Trevor Flowers 🌸🌸 @trevorfsmith@xoxo.zone

Two more weeks in this contract and then I'm free*!

* free to hustle** for different work

** after a break

Now I have a long todo list from seeing ways to improve Bink for people who aren't me.

I felt a fair amount of joy today seeing a project by a skilled dev who used my new JS framework, Bink. It has been just in my head for so long!

I put together a chunky controller, too. It looks and feels like I found it in the desert.

I, uh, decided to make a mechatronic tardigrade. Here's the main body skeleton.

It went ok.
Hashtag duck lips

Narrator: It didn't.

Right. A year in and it's time for a ding dang haircut. How wrong can I get it?

I have started to daydream about the folks I've met through XOXO using the thing I'm creating to run their own talk shows. If it works half as well as my daydream then it will be 🌸💖🌸.

I'm thinking about making this wee lappie into a matrix node (matrix.org) with a riot.im web client, using ngrok to give it a stable public endpoint. I have Slack group fatigue (so many!) and am generally interested in federated networks. I worry that the docs say little to nothing about moderation of harassment and abuse, though.

I don't care what the calendar reads, it's officially Fall when I light the pilot light in the fireplace.

I'm at home tuned into W3C Immersive Web folks in Fukuoka polishing the WebXR spec while I code a new XR simulator for Transmutable Soundstage. The younger person I was when I first tuned into the idea of VR (~01985) is pretty thrilled with XR-related goings-ons in 02019.

I found instructions for stopping it from going to sleep when the lid closes so now I can tuck it away and treat it like a wee server with a ~10 hour battery backup. I have an SSD that I'm going to attach for bulk storage. Next I want to find/make a web-based photo library so that I can escape Google Photos.

The only slightly hacky bit was removing a screw to turn off write protection of the bios. It required just a screwdriver but for folks who aren't used to poking around inside electronics it could be a bit stressful.

I ended up with a Dell 11" Chromebook for ~$0 and had fun wiping all traces of ChromeOS and installing GalliumOS, a derivative of Ubuntu Linux for small lappies. It took a small amount of terminal work but required almost no knowledge as the directions were clear.

I still thrash around a bit with lifetime notations so I need to read more about them and look at more OSS Rust code to see how more experienced folks use them.

I'm to the point with Rust where I can reliably write code that runs tests and does what I expect. It's still probably bad code in terms of The Rust Way but I'm getting there.