Alaska 2026
We spent the last week off-grid exploring the great north. Captured with a KODAK Charmera . Jason J. Gullickson, 2026
mr's Preposter.us Blog
mr's blog on preposter.us
Latest posts
Repo Watch - 2026-07-31
As I bring my code repositories back online I'm going to accompany them with a weekly-ish post. This is as much for me as it is for you, because doing this slowly and thoughtfully gives me a chance to revisit some projects that I haven't looked at in a long time, and might play a role in future work. Pouch https://codeberg.org/jjg/pouch Pouch is at the center of an experiment I started in…
Walk into the light
Codeberg 's recent move to ban LLM-generated projects , along with their ongoing efforts to keep AI companies from scraping their site has inspired me to start sharing my code again. I've been using Codeberg for years, but about a year ago I mostly stopped, deleted all my repos from Github and switched to using a private, on-prem server to host my code. During this time I've debated whether or not…
Downlink 2026-07-31
* https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/142974/~/black-or-colored-vertical-lines-or-streaks-on-printed-pages * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIe * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MouseText * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbols_for_Legacy_Computing * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIc * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-definition_television *…
July
I struggled a bit with getting a post out every day this month. Looks like if I'm going to maintain the pace for the year, I'm going to have some catching-up to do. Jason J. Gullickson, 2026
Mediapal
In the last week I've had two friends ask me about setting-up a home media server. Around this same time we had a major outage of one of the basically two ISP's in town of which one of these friends is a customer. This enhanced his interest in setting something like this up. I have been running Jellyfin on an old Backblaze Pod in the lab for close to a year and I use it almost every day for…
Mixing it up
How to make a streaming service for less than the cost of subscribing to one
I experimented with running a streaming community television station and managed to keep it on the air for awhile, maybe six months? As it turned out the technical side of it wasn't the hard part, the creative part was. While I'm an experienced filmmaker, and I thought that was enough, in the end I didn't have the time or energy to create much of anything for the channel or build support in the…
PPCTNG
So what about a new architecture for a personal computer that is built around an FPGA or a couple FPGAs (but probably just one large FPGA, or maybe two so that it's possible for it to give itself a "brain transplant") which fan-out into some I/O... Maybe multiple FPGA's make sense, in a "network" of sorts, but more like a tree so that "CPU" type processors can be realized as well as I/O processors…
Downlink 2026-07-19
* https://go.dev/doc/tutorial/handle-errors * https://go.dev/doc/modules/layout#basic-command * https://go.dev/blog/package-names * https://go.dev/doc/tutorial/add-a-test * https://go.dev/blog/error-handling-and-go * https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/emersion/go-imap/v2/imapclient#example-Client * https://godocs.io/github.com/emersion/go-message/mail *…
Tools of the Trade
Harvest Sun
jframe
I could really use a UI "toolkit" for the web, something with a small set of "widgets" that I could compose into simple user interfaces. The complication is that I want something simple and lightweight, and ideally, without JavaScript. The sort of things that I'm looking for are buttons, input fields, bar graphs and some simple nest-able containers to organize all this in. You would think that…
Downlink 2026-07-10
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-board_computer * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II#Apple_IIe * https://www.willegal.net/appleii/appleii-first_page.htm * http://willegal.net/superproto/SuperProto.htm * https://www.willegal.net/blog/?cat=15 * http://www.myapplecomputer.net/mimeo-reproduction.html * https://www.willegal.net/appleii/apple1-process.htm *…
Grizz
I spent a lot of time deciding what L2 charging station to buy for the EV9. I thought my requirements were pretty basic: * Tough enough to live outside through Wisconsin winters (getting easier every year) * NACS connector for the vehicle * Plug-in (so if it breaks I can swap it out without cutting the power) * 40A or more * Doesn't require the Internet to work I thought I could take advantage of…
Bugs
If you're subscribed to the feed (or visited the index ) you may have noticed some anomalies over the last day or so. Those are bugs. It's a good reminder that I need to re-write Preposter.us in something that is maintained, and then maintain it. With any luck wrestling with this will provide the motivation I need to do just that. Jason J. Gullickson, 2026
Juicy
Power Games
I have some time to myself this morning as electricians upgrade the service at the house. This had me thinking about off-grid power and I spent a couple hours diving deep into making something convenient and durable for monitoring, controlling and integrating various power supplies and consumers. I was focused on Bluetti, because that's what I have to play with and really rooting-around in the…
Letting The Work Do The Work
I've thought a lot about yesterday's post over the last 24 hours and realized a few things. One is that focusing on this problem, the slopocalypse if you will, is making it impossible for me to make any progress on the things that I want to be working on, the things I need to do to find a way out of the coercive way of life that forces me to use AI in the first place. There's a lot of things that…
KGLMDPS: The Move
Nowhere To Go But Up
I've been meticulously rebuilding my laptop over the last few days, installing only a handful of pieces of software. I was really heartbroken to find that one of my favorite pieces of open-source software, one that I depend on almost daily, has become infected with the AI virus. It's become clear to me that at this point, any corporate or otherwise closed piece of software must be assumed to…
Fresh
I used to format and re-install the operating system on my laptops frequently. Way back when I ran Classic MacOS or Windows this was at least four times a year, then when I started using Linux it became less frequent, but I did a fresh install at least once or twice a year and most of the time I experimented with different Linux distros. As operating systems became more reliable I got out of this…
Over the Sea
"In every revolution, there's one man with a vision!" Information Society, 1988
The Month of Zig - Conclusion
I'm tempted to call the MoZ a failure, but even though I didn't successfully create any new programs, I learned a few things and learning is always a valid outcome. The main thing I learned was: I don't like writing programs in Zig. I really want to support the Zig developers stance against AI contributions to the language, and maybe I should send them a few bucks, but compared to other languages…
Wine Cooler Part II
Continuation of the Wine Cooler saga. The parts I needed for the wine fridge showed-up about a month ago, but I couldn't find time to work on it again until last weekend. Summer is not a great time to get things done that need to be done indoors. Once I unpacked the parts (replacement power supply and four replacement fans) I had to get my bearings again as to how the thing goes together and comes…
Ribs
I made my first rack of pork ribs on the Pit Barrel last night for dinner. I've made country-style ribs many times with varying degrees of success, but I'd never tried "regular" ribs until last night. As it turns out, they turned-out pretty good! Using the basic recipe on the Pit Barrel site and the same rub I've put-together at home for the county-style ribs there's really not a lot to it. The…
Learing at Work
I used to learn a lot at work. One of the most expensive things about being forced to use AI is that I no longer do. For decades I would learn new things and hone my existing skills during the thousands of hours I spent making other people rich. I got to keep these skills when I punched-out at the end of the day and use them to do the things I like. Now I spend my days coaxing, babysitting and…
Downlink 2026-06-29
Always an easy way to squeak-out one more post before the end of the month... * https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_User_Manual/Conditional_and_Iterator_Functions * https://stackoverflow.com/questions/77737306/openscad-syntax-modify-value-in-vector-list-array * https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_User_Manual/WIP/Text_Metrics#fontmetrics * https://openscad.org/cheatsheet/ *…
Back In Time
Ever since I was a wee child I was fascinated with developing a handful of technologies. I've worked on these things on-and-off over the course of my life, sometimes professionally, but more often on my own. Heartbreakingly, I've seen most of the co-opted by industry and evil men and twisted into things that not only fail to live up the standards I held my own work to, but become actively harmful.…
Six posts in two days
I got a little behind this month so I'm going to have to catch-up over the next two days (today and tomorrow). I'll probably post a few half-baked drafts I have in the hopper, but maybe I'll have time for one or two fresh ones as well. Jason J. Gullickson, 2026
Swyft-Inspired?
Last weekend I tried a few times to use both SwyftCard and Canon Cat emulators and in both cases didn't have a lot of success. This could be attributed to my ignorance of the emulators involved, but it made me second-guess my assumption that emulation would be the "easy way" to get to a Swyft-like machine I could take on the road. But emulation isn't turning out to be the shortcut I expected it to…
Textmode
Lately my Framework laptop running ElementaryOS has been flaking-out, glitching in some way that causes the cursor to randomly move around in my editor ( Micro ) when I'm trying to write and doing other weird things like selecting menus and dragging things around when I'm using the GUI. This morning when I was writing about the DIY Laserdisc player this caused me to loose a lot of work because…
Could I make a Laserdisc Player?
I'm somewhat obsessed with Laserdiscs . As my collection grows so does my fear that my player will fall apart. I've already fixed it once, and I have two of the same model so I have some amount of spare parts, but eventually something unrecoverable will happen and I'll have to find a new one. The problem is: there's no new Laserdisc players. This morning I woke-up thinking about what it would take…
The Machine Room
KGLMDPS is moving, and part of that move includes moving the 3D printers into an enclosed space (an office separate from the rest of the open area). This has me thinking about how I want to arrange things, and while I'll probably start by simply "lifting-and-shifting" the current setup, maybe it's time to think about how I can improve things based on the few months of practical experience we've…
Going directly to the source
I'm spending the morning reading the MAME Canon Cat "driver" sourcecode to see if I can figure out how to use it. Simply running it, I can't figure out where essential things like the LEAP keys are. The code is well commented, which is fortunate because my C++ is rusty, and I don't even know how to configure MAME let alone write drivers for it. As I read through the code I feel like I'm starting…
Kitty Steps
In my continuous process of finding a path to the Swyft-like computer to replace the computers I use now uncovered an even finer-grained way to get to something usable quicker. It's quite simple: use the tools I have to make a smaller version of the Canon Cat. A " kitten " The hardware spec for The Kitten is pretty simple: * A Quality keyboard with LEAP keys * A single-board computer (SBC) * A…
Now we just need something to plug it into...
Margo give me strength
The gift of deadlines
Jamie and I are going to Alaska this fall and I'm hoping to do some writing while we are there. I imagine it will be a place where some inspiration might occur. I don't want to bring my regular laptop for many reasons, so I plan to bring something else instead. Earlier this year I decided that I was going to bring something I built for this, and that something was The Beaver (even though I wasn't…
Give 'em the (big) finger
One of the fun things we realized could be done with the Printable Type script is making type using "symbol" fonts. We first ran a partial set, but when printed at the same size (24 points) as the alphabet set we ran earlier, the details of some of the symbols got pretty gummed-up by support. Rerunning them at about 3x that size made a "big" difference. At first this was a somewhat manual process…
A good thought spoiled?
Something I don't understand about myself is how I can get really excited about an idea, think about it intensely and even build-out part of it one day and then the next day I'm almost completely disinterested in it, and in extreme cases sort of disgusted by the idea of working on it. It's very weird. When this happens it's almost like upon reflection it's a bad idea, or something that seems like…
NAS-T
Terra -distributable personal data storage. The idea is pretty simple: a little box you put on your network where you can store your electronic files and not worry about losing them. These have been around for ages and come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Many have some form of redundancy so that if something breaks (a disk fails, etc.) the data they store is not lost, but if something happens…
The Environment
This morning has been really frustrating. I tried so many times to work on something and my computer just kept getting in the way. Instability, slowness, broken tools, distractions; a constant stream of events bent on breaking my concentration, trying my patience and evaporating gumption. All rather discouraging. I need a place to work where this doesn't happen. The Swyft environment on my Apple…
Sometimes that's all you can do
Innovation Through Constraint
This being The Month of Zig , I started thinking about how I would port my Personal Search Engine (PSE) prototype to Zig . As I worked through the prototype code one of the challenges to porting it is that the Go version depends on Go's built-in HTML parser, but there's no HTML parser in Zig's standard library (yet?). The PSE's web crawler needs an HTML parser to read the HTML documents it crawls…
Try, Try Again...
Printable Type
We've been collecting wood and metal type for use at the KGLMDPS. Antique type is so cool, but also expensive and not always what you need. While I plan to learn how to make our own wood type, in the meantime we wanted the ability to make custom type sooner so we decided to experiment with 3D printed type. We've (2D) printed with 3D printed things before, but I've never set-out to make a proper…
Do It Right
There's no shortage of excuses to do things the wrong way. "Excuses" sounds harsh but I mean it in the least judgmental way possible, an excuse is just a reason, and I wouldn't fault anyone for doing something the wrong way, especially right now, because there's an endless stream of reasons for doing things any way you can manage to get them done. But I'm trying to do a better job when I can and…
Downlink 2026-06-05
I've skipped a couple of weeks and switched browsers as well, so prepare yourself . * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatible_Time-Sharing_System * https://www.cozx.com/dpitts/ibm7090.html * https://www.cozx.com/dpitts/ctss_recover.html * https://timereshared.com/ctss/ * https://timereshared.com/reconstructing-joseph-weizenbaums-opl/ * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Power_and_Human_Reason…
The Month of Zig - Day Five: Ask For Help
After posting a link to The Month of Zig - Day Three to the fediverse I received a number of replies, one from Alexey that was little more than a code snippet: Yesterday, I tried pasting this code into the file where I'm trying to write my first new Zig program. It didn't compile, so I asked a follow-up question and received another terse-but-helpful response: Turns out that this link was the key…