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June 2025
For a few days, Pino became a land creature, living on stilts, while we scrubbed and re-painted the lower part of the hull. Our propeller had a bit of a wobble, which we hope is now corrected. We also battled with the old wheel quadrant and were finally able to remove it, at least a part of it. Boaters have frequently helped us while we were in boatyards, and we are finally able to pay it forward. We offered both advice to those who asked and lent tools to folks that needed them. It felt nice. Teapot's new bottom has seen water for the first time, the new gelcoat will allow us to take it around into bays for many more years to come.
We spent many June days working on both Turnip Complete(Uxn book) and the enhanced version of the Victoria to Sitka Logbook, with frequent breaks to enjoy the beautiful places we found ourselves in.
The beginning of our sailing season has been very blustery, allowing for some good sailing, but also often forcing us to wait at anchor for clement weather. Later, we sailed through the San Juan Islands to meet up with some Merveillans on Blakely Island. We are very grateful to be part of a community of such kind, curious, and generous people. The image that was drawn for this month's update represents cooperation between members of Merveilles.
Book Club: This month we are reading Ill Met By Moonlight by Sarah A. Hoyt, Silmarillion by J.R.R Tolkien and Girl's Last Tour by Tsukumizu.
May 2025
Oquonie was released on the Playdate Catalog this month! We'd like to thank everyone who sent us photos of their progress in the game, it has been nice to follow along. The game is kind of our first official release on a modern handheld platform, and we're happy to see that Uxn roms run well on it! It might be one of the first original Playdate games implemented that way?
In other news, Devine started working on a book, the working title is "Turnip Complete". The goal is to write a complete and stand-alone implementation guide for the Uxn virtual machine and devices, along with some example programs and thoughts about playful computery things. We might have something to show for it come autumn, maybe.
We've left Victoria for the summer, and are falling back into the groove of waking up at dusk to catch the tide. We have a quick haul out lined up, and afterward we'll be sailing around the Gulf Islands until the fall. We have lots of projects to finish up these next couple of months and can't wait to share them with you.
We share photos of life aboard throughout the month on our little photo site, if you're curious to see what the daily life aboard Pino is like.
Book Club: This month we are reading Artemis by Andy Weir, Gardening Without Work: For the Aging, the Busy and the Indolent by Ruth Stout and A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen.
April 2025
- 100r.co, updated water, ditch bag, woodstove installation, and added new photos and information on first aid kit.
- Rabbit Waves, updated Triangular Bandages with animated gifs, and First-Aid kit with new med suggestions (also appended a .txt list of meds and their intended use).
- Hakum, began a new comic sequence named Sabotage Study(not yet completed).
- Orca, modified the behavior of the lowercase-j operator to allow for jumpers to grow.
- Solresol, improved the documentation.
- Uxntal, improved the documentation.
The weather is getting warmer, which is perfect for airing out Pino's lockers, and drying off moldy clothes and tools. Anything stored in the v-berth lockers, below the waterline, suffer from extreme wetness. It is a very, very annoying fact of boat life, but there is really no way to bring good air flow in those spaces. We scrubbed the lockers clean, parted with items we no longer needed, and sent two laptops to the recycler.
In last month's update, we mentioned Flickjam, a game jam based on Increpare's Flickgame. We received a total of 27 entries! They're really fun, and all playable in the browser. Devine's jam entry is about a very adorable rabbit learning to play the word "rabbit" on a xylophone in Solresol.
Devine spent some time off the computer, skating and folding paper. The paper computer pages have been updated to cover some new ways in which computer emulators can be operated on paper. While on that subject, we highly recommend Tadashi Tokieda's excellent talk named A world from a sheet of paper.
Another item on Devine's list was to gradually phase out Uxnasm.c in favor of the self-hosted assembler. We're not 100% pleased yet, but it is getting closer to retirement.
Starting on May 20th 2025(1000 PST/PDT) the Playdate Catalogue will include Oquonie. The game is also available on our itch.io store.
The video for Devine's November 2024 talk A Shining Place Built Upon The Sand is now on YouTube.
Book Club: This month we are reading Banvard's Folly by Paul Collins, Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman, and we are still making progress on the The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt.
March 2025
In the above illustration, little Ninj is going through a first-aid kit, looking through our supplies to see what needs to be topped off and what is out-of-date. Rek drew a list of suggestions on what to include in both a first-aid and a medical kit for the Rabbit Waves project, we plan to add more items soon(thanks to everyone on Mastodon who suggested additions! It'll be in the April update).
We will spend the first few days of April participating in Flickjam, making small games in the style of Flickgame, a tool originally made by Increpare, in which the world is navigated by clicking on pixels of different colors to head in different directions. Devine ported Flickgame to Varvara, and wrote a compiler for flick games to uxn roms.
This past month, Rek finished transcribing the entire 15 weeks of the Victoria to Sitka logbook! We have plans to turn it into a book, in the style of Busy Doing Nothing, with tons of extra content and illustrations.
March was a very good month for silly calendar doodles. Our paper calendar is always in view, it documents important events like releases, appointments, as well as food, memes, and other noteworthy things that happened on each day.
Book Club: This month we are still reading The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, it's a long book!
February 2025
On February 14th, we celebrated our 9th year living aboard our beloved Pino. Read a short text by Devine, which expands on what it means to truly be a generalist.
Despite the weather being less-than-ideal, we were able to install our replacement solar panels, and revisit our notes on solar installations.
Devine completed Nebu, a spritesheet editor as well as a desktop calendar, alongside many other little desktop utilities. Nebu is just over 8.3 kB, a bit less than a blank excel file.
In times of increasing climate and political instability, it is a good time to get together with your community and make plans for emergencies. Consider reading Tokyo Bosai about disaster preparedness, this elaborate document deals with disasters that occur specifically in Japan, but many of the recommendations are useful regardless. We released a new page on rabbit waves with suggestions on what to pack in an Emergency Bag. Remember, every emergency bag is different, and what is essential varies per person.
We also put together a print-it-yourself zine, which combines useful information about Morse Code and Signal Flags. If you have printed the zine and don't know how to fold it, see Rek's illustrated instructions. Speaking of signal flags, we printed stickers of Rek's ICS flag drawings.
The nice weather finally arrived this week and we were able to redo Teapot's gelcoat. This was our first time working with gelcoat, our friends Rik & Kay, who lent us their workspace, were very patient and generous teachers. We will continue the project later when the gelcoat has cured.
Book Club: This month we are reading The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt.
January 2025
Devine spent time improving the html5 uxn emulator, and thanks to their hard work it is now possible to play Niju, Donsol, and Oquonie directly in the browser on itch.io, the same goes for projects like Noodle and Tote.
It's been a long time coming, but Oquonie is now playable on Playdate. Rek spent the last week converting the 2-bit assets for Oquonie to 1-bit, because some of the characters and tiles were too difficult to read, now all of the assets work perfectly on monochromatic screens. As an amazing plus, Devine got the music and sounds working perfectly, just like in the original iOS version.
From January 19-25th, we both participated in Goblin Week, an event in which you make goblins every day for a week(whatever that means to you). See the goblin series made by Rek(viewable here in higher rez also) and the one made by Devine(Mastodon).
Pino has earned two new replacement solar panels this month! We have not installed them yet, it is still too cold outside in Victoria (we are expecting snow this week).
We share photos often in our monthly updates, and so Devine spent time building our very own custom photo feed named Days. It is possible to follow the feed with RSS.
Book Club: This month we are reading How do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino and Middlemarch by George Eliot.
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