2017 November 06 14:55

Another year of little writing. It’s too bad. I’ve been going down lots of interesting rabbit-holes and meaning to write about all of them, but instead of writing I move on to the next one.

I’m here right now to announce that I’m writing this entry on an Acer Chromebook 14 (model CB3-431), on which I’ve installed Gentoo Linux in a chroot to use as a coding and writing environment. So far it’s gone swimmingly. Gentoo seems pretty solid! The initial “install” (I started with a stage3 tarball) is a bit tedious, but now that it’s done I’ve got 19,000 software packages at my disposal!

This finally feels like a developer machine. I’ve really been missing having a true command-line!

It’s also quite surprising that even though the processor in this Chromebook – a Celeron N3160 – isn’t that beefy, building Vim, Git, and Mercurial (and a handful of dependencies) from source took only a few minutes.

muforth runs fine on this machine too. ;-)


2017 February 23 00:16

Welcome to 2017!

Oh, the insanity.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I’m not ready to say “happy 2017” – and I may never be. But I’m also not ready to pivot this “platform” – which is where I like to chat to myself and my occasional reader about technology, computing, two-wheeled transport, and other things that catch my attention (like the occasional restaurant range) – over to politics. I did ponder starting another site/blog to engage in political discourse and may still, even though I’m overwhelmed just keeping this and the muforth project site alive.

Anyway, I’m here to report that I’m still here.

I’m about to launch into an update to this site similar to the one just undertaken on the muforth site. The difference in readability is .. huge.

I’ve also finally removed the crazy Javascript redirection from www.nimblemachines.com to the current year’s journal page. I think it was messing up Google’s indexing of the site, and I was never totally convinced that it was the right thing to do. Now the site has a normal index page, with its own content (a thoroughly goofy “introduction” to what Nimble Machines is all about).

Stay tuned.


Read the 2016 journal.