What I'm up to right now!

Page created: 2021-11-11 , updated: 2023-05-07

The active list:

(Newest of the new at the top.)

  • DAILY: I’ve been writing on my massive Forth: The programming language that writes itself: The Web Page every morning for a couple weeks. Finishing it will take (at least) a couple weeks more. It’s getting pretty huge and I’m kinda loving it.

  • DAILY and BACK ON TRACK: 2023 is my The Year of the Microcontroller! You can check my progress there, broken into "chapters".

  • BACK ON TRACK: Assembly Nights: Season Two has started creaking and groaning back to life. The big deal here is making a tool (in Zig) to help me debug my ELF output. Writing the tool is helping me walk through the ELF header more sysetmatically and hopefully I’ll find my bug.

  • Off and on: Learning to play the Irish Whistle one tiny bit most nights.

  • Just started trying out a new phone app to learn the German language. I like it so far, but I’m not gonna start praising it publicly until I’m past the first impressions stage.

  • Still "gardening" on this website regularly. Check the Updated dates on pages.

Done or recently:

  • Finished RetroV - Uh, I basically lost my mind for two weeks and wrote some JavaScript and a heck of a lot of supporting material.

  • Finished my Forth talk 2023 (with a ton of drawings).

  • Finished Hoo? A solo journaling RPG for a game jam with lots of art (including an entire Tarot deck!)

  • Finished my book-guided OpenBSD tour openbsd.

  • Finished Mr. Tree Goes Down!!! (Dec 7: And the print copies just came today!)

Cover of my book Mr. Tree Goes Down showing mr tree’s silly face

  • Wearing libre and feeling like a gnu man.

Slightly shelved:

  • Getting back to needle felting is a 2023 goal that I will certainly do.

  • Also a 2023 goal: finishing/updating my htmx live reference.

  • Glacially/Painfully: Working on my ray tracer (github.com) in Zig and the top-secret side-quest (very exciting in a slow way). No promises about 2023 for this one.

Quite shelved but revivable:

  • Caught the old Web/REST/hypermedia religion bug again in late 2021. Resulting in this top-secret work in progress and a load of used books at my doorstep:

    • REST in Practice (2010, O’Reilly) by Jim Webber et al

    • RESTful Web Services (2007, O’Reilly) by Leonard Richardson et al

    • RESTful Web Services Cookbook (2010, O’Reilly) by Subbu Allamaraju

    • Building Hypermedia APIs with HTML5 & Node (2012, O’Reilly) by Mike Admundsen (don’t let the title throw you off, this book looks great!)

    • Adaptive Web Design (2011, Easy Readers) by Aaron Gustafson (FINISHED)

    • Weaving the Web (1999, HarperCollins) by Tim Berners-Lee (FINISHED)

  • Re-discovered some discarded lumber in the side yard. Will be making a "Roman-style" woodworking workbench inspired by Rex Krueger (Actually, I might upgrade this to a 2023 "weekends" goal…​)

    • March update: got out the circular saw and rough-cut the boards to length.

    • Will also be restoring an old jack plane courtesy of ebay (I have all the materials now, just need to pick a weekend)

Now now now

This page is a really nice way to brain-dump what I’m into at the moment. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a while and when I ran across Derek Sivers’s concept of the "/now" page, I knew I had to jump on board. Read more at nownownow.com!