charles childers is _ _ _ _ __ ___ __(_) |_(_)_ __ __ _ (_)_ __ \ \ /\ / / '__| | __| | '_ \ / _` | | | '_ \ \ V V /| | | | |_| | | | | (_| | | | | | | \_/\_/ |_| |_|\__|_|_| |_|\__, | |_|_| |_| |___/ _ _ _ ___ _ __ ___ __ _| | | _ __ (_) ___ ___ ___ ___ / __| '_ ` _ \ / _` | | | | '_ \| |/ _ \/ __/ _ \/ __| \__ \ | | | | | (_| | | | | |_) | | __/ (_| __/\__ \ |___/_| |_| |_|\__,_|_|_| | .__/|_|\___|\___\___||___/ |_| ---------------------------------------------------------------- 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.