing, but I did a quick adaption of ilo.c into it, and it works for that. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.11 Arland has the initial Braceless C working now. I'll do some work on it soon. Just resting today. Tomorrow I'll do some coding. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.10 I have a color-capable ilo-x11 now. And it's a lot faster to update and redraw the screen. Arland & I did some work on a "C Without Braces or Semicolons". This is not working yet. Arand thinks he'll be able to get it working soon. Arland has begun a new Graphica implementation atop the faster ilo-x11. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.09 Mostly done ilo-x11. I have some ideas for color support, and am still looking at performance improvements. I need to finish the nga-x11 soon. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.08 I have now uploaded my RAW fonts (in 8x16) to charles.childe.rs These are all suitable for use with Konilo or RetroForth on X11. In the evening I was able to implement lines and triangles. It's enough for now, but I should probably do filled shapes and set- ting the drawing color. Tomorrow I may write a bit on my early goals for 2024. While still several weeks out, it'll be good to try to organize my thoughts a little. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.07 Color selection. Konilo + X11 is a monochrome experience. The only small splash of color is the cursor. I'm using a bright red for this, which is easy to see against the black backdrop. For RetroForth + X11, I'm doing a white on dark blue, with a cyan cursor. This makes it easy to quickly identify them. RetroForth now haas support for the pixel, get_pixel, and mouse devices. For my patrons, I posted some documentation on the drawing words. Tomorrow I will try to finish more drawing words. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.06 I spent my programming time doing more work on X11 bits. I now have a partial Nga with X11 support. Tomorrow I'll start the process of adding the i/o interface code so I can port the ilo drawing words over. Otherwise, not much to report. It was cool today, but seems to be warming up outside. My glucose issues are improving a little. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.05 I added some initial cursor support to ilo/x. This needs some refinements, but already makes a big difference in usability with the termina programs. The next steps are to get the stability improvements from the ilo-safer.c in place, then to add support for Xresources to set foreground & background color. Health: I was able to get several hours of sleep this morning, and my glucose is still quite high. I'm going to start back on IF and working towards a short 1-2 hour eating window to see if I can get my glucose levels to lower levels overall. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.04 I continue to suffer from high blood glucose. This is troubling. I've started on a kqueue approach to uxn11, but it's not working yet. I'll be taking a break until later as my hands are starting to hurt a little. Up to this point, my X11 setups have either been using dwm or cwm with four xterm. I am going to change this, to let me have a layout focused on a Konilo window. As work on this progresses, I may be able to drop the xterm sessions and just run my system on X. It's already tempting to try this... ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.03 I attempted to build uxn11 on my OpenBSD box, but the lack of a set of Linux-specific system calls kept me from completing it. I was able to build the SDL2 version, and have the "essentials" up on my dev box. For RetroForth, akritid in #retro prompted me to finish up some work on retro-describe(1). This is now considerably faster (as is anything using file:read-line). I have one more word to work on (file:write-line), but am pleased with the results so far. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.02 I did end up writing a turtle (t:) vocabulary, along with circle (no filled variants of rect or circle yet, and still no triangle or arbitrary lines). I'm going to take a short break from this to work on RetroForth tomorrow. My blood glucose is high again (running between 300-430, even after over 200u of insulin on the day). Hoping this resolves soon... ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.11.01 November is here. And it's finally getting cooler, so I'll be able to spend more time outdoors. In ilo/x, I've added basic lines (hline, vline, and diagonals) as well as rect. I didn't get to do the circles or arbitrary lines yet. I might try for turtle graphics (at least to a limited degree). ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.31 The ilo/x system has seen more work done. It's a little faster now and I added i/o ports for reading and setting pixels. Now I can write some words to do basic drawing. Doing this in Forth will be slow, but I can live with that for now. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.30 I didn't get the Napia code packaged. But I did work on ilo/x. And it's working. I'm using a 1bpp framebuffer, with the DEC bits from Arland. Just terminal emulation so far, but it's all working. I'm writing this entry under it. Tomorrow I will try to do some performance improvements and general source cleanup. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.29 Today was Tammie's birthday. We spent it at home, resting. Arland is working on a cake, hopefully for tomorrow. I have to smuggle a few supplies to him. Tomorrow I'll finish Konilo+Napia release, and get it published. It's yet another overdue task. I need to start budgeting more time for these projects. Also tomowrrow: I will be working on the next bits of the X11 ilo. Initial goal is to be able to emulate a basic terminal; Arland will look at expanding to support (graphica) later. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.28 I've caught up on some rest (slept from 0600 to 1100), so that's a good start to the day. I wrote & published a weekly Patreon update. Today will be mostly resting further. I'll be doing a little in the wiki, and probably a little more on robot-finds-kitten. It's probable that there wont be a lot of progress today. Benjamin is off at Dorney Park as part of a band trip. He won't be home until about 0100 tomorrow. That's quite likely to be an interruption of sleep, so I expect to still be tired tomorrow. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.27 Another sleepess night. I seem to be coming down with something. At work I spent most of my day sorting tools and getting them separated for shipment to our nine branches. This was long and tedious. It'd have been better if the team working on this yes- terday had actually finished, or at least accurately tracked the part they did. I'll write the Week in Review post tomorrow. Going to rest now. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.26 Yesterday evening I setup what should be my final VNC configs on ansuli & Arland's box. I'm running 4x terminals w/Konilo. The layout is a 2x2 grid, using cwm, and I have xeyes & xclock at the bottom. I like it. I began working on (tito), a vocabular for writing interactive fiction. This is being based on my earlier work in Retro 11, but will not be a direct translation. I intend to take some advant- age of the block based nature of Konilo. I am also starting on something like cal(1) in Konilo. I have a couple of prototypes, so hopefully can get a full implementation done pretty quickly. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.25 Back to not sleeping. Ugh. In #retro on irc.oftc.net, fangchar reported a couple of bugs in RetroForth. I've fixed both now. (I'm likely going to do a new release before the planned 2024.4 one, as a number of issues have been fixed now) The (termina) interface to (wiki) now has a key binding for adding new pages. Arland will be home tonight. We may discuss Graphica a bit. I am considering some of the keyboard/mouse handling stuff and how to make it more responsive. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.24 I was able to get a few hours of sleep at last. Feeling a little better this morning. I've merged a copy of Arland's s:dedup code into my personal block set. I made a couple of small changes to naming to keep it in a single block. This depends on (ll) so I added a load block as well. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.23 Another sleepless night... I merged the .h files into the .c for ilo-x86-native. There's no functional change with this, but it makes the source more consi- stent with the other implementations in terms of keeping files to a minimum. In Retro, I moved some files to package/extensions. This will be done for several of the Forth-side device vocabularies (for less major ones) to hopefully make it easier to manage some parts of the build process. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.22 I woke up with very high glucose and a massive headache. It took about six hours to get my glucose back to a safe-ish level. I'm trying to setup an ESP32 toolchain on OpenBSD. It'd be nice not to need the Arduino software & Windows for building ilo for the dev board I have. For RetroForth, I added a bunch of missing source data, then began making the output from `make` less noisy. Also fixed some casting issues, and may have found an issue with `s:dedup`. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.21 Too tired to write today. My glucose issues are getting worse. This is troubling; I will be trying to find a doctor soon. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.20 I was able to get a 32-bit Nga in D written. This took a little longer than the ilo in D, but I'm happy that it's functional. i still need to do some optimizations, and add stack class. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.19 Going to dive into RetroForth for a bit. I'm still exhausted, so I just added some NOP skipping today, and setup a source tree for a D implementation. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.18 In Konilo, I've cleaned up the D implementation a little more. I'll probably start a Nga in D soon. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.17 It's the second day in my work week, and I'm still covering for a coworker for another week. I'm quite tired, and not really feeling like doing much. In the D implementation, I've added classes for stack & memory, and some range checks. (This is for Konilo). ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.16 OpenBSD 7.4 released today, so I've updated my dev box & the one Arland uses. Updates are easy: sysupgrade; pkg_add -Uu; sysmerge then any manual adustments the install guide lists. Stuff today: a little work towards the "robot finds kitten" game (will be for both Retro & Konilo), and I'm doing some tests on SwiftUI, trying to figure out a good way to deal with the connection between the file manager & the editor. I've also setup a fresh ports tree so I can finish the update to the FreeBSD port of RetroForth. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.15 This was a lazy day: just focused on resting and a bit of reading. I started setup work to try to get my Mac to backup via rsync, but am getting the stupid "broken pipe" errors that plague SSH on macOS. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.14 I wrote an implementation of ilo in D. This was quite easy; and is quite similar to C. I had a few small issues around division, but was able to resolve them quickly. I'll mark this as one to work on more (I'd like to do a version using D's classes for the stacks). Haskell would be an interesting target (suggested on Mastodon), but there's not enough space on my dev server to install GHC. I've attempted to free up space on the VPS for GHC, but there's just not enough space with the partition setup I have. Maybe I can set this up on Arland's system... ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.13 The small delays in input handling under c-r-t are not bad; I am finding that they actually fit with my slower typing of late. Next up for me is getting Konilo/napia ready for release. It's similar to the main Konilo system, so should be easy? ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.12 The "cool-retro-term" works much more smoothly when run directly on a physical machine. I quite like it. For VNC, I've turned off all the effects except for burn in and bleed, and I'm pretty happy with the result. On the release front, I'm about half done with the release notes and am mostly finished packing the files up. This will be done today. (14:15 update: it's done!) ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.11 Good news is that I was able to get some sleep last night. I'm still very tired, but if I can repeat this for a few days, I should be feeling better. I saw an article (https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/10/23911145/) discussing a "personal cloud computer". This is quite opposite of what I think of as a personal computer. A personal computer really shouldn't be cloud-first and heavy on AI. Local storage, and understandable by its user are important here. I've been playing with cool-retro-term on OpenBSD. I like it. Under VNC, it's sluggish unless many of the effects are disabled but it definitely reminds me of my times using an actual termin- al. Maybe I should start watching for a real terminal again... ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.10 It was a busy day at work. I had an early dinner, then went to bed. During lunch break I did some prep work on the 2023.10 release packaging of Konilo. I might be able to finish up on Wednesday if it's not too busy. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.09 Still not sleeping well, but I've been semifunctional today. For ilo, I've done a little work on ilo+graphica. The character display code has been refactored, and I added NOP skipping. Some experiments have been done on autoselecting the opcodes/event tuning, but this is not yet done. I wrote a little overview of the * load blocks. This will be put on Patreon tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll do more on the verbose execution in RetroForth. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.08 No programming today, instead I spent the day setting up some emulators on the M1 Mac mini. It seems to be pretty good for this. For the iPad, I now have a USB-C HDMI input dongle, so I can use it as a display for my S22 Ultra or other devices. I'm using an application named Orion for this. It's a little odd to run an Android interface on the iPad, but the extra screen space is nice. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.07 I wasn't able to sleep until almost 3AM, but did manage to get some sleep after that, until about 9AM. Not doing much typing today as I'm still exhausted. I placed the order for the TTGO VGA Controller w/PS2 & ESP32. It should arrive in a few weeks; I'm quite looking forward to implementing ilo for it. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.06 I did not get any sleep last night. The exhaustion is making it difficult to do anything. Despite my exhaustion, I was able to get some typing done, so the updated Konilo manual is ready to merge. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.05 Last night was a little better; I'm a bit less exhausted today. I spent a few minutes last night working on RetroForth/iOS. I'm hoping to have my source editor fully tied to the file manager in the next day. At that point I can release the beta, even if a variety of other things aren't quite done. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.04 I was not able to sleep last night, so I am very, very tired today. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.03 I didn't sleep well last night, so am very tired today. In the IRC channel, sevan reported a bug in retro-muri.c, and also found issues with the test code for the instruction set. I have fixed these in the repository, and will be issuing a new release merging in the fixes in a few days. For Konilo, I need a little more time to finish some revisions in the manual. I should be done these within another day or two. There's also a few needed updates to the glossry blocks. Tonight I'll start considering how to get started with writing a tool for tracking bugs. And toy with adding color to Arland's (game:pig). ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.02 I've made more progress on the iOS interface. I should have the editor tied into the file manager in another evening, then I can finally get a TestFlight build issued. Using a much larger font (28pt) is kind o nice. I much prefer a easily readable display. Hard to do this on my phone though... ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.10.01 Today was spent on RetroForth/iOS. The new SwiftUI based code has seen significant progress. I have a functional Listener, and most of the editor functionality done. The file manager is also getting close to being usable. TestFlight build *will* be published this week. RetroForth 2023.9 is now out. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.30 I worked with Arland last night; we now have his Pig game in the blocks. I refactored the display code and added a (termina) wrapper; he added code to display the dice face. I've had some ideas for a faster way to find things in the blocks. It's not something I will be writing yet, but I'd like to start experiments on this towards the end of the year. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.29 It's been raining on and off today. I'm enjoying it. The block reorganization should be done tonight, then I can prepare the subset for the sample blocks in the upcoming Konilo release. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.28 Trying to balance multiple projects is difficult. I'm going to try to plan my time more carefully, in hopes that I can divide my efforts in a more balanced fashion. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.27 After I get the 2013.9 releases of Retro & Konilo finished, I'd like to take a short diversion to document my two personal comp- uting evironments. At this point there are two, one based on Retro, and one based on Konilo. Last night on Mastodon, eli_oat shared a link to Uiua, a stack based array language written in Rust. It looks like this will be a fun thing to play around with. (Eventually I want to make a vocabulary for working with APL-style arrays, so things like this are helpful in my research towards this.) ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.26 I've noticed that the native version of Konilo does not seem to have the colors quite right in (termina). I'll look at this. I'm going to write a bug tracker in Konilo & RetroForth. Or at least attempt to do so. (Details on the bugs will be in the blocks, with Retro used to create a web/gopher/gemini display of them). I gave up on fixing RetroForth/iOS. The storyboards are proving annoying to try to fix, so instead I'm rewriting the interface using SwiftUI, but leaving most of the backend code in place. It's my first mixed-language Swift & Objective-C project now. So far I have the basic framework for the editor, documentation, & settings. Tonight I'll work on the file manager. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.25 Rain again. At least it's comfortably cool outside now. I decided to setup a directory to start working on an x86 native + graphica system. This will hopefully (eventually) let me have Arland's stuff working without an underlying OS. I will be adding NOP skipping and a couple of superinstructions to the DOS ilo vm. This should make it slightly less painful to use on older hardware. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.24 Another rainy day. I've done some work on the block reorg. It'll be a couple of day to finish. I also have started updating the Storyboards for RetroForth/iOS to try to fix the keyboard issue. It's unlikely to be complete today, but maybe on Monday? ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.23 Still having weird spikes & crashes in my blood glucose levels. It's a cool, rainy day today. Just spending some time reading and resting currently. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.22 I made headway in getting a Konilo + ilo using floating point stacks and memory working. The Konilo image isn't yet working, but I have been able to load and run some smaller test images. I moved forthworks.com to the new server today. There'll be a few more things to get up and running (the glossary server and dict servers particularly), but it's working and I think that I should be nearly done now. The only remaining thing is my sisters website, which uses PHP. I'm looking at my options for dealing with this one. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.21 I've tracked the issue with RetroForth on iOS to the keyboard display. I'm resizing the views when the keyboard opens and then resetting them when it closes. But iOS 16 or 17 changed some parts of how the keyboard is handled, so I'm working on adding revised constraints to the views so I can hopefully have it fixed soon. Rick posted a picture of an ESP32 board with VGA and PS/2 mouse and keyboard. I'm going to order one to port Konilo to. It'll be interesting. There's mention of a `FabGL` library for the VGA, but this is GPL, so I might want to write my own. Tomorrow starts the next round of block reorganization as I get ready to finalize the 2023.9 release. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.20 I've run into a number of issues with RetroForth on iOS after building with the latest Xcode. Most are pretty small, but one is causing the display to be replaced by a blank view after the keyboard is closed. I'm working on fixing this before I push a public TestFlight build. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.19 In Konilo I've added a couple of blocks with initial support for unsigned maths and comparisons. These are in `(crc:unsigned)`. I also began working on a vocabulary for double cell numbers. This is new: I've never actually implmented this in my systems, so I'm learning as I go. The double cell code is in the `(crc:double)` blocks. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.18 I've added a VGA-based color palette for Arland's Graphica and set it as the default. It's now close to identical to the normal terminal colors, making stuff using Termina display as intended. I now have a remote VNC connection to my OpenBSD box, so I can test Graphica when not at home. This will be helpful. My remote setup is basically the same as at home. X, a lightly tweaked dwm, and three xterm windows. I've dabbled with a few other window managers, but don't really want a non-tiled one and since I only ever have 3-5 windows, dwm works well. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.17 Another bad night w/high glucose. I wasn't really functional until late in the day. I need to figure out why this is happening. I may not be able to finish the TestFlight beta today; if I can't, I'll probably push for Monday or Tuesday. Hopefully tonight will be better... ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.16 Not feeling well. Possibly due to glucose issues from the last few days. I worked a little on the iOS RetroForth build. I need to get a few more hours of testing before I can push the TestFlight beta. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2032.09.15 Last night was really bad. My blood glucose spiked to 506, then dropped down to 148. (Up from 197 initially). All of this over a five hour span. Ugh. I hate diabetes. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.14 The manual is up to 98 blocks, with several more in various stages of completion. I'm hoping to be around 150 blocks by Monday. I also noticed that the ilo-x86-native floppy image used in the demo was running an old, pre-(termina) capable display driver. I've updated this, and it now works properly. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.13 It was a stressful day at work. But the evening was calmer and I was able to rest a bit. Arland sent me the first draft of his Pig game. I merged part of it (the random number generator) as `(dusk:rng)`. After a read, I identified a few issues that he is addressing before he moves on to working on a (termina) interface for it. I've expanded my backups to rsync.net. At present I have about 35gb of data backed up via nightly cron jobs. Before bed I'll start writing a new section in the manual. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.12 I finished migration of retroforth.org to the new server today. The big remaining one is forthworks.com. I'm still looking at what will be needed for this. It's the only one running Atua (as it's a Gopher server), so I'll need to see if I can run Atua-WWW on a separate port and have httpd redirect port 80 to it for this domain. Other bits: I wrote a bunch of new words for doing indent, unindent, cut, copy, and paste in the block editor. These are in (opt:editor-ext) if you want them. They are pretty handy, but will use ~600-700 cells of space. Arland has been writing a 'pig' game. I'll look at it later. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.11 I have a small schedule change at work (now 6:00 to 15:00). So the change is going to take a few days to get used to. I've started reading a little on 'virtio' and doing a closer look at x86-64, in preparation for hopefully starting a second 'native' ilo implementation. (Or perhaps third, since I do have the Teensy one). At work they told me to expect a new laptop next week. So now I get to start making backups of the current one to prepare for migrating to a Windows 11 laptop. Other things: I finished setting up forth.chat yearly archives, and am getting very close to pushing the new file: words. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.10 I setup the staging environment for RetroForth 2023.09 and Konilo 2023.09. There'll be two Konilo releases: one with ilo and one with napia. I'm expecting to publish the a release candidate at the end of next week. Things to look forward to over the coming week: finishing file: additions in RetroForth, preparing the final starter block set for Konilo. Finishing the Graphica documentation. I'd like to expand the Konilo manual a bit more as well, but am unsure if I'll have time to do so this week. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.09 In Chrono Trigger I'm now done about a third of the game, and am taking a break until at least Monday. I have the rsync.net account created, and have run the first backups. I've crafted cron jobs to do these daily. No programming today. Just resting for the rest of the day. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.08 The only programming done today was tests on new file: words in RetroForth (for use with utf8/32 translation). This is going well, so should be committed next week. Tomorrow I'll set up an rsync.net account and begin getting a proper backup of the server in place. For now, I'm going to spend a little time playing through Chrono Trigger. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.07 I've moved Arland's server contents to the new server. My personal wiki has picked up several new blocks. I hope to be able to continue adding at least one block a day with various notes and informational bits. I now wish to write some tools to help find wiki blocks more easily. Not sure what this will look like though. Tomorrow I will be trying to get back into Graphica to finish updating my draft of the updated documentation for the core functionality. A side thing: I should have a new beta of RetroForth for iOS next week unless my hand pain starts increasing. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.06 I've finished much of the work to get the new server functional. At this point I have OpenBSD httpd configured, working with TLS, using certbot to get the certificates and a cron job to update them. Other than retroforth.org, I have all the content from the main server copied over. Tomorrow I'll be working on setting up the various cron jobs, then starting to look at getting Atua up and running. I'll need to write a new tool to generate index.html files from the goph- ermap files before I can bring over forthworks.com. Forth stuff: I'm looking at some small programs and games for a 'zine. Will be discussing this more with Arland soon. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.05 I started setting up a new server. This will replace the two which host retroforth.org and forthworks.com, and also several others that I use for other things. The new one is more capable. It's a Linode with 4 CPU, 8GB RAM, 160GB disk space. I have it running FreeBSD 13.2 with ZFS. I'm running it with OpenBSD's HTTPd. I'll maintain an option to flip to using Casket for testing, but until I can get it working better under load the pragmatic choice is to use a more conven- tional server. Gopher will continue to be under Atua. The full migration will be done in stages, over this month. I have moved forth.chat, retroforth.net, and retroforth.com over. Tomorrow I'll begin the shift of retroforth.org over to it. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.04 Today is Labor Day in the United States, so I was off work. It is nice to be off on holidays as I generally don't face any inquiries from customers and can relax more than normal. It's hot again, and looks to remain hot for the rest of the week. I'm not happy about this, but will try to stay cool. I started a few early bits towards the new filesystem code. It isn't going to be a high priority project, and might never get released, but this one might work out better than the last few. Tomorrow I'll be starting on words to read/write uncode charac- ters in data files. This will add several new word to the file: namspace. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.03 No programming today. But some reading of old Unix sources was done, and I created a fresh block set for future file system experiments. I had a hard time sleeping last night, so spent much of the day resting. I am starting to experiment with using `rsync`. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.02 I was up late, and slept in. Some time was spent on server maintenance. I'll be moving some things to a new server soon (consolidating three of mine into a single one with more resources). I'm gathering usage data from them to prepare for setting up the new one. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.09.01 It's September. With no one bugging me I was able to get the small amount of needed work done early, then I was able to rest for a few hours. On the Mac, I had no luck with OpenBSD or FreeBSD. I did get a Linux install running. I tried out KDE a bit, then Gnome. Some quick observations: KDE is fast under Wayland. Gnome is slow, but notably quicker with X11. (Still slower than KDE). I dislike seeing so much running under systemd in the process list. So what's next? I have a "week in review" to finish writing, then will probably write a "pig" dice game (or at least start this) ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.31 I'll be (mostly) off work tomorrow. Looking forward to this; a four day "weekend" is a pretty nice break and I can hopefully get some rest in addition to doing some writing & programming. It's warm today, but the humidity is down. This is nice; I hope for a long break from the summer heat. On my Mac mini, I setup Cheetah, which is a front end to the macOS virtualization framework. I'll see if I can figure out how to setup a BSD on it, or at least a Linux. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.30 I'm starting to feel better. I added a few new blocks to the wiki. I am hoping to add a block at least every other day until the overall contents get up to a large enough set to help idenitify additional tooling needed to make it more usable. Good news: I'll be off work Friday and Monday, giving me a nice four day weekend to rest and hopefully do some programming and writing. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.29 Still not back to normal. Work was stressfull. UTF32 for source files is now working in RetroForth. This was a longer than expected process, but I'm pleased to say that it seems stable and doesn't appear to have broken anything. Space on the OpenBSD server has been freed up. I'll be good for a while now, though I will look at replacing it with a new install after I retire toot.forth.works. Tomorrow I start on UTF32 support for general file i/o and the UTF3 conversion device/vocabuary. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.28 I'm still feeling sick. When I got to work I felt ok, but have been feeling worse as the day goes on. I moved the insulin cost & dosage calculators to be under (health/) and added a BMI calculator. I ran out of space on my OpenBSD dev server. This is due to a bad partitioning (~6.5G set aside for /usr/obj and /usr/src). One day I'll fix this with a reinstall & manual partitioning. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.27 I ended up sick with a stomach issue last night. Still not quite feeling right yet, but definitely improved. I've now merged in some Graphica fixes from Arland's source tree and will continue on the documentation this afternoon. Evening update: Arland has (paint2) mostly working now. I'll be merging in his latest few changes to the backend code before going to bed tonight. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.26 I found & fixed a serious bug in the (nonix) `xrm` word. This was deleting the wrong blocks... ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.25 Some stuff: I added a version of ilo.c for OpenBSD. This uses pledge() and unveil() for added security. I'll be adding in some error checks soon. For Graphica, I was able to get most of the backend code updated to use the new point structure, write new Forth blocks to call into these, and do a little testing. (I woke up this morning to a little numbness in my hands, but almost no pain; quite odd after yesterday). So I'm basically a week or so behind on what I wanted to get done, but hopefully the next week will be better. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.24 I've not uploaded the WISP entries in a few days. I should do this sometime... Today has been particularly bad with RSI pain. Not sure why; I have been trying to keep typing and general hand use down to a minimum. Made tacos for dinner. They turned out well. I'll try to do another batch of them next week. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.23 Halfway through the week. I have a list of words I think should be good for Graphica 0. I'll send Arland a copy soon. I have prepared a couple of small source files using UTF8 multi- byte characters for testing RetroForth's UTF8/UTF32 code. I hope to get back to working on this next week. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.22 Due to wrist pain I'm probably not goung to write much. It's been getting a little worse, so I don't want to risk any more damage. I'm thinking through the Graphica vocabulary to decide on what words should be in the initial "level 0" vocabulary. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.21 Well it worked pretty well. There's still some issues (colors are not quite right, and cursor movement is a little off for the second row of text), but I think I can finish it tomorrow. I also started updating the Graphica drawing backend to use the packed point (x in upper; y in lower bits) approach instead of an in-memory representation. If this keeps going smoothly, (and if the RSI pain remains at a tolerable level), I might (with Arland's help) be able to get it done this week. That's probably wishful thinking though. I already have a little pain back in my left hand... ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.20 Still tired. But the pain in my hands is not as bad today, so I will try to do some programming tomorrow. I think it's time to start on the Graphica terminal emulation. Hopefully this will be easy; I *should* be able to mostly just drop in the ilo-native-x86 code for it, with a few small tweaks. But there's no guarantees... ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.19 Sleepy today. I ended up sleeping about half the day, which was much needed. Then watched a movie, took a walk, and spent some time with the kids. It was a pleasant day. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.18 At work I've been focusing on cleaning up billing issues. This is quite time consuming, but I think I'm about a third of the through. Tomorrow I'll start some work on the new terminal code for Graphica. Then Arland can try to finish the drawing functions. Otherwise, nothing to report today. Still having some pain in my hands, so I'll probably still be limiting my time typing for a few more days. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.17 Video work today. I finished the initial draft & test recording of a video on the evolution of the VM models (Maunga, Ngaro, Nga as well as ilo & Napia). Tomorrow I'll try to do a test record of the audio. Arland is going to look at doing some drawings to add visual interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.16 ilo-x86-native now has colors working. Taking a break from this now. I'm making a small patch to ilo.c to test out the OpenBSD pledge and unveil system calls. For pledge() it appears we need to use "stdio rpath wpath". I still have a few more tests to run before looking at unveil(). If successful, I might add use of these to the amd64 assembly implementation. Arland has been making 1-2 loaves of bread each night. It's fun to watch. I do need to try to get him started on these earlier; starting them at 2200 or later doesn't give a lot of time to work on them. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.15 I fixed the cursor positioning in ilo-x86-native. Next up is colors. At least it's now functional enough to run monochrome (termina) programs. Due to hand pain I'm not planning to do any actual programming tomorrow, just reviewing the existing code and VGA docs to make sure I'm ready for adding the color support later this week. Bob (at work) has me playing Wordle, Connections, and some other puzzle games. I might try writing something like Wordle in Forth at some point. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.14 I attempted to merge in code for UTF8 to UTF32 support for source files, but this did not work out and the VM started to hang. I'll investigate more later. Onto Konilo. I started merging in the terminal emulation into ilo-x86-native. It's not quite working properly yet (still seems to have a small issue with cursor positioning, and colors are not in place yet), but I can now run some (termina) programs mostly successfully. My hands are starting to hurt again. I'll probably try to debug the cursor positioning, then take a break for a couple of days. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.13 The console code rewrite from Python to C is done. I also did a bit of refactoring, so it's ready for me to start merging into ilo-x86-native and then Graphica. What else? It's hot and humid again, so I'm not going to be on the Mac mini this weekend. I'll try to get to it once conditions improve. I'm working on a little thing that might end up being related to Arland's Namiko project. This is currently in Python, but may be rewritten in C and Forth later if it works out. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.12 I've mostly finished rewriting Arland's terminal processing code in C. I should be able to finish debugging later tonight, or tomorrow afternoon at the latest. Then we can start merging this into the ilo-x86-native branch as a test case. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.11 I'm less tired today. Stressful at work, but now (1821) I'm off until Monday, so I'll see if I can unwind and do some reading, writing, and maybe listen to some music. Ok, so programming stuff. I will be working on the terminal code this weekend. And the Life (termina) interface. And trying to complete a beta of RetroForth on iOS, which will require some work with the Mac. (This will be temperature dependent; if it's too hot/humid, I'll have to wait until it cools down.) ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.10 Still tired, but I did write up some notes for the weekly update on patreon. Arland sent me his latest DEC terminal code, so I started review of it. I'm planning to work on this and some of the Graphica code this weekend. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.09 The month is rolling by quickly. I decided last night that I should write a (termina) interface for editing & running Life. It'll sit over the existing implementation, much like the JMF Mandelbrot viewer. I was too tired last night to do any programming. But I did some thinking through parts of the Nga code, and I have a plan now for implementing the UTF support in source files. This is probably going to be ready over the next few days. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.08 I'm going to rearrange my blocks again. (This seems to be a thing I do every couple of months). I'll be moving source code to 0-8192, and devoting the higher blocks to data. I will also be writing a small utility to patch the differences between my personal block file layout and the default blocks in the ilo repository. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.07 I'm attempting to spend less time online (apart from work hours) so updates to WISP might be delayed a bit. What I hope to do is structure my online activities into batches, connecting briefly to pull in updates and push out changes & responses. From past experience, this wil be difficult, but probably better for my mental health. With that being said, here's some quick updates for today: both (kowae) and (taotaka) launchers have been merged into ilo. Retro has UTF8 <-> UTF32 support at the interactive listener (as a build-time option). More UTF stuff is coming. I've begun writing a post introducing both (kowae) and (taotaka) It'll likely be published near the end of the week. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.06 Not feeling well today. My blood glucose is high this morning, and I feel somewhat queasy. Will rest as much as possible. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.05 I woke up today with a severe headache. Spent much of the day avoiding light, loud noises, and trying to rest. I was able to do a little work on the RetroForth/68k Mac code. This is not yet working, but I am now able to get the image to load and some code to start executing. There's still a lot of issues. I'm going to try to do a little more tonight, but may need to wait until tomorrow if the headache gets worse. It's now 2138 and I'm wrapping up for the night. The Retro/68k is still not working properly. I'll review tomorrow, comparing to the original sources, and then compare modifications to the ilo sources. Hopefully I can find the cause of the issues. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.04 It's getting late, so I'm going to enter today's notes before bed. I have a working kowae (the second launcher, with a 3x3 grid) It's nice, but not as flexible as the unnamed termina-based launcher. I'm leaning towards including both in the blocks. We had a BBQ for lunch. I cooked sausages and burgers; they were quite good, though there was a bit more leftover than normal. Dustin says we might do another one next Friday, so I'll prepare for this. I'll spend a few minutes to finish the weekly update before sleeping. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.03 It's a tired day. While I got some sleep, I'm still suffering from the severe sleep deficit from the last few weeks. Before bed I'll be doing a little more work on the launcher. I have two models and am not sure which I prefer yet. 2153: I'm going to shut down in a few minutes. Arland helped me identify a bug in kowae, so I'm now very close to having the second launcher working. I should be able to get it to a usable state tomorrow. New word in (std): "invoke": '(block-set) 'word-name invoke Will load the block set if not loaded, then find and run the word. This will be enhanced a bit further soon. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.02 I was able to get a few hours of sleep last night, so I'm much less exhausted than yesterday. So what to work on? (tuaki) a single step debugger (kowae) the new launcher program (kohure) adding optional color to the memory browser? (peita) ascii art editor These are a few ideas to look into. I think Arland is coming for a few days, so I'll discuss these with him when he arrives. I also need to get back to work on the DEC escape sequence code; it'd be nice to have this functional soon... ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.08.01 Today was a very tired day: I'm going to bed early, so won't be programming tonight. I think I'm going to try writing a single step debugger for Konilo sometime soon. Maybe starting with Retro's Autopsy code? ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.31 Today was a retrocomputing day: I spent my evening working in System 6 on an emulated Mac. The results? I've made the ilo-68k a little faster (adding in NOP skipping). I was also able to update to both the latest Konilo image & blocks. The good news is that it does work fine. It's slow when run at 1x speed, but that's expected. Before I update the repository I plan to add the limited set of superinstructions (handling of lica...., liju...., etc as single units) to eke out a bit more performance. Other stuff. I updated the Konilo blocks. And started another branch on the launcher interface. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.30 Last night Arland & I rewired an old light fixture in our kitchen. It's now using line voltage LED T8 lamps, so is more efficient. I did get a small cut on my left pointer fixture, but that was the only issue we encountered. On the hardware front, Arland is interested in Sharp's memory LCD (400x240). It looks like this can be used with a few i/o pins and a small bitmap framebuffer. I'll look at getting one of these for testing. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.29 It's still hot. I spent the morning watching Oppenheimer. It was better than I expected, but long. The theatre was nicely cooled, which was nice. Today I start rewriting Arland's Python code for DEC terminal processing in C. It'll be tied into both ilo-x86-native and the Graphica system. Once done with the native side, the tools using Termina will work, which will make that nicer to use. New hardware: in August I'm going to be picking up a second RP2040 board and something with an ESP32. I'll also order some FRAM chips from Adafruit, in hopes of getting a full ilo system running on these. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.28 It's very hot, and I'm not doing much today. I spent a little time with Arland's PlayDate; it'd be amusing to have something like this with a 30% keyboard and Forth. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.27 I made a small change to tuhi, which makes it a little nicer for non syntax highlighted editing. I also identified & fixed a bug in `s:get/line`, which now works correctly for both delete and backspace. This has been committed in the repository. An interesting change: with the tweaks to tuhi, the current text entry is slightly brighter, so it's easier to spot what is being edited. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.26 It's getting hot again. Hoping it cools down tonight. For the video, I'm going to start with two. One will be on the dictionary structure in RetroForth; the other will be on blocks. In other news, I have an experimental ilo that does conversion of keyboard input/output between UTF8 and UTF32. I need to do a lot more testing on this, but it appears to be something that would open up the world of Unicode to me if I need it. I added a block with `s:pad/left` and `s:pad/right`. The current code has a memory leak; I will fix this before comitting it to the public blocks. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.25 It was hot today, but we had a short afternoon thunderstorm that cooled things down significantly. The forecast says it'll get hot again as the week progresses, but I'll enjoy this brief respite until then. I have begun porting some parts of the extended Konilo system to RetroForth. This started with adding `fill`, and is continuing with (termina). The termina application scaffold is not yet working, but the color & cursor positioning code is fine. This process will help me identify differences between the systems. I will try to document these. Arland is coming over this weekend; we'll try to get a test recording of the first video done so he can start editing. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.24 I refactored the (wisp) code, making it easier to relocate the data blocks. This was done as a precursor step towards a termina interface. Then I proceeded to write the termina interface. It's two blocks, and provides keys for moving through the blocks, starting tuhi, creating a new post, and jumping to the latest post. I've altered (termina) in a breaking way: the bg: and fg: words now set the colors directly. This will require updates to existing programs, but makes the code cleaner overall. Apart from this, I wrote an " sigil (in the examples) for strings with spaces. And I wrote a bit more into my wiki. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.23 I'm still quite tired from yesterday, though I did finally get more than two hours of sleep. I'll probably be resting more this afternoon. On a development front, I now have a working SSH server on my Android phone, so I can use Termux via Blink (mosh) or Prompt (ssh) from my iPad. This is nice, though I still need to see if I can work out doing the connection via USB or an ad-hoc wifi network. (I like the larger screen on the iPad for readability) I'll be making a few small revisions to my launcher code today. It should be ready to merge into the blocks in a couple of days. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.22 I was able to fix `restart` in the amd64 assembly ilo. I updated the OpenBSD binary, but am out of time. Today I'll be visiting my my brother and his family. They have been in Grenada for the last five years, so it'll be nice to see them again. (Late update: we got home around 22:00; I'm exhausted, so just going to have a late dinner, then go to bed). ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.21 Still having pain, but am doing a little work. I'm sending notes to Arland concerning the Graphica updates. And re-reading my launcher code. I have noticed that the amd64 assembly ilo has a problem when running `restart`. I think I can fix this, probably tomorrow. It'll be a little annoying (as I'll also need to update all the binaries), but I'll probably wait on that until my hands are doing better. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.20 I have updated the Napia source tree to use the latest Konilo image & blocks. Other than this I'm not doing any programming today; I've been having increased pain in my hands, so will slow down a little to try to rest them. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.19 A bit of non-Forth (though still related) today. I wrote the core code for processing the subset of DEC/VT100 escape sequence stuff that (termina) uses. Arland ported this from C to Python and has fleshed out the missing bits. We'll rewrite back into C, then update the Graphica text output to use it. Once this is done, we have plans to simplify the Graphica system in a variety of ways. I'm hoping that we will be able to have it ready (including documentation & some examples) by October. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.18 I've not been sleeping well, and it's starting to become notica- ble. I'll try to get to bed early tonight, with hopes of enough sleep to feel better tomorow. The update handling code has been added to (ripanga). This now needs two blocks. I've done some testing on the update code; it appears to work ok. Tomorrow I'll try to get the spreadsheet notation code written. I'm dealing with some numbness in my right hand and a little pain in my left, so I might have to take a short break in the near future. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.17 I merged in Kohure. Looking at my old notes, I decided to pick back up the previous work on a headless spreadsheet. I've reworked the vocabulary, and written an implementation. The data storage parts work, so next up is writing support for calculations. I described my planned approach to Glen; he thinks it'll work, so I'm going to proceed with this tomorrow. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.16 Other than the help screen, Kohure is done. I'll finish this tonight, and will merge it into Konilo tomorrow. With my weekly patreon postings, I'll be starting to include some of my handwritten notes on occasion. This might be of some interest. I've finished the first PDF of the Konilo dictionary. It's sized for A5 paper, and will be included in the nightly snapshots starting this week. A supplementary dictionary for the (std) blocks is now being worked on. I hope to have this done by the end of the week. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.15 I installed iPadOS 17 beta on my iPad last night. I've run into a few small bugs, but nothing too annoying yet. Stage Manager is much improved. Tonight I will begin adding direct entry of values or assembly in Kohure. Then write a help screen and it'll be ready to merge int the repository. I didn't write up the week in review for Patreon yet, I'll do this before bed tonight as well. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.14 I now have a functional core for Kohure (the memory browser) in my blocks. I still need to write a help screen, and maybe add a function to edit memory cells directly, but the browsing part is finished. As with most of the recent stuff it has a (termina) interface. It's still hot and humid, but I have one room that's mostly tolerable today. So getting a little work done. Tomorrow is a real-world task: helping Arland set up some fans to improve airflow in the upstairs of his place. Then I might work on finishing the scripts so we can start the audio parts. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.13 My blood glucose crashed hard last night, resulting in a night without sleep. Thankfully it's been stable today. Humidity is up again, making my house uncomfortable. I was able to get a few more fans to help circulate the air better, which may help. I've started work on a memory browser. With the small screen sizes I use, this is kind of tight. It displays the address, three cells (as instructions, values, and ASCII [when valid]). I can already browse a portion of memory, but it does crash after several screens. I probably missed a small detail; I'll take a closer look after I sleep for a while. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.12 Some fine tuning on Casket: I'm now having inetd run the program without using a shell script. It also no longer gets run under timelimit, so it saves two processes per connection. This should help scalability a little. The reaper script is now run every few minutes and kills any processes older than 180 seconds, so accomplishing the same limits I had with timelimit. I added `clear` to (nonix). Tomorrow evening I have to pick up a ping pong table & a chest. There'll probably be a little programming, but I suspect I won't get a real chance to resume significant work until Friday. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.11 Today was a little stressful. I published Casket v6. And it promptly got field tested by both lobste.rs and hackernews. It did an acceptable job under load from lobste.rs, but spent the entire afternoon and evening under a (for me) massive load from hackernews. The bad: lots of timeouts, inability to connect, and very heavy server load. The good: this is the first time the server has remained responsive to SSH connections, so I've been able to keep an active eye on things. I'm pleased overall, but will probably look for more ways to handle scalability in the next update. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.10 I'm a bit over halfway done my launcher program. It's not a very fancy system, but it'll serve my purposes. (Arland's launcher will be nicer; with much more flexibility). Weather update: it's still quite hot, but the humidity is down, so it's much more tolerable. This should be helpful in making progress towards video production. Health updates: my RSI issues are mostly staying under control, but I'm going to start reducing some of my typing soon to help ensure that this remains true. Blood glucose levels are down a little, but still too high. I'll be transitioning back to a very low carb diet starting tomorrow. More plants than meats this time. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.09 I've started writing my take on a simple launcher program. This will probably take at least a few days to complete, but it'll be interesting to work on. An update on the above as I wrap up for tonight: I have the data structures created, and am able to populate the categories. Next will be words to access the corresponding addresses, then I can write the display code and key handlers. It should be straightforward at this point, but I'm sure there will be some unexpected issues. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.08 It's now the evening, so I'm just doing a bit of recap. The humidity inside is down, so while still hot, it is much more bearable. Arland has begun working on his launcher program. I helped debug it a little. I'll also be writing a launcher program; mine will be less fancy thank Arland's. It should be fun to compare these. I have had a few thoughts about words for saving/loading image (and ASCII artwork) data across multiple blocks. I need to spend some time considering this more before starting to implement it. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.07 I've refactored more of Casket. I should be done with this on Monday. Arland comes home tonight for a few days. I'll see if he is willing to work on a launcher program. It's still too hot and humid. Not going to write much more code or text today. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.06 I forgot to run the upload script yesterday. I'll do that in a few minutes. Casket using the new file words is *much* faster. A transfer that took almost 16s on my dev server now takes 0.3s. It's only about 3x slower than the OpenBSD HTTPd in this test case. I swapped the main retroforth.org server to use this version of Casket as I continue to improve various other areas. I will write a bit on this for patreon. I'm going to try to have Glen record the audio for the first two videos in the next week. This will need a bit more writing, but I really want to get these moving forward. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.05 It's still very hot and humid. And it looks like this will not be breaking anytime soon. I'm making headway on various fronts. The Konilo dictionary is now finished draft 3 (waiting for Arland to review again). I'll upload a copy to my patrons tomorrow. RetroForth has gained file:read/bytes and file:write/bytes. I started work on using this in Casket. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.04 It's July 4, so I'm off work. But still programming. I fixed the memory leak with the 'hints' part of (termina). This was bothering me, so I'm glad it's no longer an issue. Next up: trying to get nested (termina) programs working. It took longer than expected, but the nested (termina) stuff is now working. I've set (tuhi) as the default `Editor` for the `catalogue`. I've also written a `ti:help` as part of (termina). It'll be used to display a simple help screen for (termina) programs. Last bit for today: I'm working on more (wiki) words. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.03 Today was spent on Tuhi and trying to stay cool. I added cut/copy/paste (via XCV) and indent/de-indent (via []). A little work on the video scripts was done, and some steps towards a possible quarterly 'zine. I added a right column to the Tuhi display. This makes it easy to make sure the code being entered doesn't overflow the line. So all that's left for Tuhi is a general help block (which will need some (termina) additions to do the way I want) and the "leap" function. Going to wrap up for now; maybe I'll write the "leap" tomorrow. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.02 I've started writing the additions to Tuhi, but didn't get very far. It's too hot to be productive today. I attempted to do a little work on the kitchen sink, but wasn't able to turn off the hot water line. I'll try this again after it cools down. (The single handle control is loose; I can't remove it until I can get the water turned off.) ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.07.01 Today was a rest day. Tammie & I stopped at an Olive Garden for lunch, then did a bit of grocery shopping. I didn't do any programming today. I did think over my planned approach for the Tuhi expansions, and started considering how to extend (termina) to support nested programs. I'll likely start writing code for these tomorrow. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.30 I'm off by a day; I had thought yesterday was Friday. It's a bit disappointing that it's not quite the weekend yet. I ended up being too tired to work on the scripts last night; hopefully today will be better for this. 1300: It's been somewhat better. I have drafts for three scripts written & sent to Arland for review. Deciding on weekend projects: tuhi improvements (add leap, indent/deindent, cut/copy/paste lines), update the Teensy build, expand the wiki: vocabulary. Finish some reading backlog. Sleep. I probably won't finish all of these. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.29 The core functionality of Konilo works on a non-visual-terminal environment. With (termina), I have a vocabulary for writing things that use this, but I still desire to support a simpler output model for most things. As such, I'm starting (with the wiki) to add variables that disable the use of (termina) words for the things that can reasonably support both. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.28 I'm about halfway through the first draft of the script for the first video. Arland thinks it's ok, though he said he may wish to alter some of the phrasing. I am going to try to have my part done by end of Thursday so we can do some revising on Friday and a test recording on Saturday. ---- On a Unix host, if performance matters, it may be best to cache the blocks in RAM. In my tests it saves considerable time when searching through the blocks. I'll probably publish an ilo-fast at some point that makes use of this and other techniques. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.27 Last night I merged a patch to fix an issue with the GNUmakefile as well as adding `block:for-each` to the (std) blocks in Konilo and also committing the current error handling device code for RetroForth. I have begun working on the scripts for the initial set of videos. I'm hoping we can record & prepare some longer tests in the next week or two. For Arks, some work has been done towards supporting packed blocks. This will not be done quickly. I will be trying to have the core words needed done over the next few weeks, then Arland will need to work on making a usable editor. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.26 I renamed the (tools/titles) to (tools/catalogue) [and aliased catalog to catalogue]. It's looking like a strange week; rain is expected every day, but we are seeing long sunny periods as well. It's very humid. Some minor issues in the new RetroForth error handling device are now resolved; I can now proceed to flesh it out further. Work related note: I had thought I was done with purchasing for now, but our purchaser wasn't back, so I'm still covering his tasks. This requires much more typing than normal, so I have to be careful to avoid another RSI flare up. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.25 It's going to be a hot (~30C every day), humid week, which does not bode well for working. (Our house is not well insulated, and is basically the same temperature as outside during the summer). A possible list of initial videos about Konilo: Introducing Konilo; An Overview of Blocks; Locating and Browsing the Blocks; The Basic Block Editor; The Tuhi Block Editor; An Overview of Forth; Basics of Programming in Forth; Exploring the Vocabularies. For RetroForth: Introduction; adaptions of the overview/basics/vocabs videos. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.24 Tammie and I watched Pixar's Elementals. It was ok; there wasn't anything new or innovative in the story, but it was fun little excursion with my wife. I started some experiments for production of videos relating to RetroForth and Konilo. Arland and I hope to begin the actual videos over the summer, with a goal of having two initial series (one on each system) ready later this year. We expect to publish them to Patreon first, with possible a possible YouTube channel later. Initial production is likely to involve use of Asciinema, screen capture, voice overlay, and some art done in Procreate on iPad. The initial tests look promising; more details to come later. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.23 I published a week-in-review to patreon this morning, then had a coffee before starting work at my day job. Hopefully I'll have time to finish the tuhi revisions at some point today. ---- I don't have the tuhi "leap" working yet, but the editor now uses the syntax mode for source blocks and plain mode for normal blocks. It also realigns the keys to be closer to that of the titles tool. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.22 I didn't merge in the (list:syntax) blocks; I was too tired after work. I'm doing this now. ---- For tuhi: I'm going to make some changes. I will add a "leap" key, rearrange some of the hotkeys to be in line with `titles`, and am making the display switch into a toggle. The display toggle will switch between (list:syntax) and the default mode. ---- I started some notes for revising Graphica to what should be the final state. Hopefully this can be completed over the summer. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.21 I added a `wisp:latest` to (wisp) to make it easier to bring up the most recent entry for edits. This should simplify adding to an entry as the day proceeds. I've made a few small revisions to the (list:syntax) blocks. I still want to add a couple of things (detecting . comments, and maybe the [ ] ; immediate words), but it's working well enough for now. I'll merge it into the ilo repository today. (tuhi) now has support for using (list:syntax) [if the blocks have been loaded]. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.20 Covering for multiple people at work is draining. I'm too tired to do much in the evenings. Thankfully there's only three more days of this until we get back to normal. In the ilo repository I've grown the blocks, added in (wisp), and relocated the Glossary blocks to the end. Adding in (wiki) will be done later this week. For the wiki; I've updated the wiki-export.retro (not yet published) to add in some CSS and generate an "all-pages" page. Some minor revisions to the pagename filtering have been added. Arland suggests adding something to display the page name. I'll try to add this tomorrow. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.19 I wrote a small program to export the wiki blocks as HTML files. It's written in Retro, and runs pretty quickly. I'll be working on a variation for Gemini as well. ----- Today was hot (31C); I'm hoping it'll cool down some tonight. It's just barely entering summer and I'm already tired of the heat. ----- Tomorrow I'll start work on words to identify missing links in wiki. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.18 Happy Father's Day I fixed the basic formatting issue with the new (list:syntax) blocks. It's now at a minimal, but functional state. Arland will probably work on the color selections before we merge this into the main ilo blocks. The most recent updates to iSH seem to have fixed most of the problems I was having. It's still slower than ideal, but I can live with that. It does still segfault with my non-libc binaries though. I'll do some investigations into this over the summer. It's warm, bordering on hot, outside. Tomorrow is suppose to be worse though, so I'll be trying to stay indoors if I can. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.17 No coding so far today (19:37). The pain is down to my 'normal' background levels. I'll try do some programming tomorrow. I will be increasing the ilo.blocks in the konilo repository to 4,096 blocks. This is a big increase, but I am expecting to use a fair amount of this with documentation related blocks and more examples. Arland did some image logos for Napia & Arks. I'll be updating the Napia HTTP page soon, and we'll get a placeholder up for Arks. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.16 As expected it was a long, draining day at work. Thankfully we will be mostly fully staffed next week. Here's to hoping that I can get some rest over the weekend. Arland helped add a "Leap" function to the new `titles`. This lets you leap to the start of a block set, by providing the first part of the block title. It's really handy, and I'll be merging it into the ilo repository tonight. Other than that no programming today. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.15 We didn't get home from Arland's graduation until pretty late yesterday. I'm glad I did a partial day off/work from home; I'd have been exhausted if I had gone into work. Today's work has been a little expansion in the (wiki) blocks. I refactored `wiki:render` to separate out `wiki:locate`, as a step towards some later words. I'm not going to do much tonight. My right wrist is in a lot of pain tonight. Hopefully tomorrow will be better... ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.14 Arland graduates today. I'm happy for him, though it's been a stressful couple of weeks leading up to this. I took a (mostly) off work day since the graduation is at 18:00, and I didn't want to be exhausted after work (unlike with Glen's last year). Konilo: the initial wiki code is done. I have a few more words to write, but I'm now able to start writing things for it. I expect to grow this in interesting ways over the summer. The rewritten (wisp) is working out nicely, and I have the server side stuff for generating the .txt completed. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.13 Maybe I should add a "jump to block starting with ...." key to titles. This would make it easier to quickly locate sets of related blocks. I've long liked the idea of a personal wiki. As part of using Konilo as a personal knowledge base, something like this would be very helpful. I have a few ideas on implementing this; I'll be starting to experiment on thesee tonight. Based on some quick estimates, I expect the backup set (assuming 1 backup per day) to be around 160MB per year. This seems small enough to be easily dealt with on modern systems. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.12 I couldn't sleep last night, so I'm quite tired. I need to get some sleep soon. I'm moving my old WISP blocks into this bigger set. I'll have room for more entries than I think I'll ever actually write, but that's fine. I'll rewrite the words for generating the text output and starting new entries. With a much larger space for the blocks, I added a "4 Jump" command to `titles`. With this I can quickly jump around in the block listing. Enough for now. Time to head home for dinner, a shower, and (hopefully) some much overdue sleep. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.11 Very tired today. My blood glucose started ok, but spiked and stayed high. I have setup a new project directory for my personal konilo branch. This is not fossil tracked, but does have some limited backup/restoration scripts. There is also a nightly cron for the backups. This system has 65,536 blocks. By my quick calculations, WISP will use 18,250 blocks at a rate of 1 per day for the next 50 years. At that point I'd be 90; I think this will be enough, unless I decide to try somehing really crazy like storing video in the blocks. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.10 Took a break from programming today, and from the manual work. Arland asked about the possibility of having konilo.sh handle multiple projects. This could be done, but at the moment I'm not sure about possible issues that this might introduce. I'll be spending a bit of time considering this. We might do Python & Retro alternatives to konilo.sh. I am considering how to improve performance and reliability of HTTP(S) access to retroforth.org (and the other domains). My Casket server remains slower than ideal, and frequently gets tripped up by improper HTTP headers being sent. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.09 Working on the manual; mostly documenting the konilo.sh script. I have added backup/restore functionality to konilo.sh. This is something I wanted for a while. It includes an option to remove backups older than 30 days. There is some room here to explore more, but I don't want this script to get too long... ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.08 The smoke from the wildfires is starting to clear. It looks like it'll linger for a few more days, but we should be past the worst of it. ---- I'm working on the manual. There are going to be a bunch of new things added: sections on strings, characters, buffer:, byte addressing, assembly, termina, tuhi, and more. It'll be a quite significant expansion of coverage for the Konilo system when done. I think I need to rebuild forth.works to improve the partition layout. The auto one I've been using is wasting space I need. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.07 I've added documentation (in the form of glossary blocks) for all of (std), (nonix), the extra tools, and most of (termina). This pushes the overall block usage to 64%. I expect to reach at least 70-80% usage as I get back into the manual. I will need to grow the block space soon. ---- The air quality today is horrible. The Canadian wildfires are causing heavy smoke, even here in southern Pennsylvania. This made for a colorful sunset yesterday, but today the sky is just a haze of smoke. Hopefully the weather will change to help return to normal. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.06 Working on documentation today. I have basic glossary data now for the (std) words and am about halfway done with (termina). Later this week I'll add the Glossary: blocks for these. It will consume another 135 or so blocks though. I anticipate running short on blocks by the end of the month. Increasing the block store is doable, but it will make the local size considerably larger. I'm planning to move from 1,024 blocks to either 8,192 or 16,536 blocks. Both seem pretty big, but that isn't likely to be a problem on most systems. I'll provide a variety of sizes (all preloaded w/the system blocks) soon for those wanting or needing a smaller block store. These will not include the full documentation, as that ends up consuming much of the space. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.05 I was able to wrap up my work project by 9:30 am, so had most of day to rest. This was good as I ended up not going to bed until 4:30 am. Staying up to read several books was probably not the best idea... I watched the WWDC keynote. Nothing really noteworthy apart from the "Reality Pro" announcement. I'm not planning to do any AR/VR stuff (currently), and don't have funds for a headset anyway. It will be something to watch a bit, much like the ongoing AI stuff. We made a birthday cake, but won't serve it until tomorrow as it's too late for me to safely eat tonight. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.04 I am now 40 years old. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.03 It's Saturday. Going to watch Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 3. Update: the movie was enjoyable. The CGI & effects weren't great but this didn't prevent me from having a good time. The only actual issue I had was with the air conditioning in the theatre: it was too hot. PECO was supposed to shut of power to do some line upgrades, but didn't do so. This is the third or fourth time now; I'm getting quite irritated with them. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.02 I'm going to be spending the weekend resting a bit, reading, and hopefully not doing much computer work. I have Monday partially off work (I have one project to finish, but can do this from home), so this will hopefully be a restful time. I think I may need to increase the size of my default set of blocks. Of the 1,024, I am now using more than half, and, if I keep going towards some of my projects, will likely use most of the remaining ones over the next few months. The question here is how many blocks should I add? ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.06.01 I added a new (nonix) vocabulary. This provides a few words (cp, mv, cat, locate, and so on) to help in the block reorganization process. I added `n:get` to (std). This really should be in the image, so I'll add it there in the near future. (mandelbrot) now has a (termina) based interface. This puts it on par with Arland's (graphica) version. (It also means that the set of (termina) programs now increases to four. More will come) Updating (graphica) [and hopefully finishing it!] will be one of the summer projects. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.31 The end of May. The start of summer. It's getting notably warmer outside. I'm not a fan of this. With the new `titles`, I've begun reorganizing the blocks a bit. This is somewhat overdue, but once I'm done there'll be a nice set of empty pages between my examples and the documentation. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.30 The new `titles` is pretty nice now. It presents a page (16) of blocks, allows flipping through the pages, and jumping into the editor. It also allows changing the title line or display of a block. With this, I can much more easily see what I'm working with and find a space in the blocks for a project. It also has prompted me to think about the blocks a little different: perhaps a page of blocks should be enough for almost all of my programs? ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.29 I have the miniwi font working in an ilo+graphica build now. It isn't ideal yet (there's some header junk I don't really need), but it does work nicely. I didn't do anything on the error device code. Some time this evening on the new (termina) based `titles` tool. No coding, just planning. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.28 I'm working a bit on converting the miniwi BDF into a format I can use. I probably won't finish on this today. For Retro, I've made a little progress on the remaining issues with the new error handling device. If my hands are ok tomorrow I'll try to clear up the remaining problems I'm aware of. With tomorrow being Memorial Day, it's the start of three short (4 day) work weeks for me this year. Looking forward to a bit of a break from the daily grind. One more thing: I'm starting to dabble with writing a compiler for something that resembles a C like language. Not sure if it will pan out though. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.27 I slept in today. Haven't rested this well in weeks, so it was nice. Ate some noodles w/veg & sweet chili sauce for lunch. I found a nice little font (miniwi) that we will try to adapt for use w/ilo+graphica; this should allow an 80x30 display on a 320x240 display, which will work quite nicely for my purposes. Or a 180x90 display on Arland's 720x720 targets (!). ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.26 Konilo does not have `words`, as it's not really doable without saving actual names. But I did write a `words` (loadable from tools/words) that displays the names of anything with a Glossary block. I also moved around some of the (std) blocks, to leave room for modified pali assemblers with larger numbers of instructions (in prep for napia & arks). Arland is planning to make some instruction set changes to ARKS. His changes will replace some of my superinstruction handling I had planned. More on this as it develops. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.25 Hands are hurting today. I'm not working on Retro or Konilo, though I did write some stuff for my employer. I'm looking for small fonts. I'd like to get an 80x25 (or more rows) that's actually somewhat readable on a 320x240 display. This would get us closer to building a Konilo-only system around the Teensy 4.1. I may be able to order the FRAM chip I'm hoping to use with the RP2040 soon. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.24 In ilo.py, I have separated the big if/elif block into a dict based dispatch, and started adding handlers for some full inst. bundles. ("superinstructions"). With this, the Python startup is now much faster (about 24s, down from 34s). Still a lot of work to go, but as we decide on additional superinstructions, it should get closer to being usable. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.23 Keeping this brief as I'm starting to fall asleep. ilo-x86-native; the embedded image now has a consistent format. retro: I did some work on the error handling device. It's still exposing issues with the handling of fatal errors. I'll try to fix these sometime tomorrow, but it seems to be taking longer than expected. Heading to bed now; goodnight. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.22 Konilo: I updated the .sh script to make a few improvements: curl now pipes directly into gunzip; machine names are now fixed to a standard set (e.g., x86 instead of x86, i386, i686). Other than this, I also updated the startup code to restrict the blocks being searched during startup. This lets the Python VM start in about 34 seconds on my OpenBSD system. I/O under the Python VM is slow. We'll explore some caching in the near future. I've started gathering data on the specific instruction bundles and their usage frequencies. With this Arland can start making some "superinstructions" in his VM that should allow faster execution. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.21 UTM.app for macOS is quite buggy. After three attempts I managed to get a 32-bit x86 OpenBSD installed, so I now have another binary for the collection. This is currently the C VM, but I'll be able to start work on a non-libc backed one now. Arland successfully finished clearing the old garden bed and planted his sprouts and seeds. Now the long process of waiting and tending begins. It should be a good experience for him. Dinner tonight was burgers & some popcorn. This will be repeated over the next several nights. Initial stab at a quick port of the amd64 to use libc backend is not yet working. I'll need to look at the ABI docs a bit. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.20 Arland has noticed that I don't publish updates daily. I'm going to try to push the latest export more frequently. For Retro, I'm continuing to work on the error handling bits. It is going slower than I would like. Maybe I can finish this over the next couple of days? Not certain though. For non-Forth stuff, I'm making headway on finishing my schemas for Convey, and have begun work on the code to read and update the data. This evening I'll do some reading on the requirements for push notifications. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.19 I'm tired today, so not really doing much programming. I finished reading the Paksenarrion books by Elizabeth Moon. I still enjoy this series, but am looking forward to choosing a new book or series to start. Dinner tonight is tacos. I'm using a bit of meat, a lot of mushrooms and lettuce. For flavoring, a blend of salsa, tomato, and a bit of lime. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.18 Beginning to setup a source tree for the next Konilo release. I'm not planning to push a new release yet, but want to have things ready for when the time comes. I started a little work on adapting the amd64 assembly to work with the c standard library, which will make a generic unix target possible. On other fronts, I'll be loading (termina) in the standard init blocks soon. This will facilitate more friendly applications. For Arland's graphica system we will support enough of VT100 to let termina applications work without change. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.17 Fixed the arguments under FreeBSD by adjusting the stack pointer Veltas suggests just changing the offsets used instead; I'll make this change later. I was also able to get NetBSD working. Will start on DragonFly. DragonFly has an issue w/lseek; I need to work on this, but am starting to get painful. Will take a break for a bit ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.16 So on FreeBSD, it has a few issues: command line arguments and system calls aren't working. It does work (other than the args) if I run under truss(1). So it turns out that FreeBSD is clobbering more registers than Linux or OpenBSD. It's now working, after saving/restoring them. I'll take a look at the argument issue later. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.15 I'm reading through and testing an amd64 assemby implementation of ilo. This was sent to me by veltas. This is quite nice. It's for Linux, but should be easy to port to OpenBSD. And that was indeed easy; a few adjustments to the system calls and it works fine. I'll give FreeBSD a shot now. Not working on FreeBSD: odd issues. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.14 Wishing my wife & my mother a happy Mother's Day. My wife desired steak & potatoes; I made mashed potatoes and a couple of sirloin steaks. The steaks were done in a sous vide, and finished on the stovetop w/avocado oil, butter, and a few herbs. She was pleased with it, so I'm happy on this front. Not working on RetroForth or Konilo tonight; I'll resume on these tomorrow. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.13 The iSH app has been updated; Konilo (when built from C) now works. (Specifically; the old release of iSH had bad terminal emulation and would drop random lines from the output; this no longer appears to be the case). The x86 binary using syscalls causes iSH to crash immediately. I'll look into this further. The kids spent the day playing Tears of the Kingdom. They seem to like it. Yesterday and most of today my left wrist & hand have been too painful to use. It seems to be getting better; hopefully it'll be ok tomorrow. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.12 My left wrist is very painful today. Not going to be coding or writing other than this block. I started a little thing to use blocks as additional RAM. This should be useful for the time I occasionally need larger data sets. Arland & I had a little discussion on interrupts and using some of the registers to provide information on system state at the time of interrupt. This may require some changes to napia and arks. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.11 Lots of work on the canvas stuff. It's getting close to being almost usable. I might be a bit odd in that I'm mostly programming using an Android phone, an iPad mini, and a keyboard. This setup has been working pretty well for me though, and I'm not missing using a desktop as a primary system. I'll write more on this later. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.10 I've been playing with both LocalStorage and IndexedDB to see if I can get in-browser storage/restoration of the blocks working. This isn't done, but I've ruled out LocalStorage: the 5MB data limit is too tight to store the full set of blocks. Arland has started working on the canvas support. When I last checked, he has support for drawing pixels and lines. I'll write code to load the font data once he gets the other parts of the graphica code working. Rick sent a TypeScript implementation. This is pretty neat. I setup a Node environment to try it. The TS version has separate the interface and actual ilo instruction processing. I'd like to explore this in more depth, but need to read up on TS first. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.09 Arland reminded me that I've not pushed updates to WISP in a few days. I'll do so tonight. WISP is now being mirrored to charles.childe.rs as well. I published a quick update on the ilo-js progress to Patreon. Rick has a variety of ideas that sound interesting. I'll be looking at these soon. I did a little work on the new error handling device for RetroForth. This is lagging a bit behind where I wanted, but I'm preferring to take time to make sure it works as expected. Work on documenting the RetroForth FFI is ongoing. More soon. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.08 Work was long, but we're getting caught up after a serious lack of people last week (due to illness) Arland has added color themes to ilo-js. I like the amber and gas plasma themes. The whole thing is progressing nicely thanks to his help. Tomorrow I'll ask him about making the amber be the default and maybe see if he can start work on saving the settings data. I need to start reading on IndexedDB and LocalStorage to see what makes sense for storing the blocks. I need to look for some small containers so we can start the sprouting of the seeds for the garden. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.07 Tammie is feeling sick today. I'm just continuing to rest. I've still been congested, though it is clearing up at last. The temperatures are getting warmer. This is not to my liking. Arland is working on some improvements to ilo-js. This has become interesting now. It's usable, and he's made the interface scale with the display size. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.06 I'm quite tired today. We did some grocery shopping, then picked up some tea at Panera Bread. After this was selecting seeds (and some soil) for the garden Arland is working on. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.05 I was able to get the block stuff working, so a demo copy of Konilo is now running at forth.works/demo . I've published a copy to my patrons. Arland is working on some CSS for this, and I just saw a note from Rick with a patch that will fix the blocking issue. I'll merge this in tomorrow - thanks to both for helping! Kiyoshi has asked me about a Retro or Konilo that uses floating point only. I've not tried this, and it might cause some issues with regards to data in memory, but I'm quite curious to see if I can make something around this idea, so I'll be starting work on a prototype soon. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.04 The initial ilo-js is done. I still need to add blocks, and hopefully loading the image & blocks from a server, but it's probably only a day or two away from being publishable. On the health front, I have some lingering congestion, but now feel fine. Modest hand pain today. Blood glucose levels still high, which may indicate that I'm not quite past the illness yet. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.03 I'm starting to feel better. It is time to start a javascript implementation of ilo. I'm not good with js; so hopefully someone more experienced will be able to make suggestions on how to improve it once I get it working. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.02 I added the `dump` word to the konilo blocks. The main web server has been updated to FreeBSD 13.2. This was straightforward, but more difficult than an OpenBSD update. I also updated the dev server to OpenBSD 7.3. Some chat in #retro and ##forth today. Nice to see activity on the IRC channels. Very tired, so I'm wrapping up for bed and sleep. Maybe I'll be able to get more progress done on projects tomorrow. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.05.01 Still sick. I published the Konilo release. I'll have some block updates to work on. I'm going to add a `dump` word. Enough for today. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.30 I'm still sick. It seems likely that it's just a cold, but if it gets worse, I might do a covid test. For now I'll just continue to rest. If I feel better tonight I will try to do a little work on the ilo for RP2040. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.29 It as difficult to sleep last night, and when I finally did, I woke up congested and feeling a bit sick. Trying to rest today in hope that I'll feel better tomorrow. For arks, I did some work on Graphica; reducing the number of places where the framebuffer was directly accessed. I think we will be good to go on the 1bpp mode soon, and I've raised doing more abstractions to isolate the SDL bits further. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.28 I updated the main retroforth website. I still need to add links to the patreon page and a list of former & current patrons. This should be done tomorrow. I'm experimenting with getting the error handling device working under RetroForth. It'll take a bit longer before it's ready to commit. It's supposed to be a rainy weekend. There's a bit of housework to do, but that'll be pretty quick to accomplish. Arland was going to do some garden work, but that'll probably be pushed to next week. He and I need to go over his plans so I can make sure to get the materials he needs to repair the beds and plant. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.27 Another painful day. I did some work on the Konilo (and ilo) web site. This now has Arland's logo (thanks to him for making it; I like the tiny hexaghost as the dot on the "i"). I'll be updating the main RetroForth website tomorrow. It'll be similar to the Konilo one. Websites for the napia & arks systems are coming; probably this weekend or early next week. I'll be publishing the first arks snapshot tomorrow to the project patrons. It's still quite a way off from being ready for daily snapshots, but we'll hopefully get there after Arland graduates in June. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.26 I've not done any actual programming today. My hands hurt too much at present. I took my youngest kids to watch the Super Mario Bros movie. They both enjoyed it; Alex found the musical bits to be, in his words, "cringe", but liked the rest quite a bit. Dinner tonight was enchiladas. I made a couple with pulled pork and a couple with cheese. Both were good. I'll probably regret the carbs later tonight. This does get me close to having used the carb-heavy ingredients I have on hand, so I intend to begin a transition back to a very low carb and IF diet starting the end of this week. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.25 Busy day at work, with most of the month-end prep work needing to be done. I finished my parts of this, so tomorrow should be a little more relaxed. I'm working on the little tool to translate a simple infix language to pali assembly. The initial parts have progressed nicely. I will be starting on handling conditional and looping forms next. Arland and I discussed optimization possibilities a little. I think I'll probably work on an IR that we can work with before generating the pali code. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.24 Should I update my development box to OpenBSD 7.3? I've decided to attempt the update next Saturday, after I am done working on the first Konilo & ilo release. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.23 Not a good start to the day. I'm having pain in my left foot and both hands. Also a headache and very tired due to lack of sleep. Spent the morning resting. I'll start preparing the final default block set today. This is probably going to progress quickly as it's mostly just removing all the non-essential stuff. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.22 Arland rewrote `titles`; it now allows exiting early. I have started work on refactoring it to be merged into the standard system blocks. Konilo for ilo & napia will be released on May 1, unless I run into any significant bugs before then. I'm not expecting any problems. This initial release will just be the vm, image, and system & glossary blocks. A secondary release (probably in the fall) will add in more stuff to the default block set, as well as more tooling & documentation. Konilo/arks is not yet being released, but I will start sharing snapshots of it on patreon in the coming week. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.21 I'm at work on an editor for unpacked blocks (so 64x64 chars!). I really have no idea how to make this practical. I'm crafting an extended version of the basic editor. Arland and I will need to discuss the user interface part of this a lot. I've thought on having an odd model where the block presents as code, data, commentary, and tests; with each view being separate but interleaved. We are talking about a Konilo system, sharing blocks across the three VMs. In this, Napia would serve as a backbone, handling various I/O operations and cron-style tasks, with ilo & arks based systems running the user facing programs. This could be interesting to explore. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.20 A somewhat quiet day. I was able to work on a project for work (a quote management tool) today. Using Python and RetroForth. I have a lot of the functionality in place; working on a calendar view currently. Dinner was chicken, gravy, and mashed potatoes. Very pleasant, though not good for my bloood glucose; I really need to go back to IF & keto soon. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.19 Arland & I are starting a block editor that will use byte packed blocks. (So 64 lines, 64 characters per line). This is a *lot* of space compared to the normal blocks. It'll be interesting to see how useful it becomes. I'm starting to look into possibly setting up a solar system for the computers. I'd like to start reducing my power usage and reliance on the electrical grid. I also want to see if I can work out a practical, affordable way to do a self-hosted server setup. Both of these will probably take a while to achieve. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.18 The random number generator is now a basic xorshift model. It's faster, smaller, and works without any issues. I'm happy with it. I did a little example to play with this; it's kind of fun to watch. I'm tired today, but am going to spend a bit of time reading before I try to sleep. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.17 We discovered some major bugs in Arland's random number code. I will replace it with something better. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.16 I finished the Common Lisp implementation of ilo. This has been more frustrating than I would have liked, and I still need to go through and fix formatting and add comments. But that'll wait a bit until I can bring myself to stare at the parenthesis once more. I'm going to revisit the (termina) vocabulary sometime soon. I think I'll work on a lightly extended interface for konilo that takes a little advantage of VT100/ANSI capable terminals. RetroForth & nga will see the start of a new i/o device for handling stack (and other) error states this week. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.15 Celebrated Ben's birthday today. It was a short (2 hours) event. PECO was supposed to turn off power most of the day, but did not. This was good. It's much cooler today. I was able to get the integer handling working, and found and fixed several other bugs. Interactivity is working, and I can read blocks now. Next will be saving blocks, and then maybe the image. In other news, Arland & I have started some early work on sound support for use alongside Graphica. And some looks at plain X11. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.14 Still tired, but made it through the day with the help of a lot of coffee and tea. I started on an ilo in Common Lisp. This will probably take a few days to get working. I did an initial broken implementation; Arland and I then resolved a few issues. It's still not working though. I'll put it aside for a bit, then give it another look next week. The last three days have been quite hot. It's supposed to be cooler this weekend. Hopefully it will be. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.13 Very tired. I'm just going to bed; will probably write a bit tomorrow. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.12 My hands hurt today. I'm working on Makefile stuff. I think the next release will not have both a Makefile and a GNUmakefile, just one. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.11 Last day of this mini-vacation. I had a couple of short work related activities, which took less than an hour to resolve. I chose to spend the day resting. I published an updated copy of the old repl.c for nga to my /temp files. It can serve to illustrate interfacing Retro from C. I will put together a better example before the next release. I did some minor source cleanups to the Retro device interface code. I'm starting to consider the issues w/non-Unu source file support. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.10 Doing better today. My blood glucose is still high, but not as dangerously so as yesterday. Breakfast was potato rolls, with cheese sauce, ham, eggs, and onion. I enjoyed it, but Tammie didn't like it. (She's not a fan of onion) A brief visit w/Tammie's mom. We gave her some pictures of the kids. Heading home was uneventful, but long. I need to see about doing better routing for breaks next time. Home a little after 16:30. Tammie is sleeping, I'll do so too. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.09 I had a lot of issues today. I couldn't sleep last night, and my blood glucose spiked high. After getting it down somewhat I was able to get the a pharmacy to get a glucose meter & test strips. With this, and a lot of insulin, I was able to get my glucose levels back to a managable (but still high) level by dinner. Tomorrow we head home. Hopefully the travel back goes smoothly. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.08 Today started off cold, but it warmed up by afternoon. Breakfast was an egg quiche, with sausage, bacon, scallions, and croutons. I enjoyed it. We went to visit Cindy & Darrell. The drive up was uneventful, and we had a good time. (They do keep their house rather warm; it was just under 80F most of the time). Coming back, we let Glen practice driving for about 30 minutes. This was a little uncomfortable as it was his first time on the road, but he did a good job. He'll probably get more practice tomorrow and on Monday. I'm not planning to do much programming tonight. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.07 Breakfast was pleasant. We had fresh fruit, waffles, and eggs. Afterwards Tammie & the kids headed to her mom's for a few hours while I spent the time reading and watching some educational videos I had queued up. This was broken up by a couple of short walks. We had dinner at the diner Tammie's brother works at. It was ok; the food wasn't bad, and service was great. Pricing was average. I had a meatloaf, mashed potatoes, gravy, and broccoli. I'd eat it again. It's now 22:03 and we're back at the B&B. Looking forward to a bit of sleep before tomorrow's activities. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.06 While it was nominally the first day of vacation, I was working. We had about 6 hours of driving, and I was given a surprise chance at a very large bid, so I spent much of the drive on this. And to my suprise, I landed a PO shortly before arrival at the B&B we are staying in. And thus I completed the single biggest order I've ever received. I'm looking forward to actually having some rest time now. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.05 I'm renaming RetroForth/ilo to Konilo. For those curious about the naming, this derives from Toki Pona: Kon being a spirit or soul; ilo being a machine. So Konilo is sort of the soul of a machine. ----- Tomorrow we leave for a short vacation. This will not be the only one I take this year. I have 2-3 hours of work in the morning, then will be off until Tuesday or Wednesday. I'm not sure of the connectivity where I'm staying, so might be offline for a bit. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.04 I've setup FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD systems (under vmware) with Arland. Of these, OpenBSD has been the easiest one for me in everything except partitioning (though in this case we just went with the defaults.) I still need to get X11 setup on the NetBSD system. (I can go without, but Arland isn't comfortable in a purely console environment). I've also built gxemul; I'm hoping to try to setup some stuff under less common CPUs to aid in testing overall portability. This probably won't be finished before the upcoming trip. Also planned: a Plan 9 system. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.03 I updated the RetroForth/ilo for x86 native kernel today. It's now on the current image, and compiles with -O3. This required adding a memcpy() function. Tomorrow I'll see if I can add an io extension to allow access to the physical memory and x86 io ports. I'm evaluating a few options for progressing towards an actual computer dedicated to RetroForth. I'm still unsure if I should expand the Teensy system to support display and keyboard, or if I should maybe try crafting a system running on a RPi with a very cut down Linux or BSD. I lean towards the Teensy approach though. With this there are less layers, and everything should be simpler to replicate on other hosts in the future. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.02 Arland helped identify a bug in the ATA code. I've pushed a fix for it. We have this working under vmware now. Arland wants me to make an ISO image. I'm going to start looking into this. Today is much cooler than yesterday. This is nice; I was able to get a little sleep. The birds are quite noisy today, I hope they quiet down soon as I'd like to try to get to bed earlier tonight. After this upcoming trip I'm going to get strict on my dietary limitations again. I've been having too many carbs lately, and I really need to scale way back. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.04.01 Still hurting. I might try to minimize typing over the coming vacation. Arland found that a recent commit broke RetroForth/arks graphica words. He has pushed a fix for this, and we'll backport the changes to RetroForth/ilo graphica tomorrow. The `retro-ilo.sh` script now supports x86-64 Haiku. I'll be adding a binary for this to the collection. (The current Alpha4 has been quite stable on our test system; I'm hoping to do a permanent install on a similar box soon). We have a FreeBSD 13 system setup locally now. Working on also setting up current NetBSD and DragonFly BSD as well. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.03.31 Nothing significant to report today. My hands are hurting, so I'm skipping any more writing for now. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.03.30 I updated the RetroForth/napia image today. It's now based on my latest RetroForth/ilo image, so all the recent improvements are in place now. Starting to decide what I'll need to bring on vacation next week. I want to pack pretty lightly this time. Dinner tonight was tacos. I've been experimenting with fillings; most of the non-meat based ones I tried were good. I like rice, but more than a small quantity raises my blood glucose. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.03.29 Starting to prepare for an upcoming vacation (April 6 - 11); I have a handful of small things I'd like to work on. I am writing an ilo+graphica that uses an actual bitmap (1 bit per pixel) display. This should be beneficial for a possible play.date port, and maybe getting a classic Mac version with the visual stuff. Tomorrow I'll try to finish the (std) wordlist data. Tonight my hands are starting to hurt, so it's time to stop for now. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.03.28 It's been a long day. Just spending some time reading before bed. Earlier today I worked on RetroForth/nga, starting to split the device code into separate files. For the next release I'm hoping to reduce redundant code and make it easier to add new things. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.03.27 RetroForth/nga (12).2023.3 is out. I've published the source and opened an issue for updating the FreeBSD port entry. Trying to get a pkgsrc tree working so I can try to update the NetBSD port. I'll be looking at the guix port as well. It's time to try to get it a bit more widely available. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.03.26 My blood glucose spiked last night. Wasn't able to get to sleep until after 4AM, and woke up around 7AM. Very tired. Watched John Wick 4. As expected, not much plot, but plenty of fighting. The theatre wasn't crowded. I had an enjoyable time, but was *extremely* tired by the end. Going to bed early. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.03.25 Just took it easy today. I wasn't able to get much sleep last night, but once I did fall asleep around 6am, I managed to sleep until almost 10; which is much better than normal. We picked up groceries for the next week. This ended up costing more than planned, but should be ok if we are careful. Arland started exploring programming for the Panic Play Date console. He & Alex have a small game in development now. I showed Arland some of the old RetroForth systems (11 & 10). He was disappointed in the small starting vocabulary of 10, and didn't like the dictionary system & heavy use of vectors in 11. I'm not surprised by this. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.03.24 It was a long day at work, but I was able to wrap up my month end preparations as well as completing three more pages of the inventory counts. For the evening, I'm just relaxing and reading a bit. Tomorrow I start running through the various tests I have for RetroForth/nga. This will hopefully go smoothly. It would be nice to wrap up work on this so I can push out an update next week. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.03.23 I finished the glossary data for RetroForth/nga; going to start the final rounds of testing tomorrow. Jim Butcher has started writing the next book in the Dresden Files (a series I've enjoyed reading over the years). Hopefully it'll be published around this time next year. In the meantime, he also completed the second book in Cinder Spires; a series I have yet to read. It might be a good time to start, possibly during a short vacation I have coming up in early April. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.03.22 Still having a lot of hand pain. My left hand is stiff and feels swollen. Going to try to avoid doing too much with it tomorrow. I'm helping Arland with some ideas for a comic he's hoping to start working on. I roped in Glen to aid in some of the world design. We have a couple of character descriptions and an early skeleton for the first part of the story. Not doing much in programming today. I wrote an explaination of a few issues someone in the IRC channel was having. Other than that, I'm just writing a little under RetroForth/ilo on the Teensy. I think I'll be making much more use of the system on these little boards in the future. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.03.21 Pain. I live with pain in my hands & wrists every day, but some (like today) are much worse than others. I'm going to have to figure out something to help with this as things aren't really improving. In spite of the pain today, I have finished the glossary data for all but one word in Retro/nga. I'll wrap that up tomorrow, along with the other thing I did today: glossary data for the (std) library blocks in Retro/ilo. This will get all the Retro systems closer to a release. Retro/ilo+teensy4.1 is working nicely. I'm making a few tweaks around line endings, but it's running fine and I'm actually using it now for some of my writing. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.03.20 I was very tired today. But it was quiet at work, and I feel ok now, at the end of the day. Retro/nga is nearly done. I still have ~20 words to document, and then need to run through final tests & write the final release notes. But it should be doable by the weekend. On my goal of having a little portable Forth machine, I think I know how I'm going to proceed. Still need to source some stuff, but I have most of the parts other than the display. For Retro/nga (and the others), I'd like to offer a nicer interactive environment under ANSI terminals. Some work towards this has begun. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.03.19 I did some work on RetroForth/arks. This was around loading sets and applications. Specifically: `needs` now creates an indicator and doesn't reload block sets that were previously loaded. And I added a * sigil that loads an (app:....) block and runs an application. This can be used to have an application loader that imports any dependencies, then runs the program in question. That's probably it for now. I'm pretty tired this weekend, so as it's almost 19:00 will begin winding down for bed now. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.03.18 I'm interested in things like a Pinephone + keyboard, the MNT Reform Mini, and old palmtops like the HP Palmtop 200LX or some of the early Windows CE devices. Computing on the go has been something I embraced years ago, and I'm always looking at ways to do things better. I mostly work on an iPad mini and a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra. I find these to be portable enough to keep at least one with me throughout the day, but I do kind of prefer the iPad; mainly due to the applications, but also the size. What I like better on Android is the existence of Termux. I wish something like this was an option on iOS, but nothing I've found there really works for me. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2023.03.17 I'm using this as a sort of journal. The notes here won't be long (just a block each), and there's not going to be any actual topics. Just whatever I feel like recording on a given day. Today I'm having some RSI problems. The pain is back, and it's the worst I've felt in the last month. This is somewhat worrying but I'll manage. The frequency with which the pain is returning is increasing, so I will probably need to reduce my typing again. It's hard for me; writing is a major part of my life and I hate not being able to pursue it. ----------------------------------------------------------------