_ _ _ _ __ ___ __(_) |_(_)_ __ __ _ (_)_ __ \ \ /\ / / '__| | __| | '_ \ / _` | | | '_ \ \ V V /| | | | |_| | | | | (_| | | | | | | \_/\_/ |_| |_|\__|_|_| |_|\__, | |_|_| |_| |___/ _ _ _ ___ _ __ ___ __ _| | | _ __ (_) ___ ___ ___ ___ / __| '_ ` _ \ / _` | | | | '_ \| |/ _ \/ __/ _ \/ __| \__ \ | | | | | (_| | | | | |_) | | __/ (_| __/\__ \ |___/_| |_| |_|\__,_|_|_| | .__/|_|\___|\___\___||___/ |_| ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2025.01.22 I've started using the Viwoods AiPaper Mini (what's with these long names; I'll call this the VAPM to keep it shorter) for my work notes. The size is nicer for me to carry around than the Kindle Scribe, and it doesn't force me to go through Amazon for everything. I do wish I could turn off the "AI" button though. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2025.01.21 Did a bit of #OsDev today. I started working on a boot loader for use with ilo-x86-native, with a goal of being able to drop the dependency on GRUB. This will hopefully be able to just load an ilo from disk, then hand off control. This will have a struc- ture of [boot-loader][ilo-binary][system-image][blocks] on disk. (Eventually I am hoping to have the loader & ilo in ROM, but the research into this is only moving forward slowly). Other stuff: I'm testing use of the Viwood for my work notes, and doing some testing of superinstructions on my ilo-unix.c code. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2025.01.20 Back to work today. It was somewhat slower than normal, due to a combination of yesterday's snowstorm & it being MLK day. We had our new warehouse manager (Jack) start today. My initial impressions are good. I'll see how he does over the coming few weeks. On Wednesday or Thursday we have a new asst. manager (not new to me, but new to this role) starting. Hopefully he'll also be able to get people moving in the right direction. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2025.01.19 Church, then a winter storm. No accumulation until mid-afternoon but ended with about 4" of snow & ice. Not too bad. I showed Arland the SuperNote Nomad today. Will try to show him the others soon. I might give him one of these. I'm finding that I like these for my notes & Forth programming. They're not fast enough for video (though the Boox & Viwoods can sort of manage it), but are very good with text and simple images. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2025.01.18 I spent the first half of the day resting, then did a bit of reading on the iPad. After a couple of hours I went back to my eink stuff. It's oddly pleasing to read on eink. So Konilo is ok on the SuperNote. There's some lag with the display, but it looks great, and I'm happy to use it on this. But I don't think I'll be using many things on this other than the notes and KOReader, and some use of Konilo. For many things, the faster response times of the Viwoods mini is better feeling, even if there is more ghosting. I am going to make some changes to the `k` script I use to keep my Konilo system in sync across devices. The big one will be to use precompiled ilo binaries when possible. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2025.01.17 Work was a bit stressful today, but I'm hoping that this will improve next week. I spent some time with the SuperNote A6X2 this evening. I've setup some templates, and started several notebooks. It's very nice for writing. For Termux, it's somewhat slow, but does work. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2025.01.16 So doing church last night was good, but I'm very tired today. It ended up with me being up & active for about 20 hours, so I have had only 8 hours of rest over the last 2 days. Not enough. For my personal wiki, I'm going to setup a gopher interface. I plan to try writing it in Konilo & shell script, and will run under inetd. This presents some interface challenges since there are no inline links in gopher. Today I refactored the (termina) code for handling interface hints & the display. The code is a little less dense, and words are shorter than before. Overall it's slightly larger in memory due to the extra headers, but cleaner to read, so I'm happy with the tradeoff here. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2025.01.15 Feeling a bit sick today. Not quite bad enough to be a problem, but enough that it's a bit stressful. I have found out today that I was exposed to Covid, RSV, and Pneumonia from coworkers over the last few days. Ugh. My glucose is still a bit unstable & spiking when I eat. I'll be attempting to do a fast this weekend, to try to help reset a bit (though I'm not sure how well this will work). Visiting w/my dietician today. Hoping it goes well. My eating of late hasn't been ideal, due to unstable work schedules. I hope to get back on track soon. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2025.01.14 I'm increasingly shifting my local setup to center on lower power eink devices, running limited versions of Android with Termux. I prefer to use things that support Wacom EMR pens, to provide for handwritten notes alongside my Forth coding. This does have me considering more on reducing the use of color in the (termina) programs. It's already optional, but I may just do plain output in more things going forward. Notes for Viwoods AI Paper: I don't care about the AI part, but the hardware seems decent. It's fast enough for me, though not a major jump over the Boox Go 6. Konilo runs well on it. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2025.01.13 Starting the day off with coffee, as I didn't sleep well and think the caffine will be good. Had a cortado this morning, and brewed about 10oz w/the aeropress when I got to work. I've updated my cron jobs to use the new combined rom+blocks variant of ilo, so the WISP feed should now be updating again. Tomorrow I will be working on updating the (wiki) code to make use of (termina) prompt functionality, and bringing in faster entry lookups from (man). I'm also going to start working on an "ilo.sta" format for saving system state (ram + stacks + registers), in a form that we might be able to use across hosts. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2025.01.12 Church day today. No significant issues, and the new backgrounds I set up for the slides seem pretty readable. I will expand on these going forward. For songs, I'm now up to 108 complete, and Arland has another five ready to send to me. I'm going to make a few changes in my eink stuff in the near future. (Consolidating a few devices, and am looking at more capable things to replace the Kindle Scribe). ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2025.01.11 I was very tired today, so spent the first half of the day just resting. In the early afternoon, I went for a walk, stopped at the pharmacy to get the second dose (of three) for the Hep. B vaccine, then did a bit of grocery shopping. No actual programming today, though I did spend a bit of time just reading through my blocks. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2025.01.10 I'm now testing a setup using the combined rom+blocks file (as "ilo.sys", so the new name will work on the DOS system). I have basic C implementations [ilo, ilo-unix, milo, ilo-x11, milo-x11] done, but still need to do updated versions of the others if I decide to go forward with this. Going this way will open another option as well. I might expand ilo-unix to keep a "clean" copy of the ilo.sys in /usr/local/ and copy it to the $HOME if a copy isn't there. This would allow for an installable (via ports/packages) distribution. I need to think on this for a while. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2025.01.09 So the possible impact I mentioned yesterday relates to the pair of files (ilo.rom & ilo.blocks). If I decide to go through with this, those will merge into a single ilo.sys file with the rom followed by the blocks. The advantage is that a single file can be passed around, containing the complete system. This will be more consistent with the native & embedded variants though does break some existing tooling, and will break backward compatibility. I am leaning towards doing this though. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2025.01.08 Lots of little things, and one slightly larger one. In Konilo, I added `ti:prompt-s` and `ti:prompt-n` to request strings and numbers, and then updated several of the programs to use these. There's a bit left to do on this, but it makes the words easier to write & read. For ilo-native-x86: I now have a functional version which loads the ROM from mass storage. So physical blocks 0-63 for the ROM, and data blocks (mapped to 0) start at physical block 64. This needs more testing, but seems to work ok. This is pretty nice as it gets me a good step closer to a ROM- able ilo. This might have some impact on a few things in the hosted systems. More on this tomorrow I think. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2025.01.07 I had to go back and update the dates for this year's entried; I keep typing in 2024 instead of 2025. A minor annoyance; I'll try to bcatch this in the future. It's amazing to me how stress affects glucose levels. Now that we are back to mostly normal staff at work, and I can relax a little, my glucose numbers are back where I'd like them to be. I decided to start adding a few new things to (catalogue). Later this week it will support copying blocks, erasing them, and possibly a few other operations. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2025.01.06 Back to work. Now that we're past the holiday season it should get back to a more normal pace, and I will hopefully have more time to work on projects. Glucose control is good this morning. I took a short walk before work, which might have helped. Will try to do this more often. I'll be working using the Go 6 all week I think. Apart from a bit of slowness, the only real disappointment I have with this is the lack of stylus support. It'd be nice if it could act as a digital notepad. But it's great for reading on, and the Konilo under Termux is running nicely. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2025.01.05 I started a (menu) vocabulary for creating menus of text options and dispatching them. This is somewhat like what (termina) does, but doesn't have the same overall structure, and is intended for writing programs involving making choices and navigating through nested options. I'll probably have more to share on this in the future. Using the Boox Go 6; I note that due to only having 2GB of RAM, it's (mostly) a single tasking machine. Background programs need to be restarted when switching most of the time. This isn't an issue for me, but is worth noting I think. I also added several more pages in my wiki today. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2025.01.04 My glucose today has been highly unstable. I might try fasting for a day or two to try to deplete glucose reserves and see if that helps. Using the Boox for today's programming. I'm setting up a few additional programs for IRC & Fediverse access. I switched to using a lighter launcher, and have swapped over to KOReader. I wish this supported an EMR stylus (or even an Apple-style active one) as it'd be a great size for a pocekt notepad. As I do more with my eink devices, I'm finding the benefits of reading on a non-LCD to be nice. (I might look at the Boox Tab Mini C, or the Note Air 4C as a future option; the bigger screens might be helpful for reading). ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2025.01.03 Starting Konilo/teensy4.1 with my personal block set takes about 1 minute, 49 seconds. Once loaded, performance is ok, but the block i/o is slow on the Teensy. I'm hoping to improve this in the near-ish future. I think part of the issue is the overhead of dealing with FAT, and actual file i/o. If I can get the raw SD access working this might be faster. A backup plan: for my personal block set of 4,096 blocks, I could solder on 16MB of PSRAM & cache the blocks in RAM. This would help, but feels wasteful. I'd prefer to not resorting to this. As of today, I'm at 656 entries in WISP, having not missed a day since I started keeping this. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2025.01.02 I updated the copies of konilo on my boox go 6 & mobiscribe wave this morning. I'm looking into a proper win32 port of ilo, to add support for raw input & the minimal terminal emulation. Arland sent me an updated ilo.py a couple of days ago. Today I began actually reading it, and will likely merge it in tonight. A note on this: he has it stripping out escape sequences; I'd rather this be made optional. I'll ask him if he can revise to support this. Today is mounjaro day, so glucose control is pretty good. My average is up a bit, but I'm hoping that with the end of the holiday season, it'll start dropping down once more. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2025.01.01 A new year, so time for a new set of WISP blocks. The prior set is available (as text) on charles.childe.rs/WISP2024.txt Today I didn't have work, so I spent time reading, resting, and took a nice walk. It is a bit cold, but I still enjoyed the day. Tomorrow it's back to work for a few days, and probably back to a little programming. ----------------------------------------------------------------