This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of March.

• Wiki, documented the replacement of Pino's backstay, and created a project page for No Bears, None.
• Hakum, completed page 10 of Sabotage Study.
• Rabbit Waves, added a comic page.
• Grimgrains, updated lactofermentation section about jars.
• Oquonie, released a new version with lots of tiny optimizations.
• Uxn, released a little emulator for the m5 stack.

We spent a big chunk of the month finishing up the new Donsol. Devine documented the development as part of a spring edition of December Adventure. All of the graphics are done and the game is fully playable, all we have left to do is to test for bugs and to write the music. It looks fantastic. We'll let you all know when we have a release date!

The goal with Rabbit Waves was always to use storytelling to teach analog seafaring skills by making it possible to navigate between different topics by selecting highlighted objects in comic strips. Rek completed the first page, featuring a rabbit sailor's morning coffee-making routine while living on a small turnip sailboat at sea. This comic is the first step towards that goal of building a larger world for Rabbit Waves.

Spring is here and we are catching up with boat maintenance. While doing checks aboard last fall we noticed that Pino's backstay had a cut, we replaced the stay this week and plan to do the same for the headstay.

This month, we also finished proofreading the revised version of the Victoria to sitka logbook, which we will now refer to as No Bears, None. We still have work to do on it, but we hope to release it later this summer, or early fall. Lastly, we'd like to thank everyone who purchased rabbit stickers last month! Devine continues to draw very beautiful spirographs onto each letter.

Book Club: We are reading Island by Aldous Huxley.

This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of February.

• Wiki, updated knots with a figure-eight follow-through knot, also, Pino has a new headsail!
• Pavol, created a volume control tool.
• Adelie, made it so images are drawn faster.
• Turye, added support for 24x24 pixels uf3 fonts.
• Uxntal, collected generic routines and commonly used objects into example libraries.

At the start of the month, we spent a delightful couple of days deep in the wintry and rainy Spanish countryside, gathered in a medieval monastery with the Ink & Switch team for the 10 years anniversary of the studio. We also met up with Javier and Marcelino who gave us coffee and a book on celestial navigation, we will savor a cup while studying the sky.

We asked folks on the fediverse for their favourite rabbits from Rek's recent series, and picked out the four most popular and made stickers. We received them just yesterday and they look amazing! Thanks to everyone who already asked for a sheet! We pack the letters by hand, and Dev makes a spirograph on the back of each one encoding the date in gear radius and ratio.

We've hit some annoying issues with Arch, where mainstay programs sudden change their behavior or gets abandoned like volumeicon. Being unable to control the master volume without opening a full GUI application is a pain. Devine to the rescue! An hour's work and Pavol was born! In that same vein, while working on the new version of Donsol, we realized we'd need to design fonts larger than 16 px high, something that Turye was incapable of doing, until now.

On March 6th, we'll be giving a talk at the University Of Victoria, to talk about how our 10 years of living on the water has influenced our design and development work. The event is sold out at this point, but if you signed up see you there! Oquonie for Playdate will be on Playdate's upcoming Catalog Anniversary Sale running from March 5th to March 19th.

Devine has been puzzling over an extremely odd programming language idea and is looking for some pointers, prior art, ideas, so if ferns, rewriting, confluence, linear logic, tensor and multisets mean anything to you and interests you, get in touch. Lastly, we'll leave you with this image of Polycat working on a 2009 EeePC under HaikuOS, courtesy of Tbsp!

Book Club: We finally finished reading Middlemarch by George Eliot, a very good read, we will miss it. We are also reading Red Plenty by Francis Spufford and This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. We also watched great movies like The Battle of Algiers(1966) and Z(1969).

This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of January.

• Uxn, we released a new SDL2 emulator called uxn2 to replace the ol' uxnemu!
• Wiki, updated moisture prevention underliner, chainplates(with new photos and measurements), and sewing.
• Punk Rabbits, Completed the series(103 rabbits)!
• Hakum, released a new comic page for Sabotage Study.

This is likely very obvious to most people, but recently it dawned on us that clothes are, in a certain way, open-source. We can go to a thrift store, buy a shirt, rip out the seams, study it, lay all of the pieces down over new fabric, trace the patterns, cut them out, and sew it all back together to produce a copy of that same shirt. We've been wanting to learn how to make our own clothes but didn't know where to begin, until this month. Our first project was to reproduce our hats, after the store we bought them at stopped stocking them. We bought black cotton canvas at a local fabric store, took our old hats apart and re-built them(See Rek's hat, and Dev's hat). Later, Devine did the same for our old messenger backpack.

Goblin Week, an event in which people draw goblins for 7 days, occurs on the last full week of January. Devine's entries were inspired by a passage in Samuel Butler's Erewhon, and Rek drew some spunky cartoony goblins.

Inspired by Prahou's Subversive.pics, we put together image feeds for our personal websites.

• Devine's feed (RSS)
• Rek's feed (RSS)

Note that we are still uploading photos to Days, our studio's image feed.

We are making progress on the Playdate version of Donsol, and the polished manuscript for the Victoria to Sitka Logbook. We do not yet know when either will be finished so let us end this updated with one last small thing: a video by VacuumBeef of Snake Game in Orca.

Book Club: This month we have reached book 8 of Middlemarch by George Eliot, the very last one. We are also reading Mémoires d'Hadrien by Marguerite Yourcenar, and Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman.

This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of December.

• Wiki, added alternator to engine care.
• Thousand Rooms, added a Danish version of the book, thank you Fyr for the translation!
• Punk Rabbits, completed 33 new rabbits(#64-97).
• December Adventure, a month of daily devlogs.
• Uxn2, wrote a brand new SDL2 emulator.
• Heol, implemented a LISP in Uxntal.

It's that time of the year when we look back to our many bird encounters, account for what was damaged and mended, reminisce about moments immortalized in our paper calendars, and think of the many projects that have yet to leave the pages of our notebooks. We'd like to thank everyone who wrote to us, especially those who have tirelessly corrected errors in our writing and code, and we want to do a shoutout to the members of Merveilles, as well as artists, thinkers and tinkerers everywhere for inspiring us.

We kicked off January with the release of the 1-bit version of Oquonie for Playdate. It would be the first time, since the iOS version, that the game has a soundtrack. Devine also improved the html5 Uxn emulator to make all of our games and tools playable in the browser. Uxn's list of utilities has grown, with additions like a spreadsheet editor, a font editor, a theme editor and a desktop calendar.

rabbit Waves has grown by five new topics this year, and we have since assimilated this knowledge into daily life. On many summer evenings, we were out on deck scanning the skies for the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, and Cassiopeia. Polaris sits 1 degree away from the celestial north pole, neither of us had ever truly appreciated this incredible fact until now and we can't think of any piece of knowledge that has so deeply touched us. Learning about field care also had a lasting effect on us, since then we carry a First-Aid kit whenever we go out on a long hike.

In early May, we set sail for Texada Island for a haul-out. This will be as far north as we would go this year, because we had to sail right back down again to meet up with friends on Blakely Island. After the event, we had yet another place to be, we pointed our bow west and sailed out of the Juan de Fuca Strait. Pino arrived in Ucluelet just in time to attend a friend's presentation to the city council about building a new boatyard. The rest of our summer schedule was not as rigid, we spent time amongst hummingbirds, met beautiful cetaceans, solar-cooked breads and played dominos aboard wooden boats.

In December, our usual afternoon walks were often spoiled by heavy rainfall. The prolonged absence of sunlight, the constant downpours, turned Pino's topsides green. Like in Ray Bradbury's short story All Summer in a Day, our world was all rainstorms. We were too glad when the clouds parted on the winter solstice. Every year, December ends with us folding big prisms out of modular orgami techniques, especially sonobes. This year's masterpiece was a stunning triakis icosahedron made of colorful construction paper. We also played through The Neverhood drinking hot spiced apple juice. We've since been exploring other Scummvm games.

In the recent onslaught of slop, we are continually impressed and inspired by artists and developers who fight back against the machine learning spear that is pointed toward them. Choose human agency, sabotage agents! See you in 2026!

Our favorite series this year was Scavengers Reign and Common Side Effects, and ours favorite films were Sinners and Nosferatu.

Book Club: This month we are still reading Middlemarch by George Eliot, but Devine also finished Blindness by José Saramago and Rek started paging through Make, Sew and Mend by Bernadette Banner.

Devine's favorite read of the year was Donna Tartt's The Secret History, and Rek enjoyed and cried over Girl's Last Tour by Tsukumizu.

This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of November.

• Thousand Rooms, added an English version with one type of dyslexia-friendly typeface. A Danish version is also on the way.
• Orca, improved the interface, released an Orca Cheatsheet for an upcoming workshop, and increased the parity between Orca versions with new tests.
• Drifblim, implemented a tug-o-war(Mastodon) memory model.
• Punk Rabbits, completed 8 new rabbits(#57-64).
• Uxn, wrote a standalone Uxn REPL, and improved Uxn5.
• M291, fixed an annoying crashing bug.

This month, we celebrate Hundred Rabbit's 10 year anniversary and remember with great fondness how, in November 2015, we sat together at a coffee shop in Montreal, puzzling over how we would start a new life on the water. Here's hoping for 10 more years of learning and documenting experiments around low-tech and resilience!

We finally stashed our summer sailing gear, we compressed everything into vacuum bags drawing out as much air as we could to discourage mold. We're entering the month of December in Victoria, and we are beginning to feel the increasing dampness of winter in our clothes, we also see it as the condensation gathers on Pino's windows.

Devine spent the last few days in Austria for the Ultramateria Festival talking with local artists and activists about the design philosophy of Hundred Rabbits. Devine also gave an Orca workshop, played some techno in a gorgeous venue, made a brief appearance on Austrian television and Fireside Fedi.

Rek spent time troubleshooting a raw water leak in Calcifer II, gaining in-depth knowledge of yet another part of the engine. What was learned was documented in the ever-growing engine care portal under raw water pump. Rek has also been working on the upcoming Playdate version of Donsol!

Book Club: This month we are still reading Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners by Gustave Flaubert.

This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of October.

• CCCC, added a factorization mode.
• Bagel, wrote about a cursed programming language idea where instead of cons cells, s-exp represent unordered lists.
• Rabbit Waves, released a new page called Celestial Compass, and added a button for those who wish to link to the website from theirs.
• Punk Rabbits, completed 2 new rabbits(#55 and 56).

We sailed Pino back to Victoria before heading east for AMP Festival 2025. The venue was packed! The Aliceffekt show(YouTube) started with a bit of radio taiso, to make sure everyone had a chance to limber up, it was pretty funny.

As the trees were shedding the last of their leaves, members of the Merveilles community composed a spooky mixtape(download), and we folded paper to craft ourselves some homemade Halloween masks. Like every year, we carved a pumpkin. This year's design was inspired by the Hollow creature from the amazing animated sci-fi series Scavengers Reign.

We spent the rest of the month with family, seeing friends and reviewing microgrant applications for Rhizome.

We have re-opened the store for sticker sales, but at the moment we cannot ship them to the US due to the suspension of the de minimis exemption. We hope to resume shipments as soon as we can figure out how to comply with the new shipping rules. The sale of our physical books to the US is unaffected. We'll end this update with the mention that Oquonie is part of the Playdate Catalogue fall sale lasting until Nov 13, 2025. Thank you to everyone who continue to explore our strange little world.

Book Club: This month we are reading The Outsiders by Susan E. Hinton, and Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners by Gustave Flaubert.

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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of September.

• Noodle, redesigned the interface.
• Wiki, updated with a new photo.
• Punk Rabbits, completed 19 new rabbits(#35-53).
• NanoTalk, released a Nanochat client, written in Tal.

As promised, we released a revised transcription of Devine's talk Permacomputing 101 for Critical Signals 2025! We have moved our website to a Canadian TDL(100r.ca), so be sure to update your bookmarks! We will keep the .co version of our website online for redundancy.

Rek finished revising the upcoming version of the Victoria to Sitka logbook and passed the text over to Devine for proof-reading. The finished publication will feature 104 drawings, 19 recipes, and 18 new sections on a variety of topics. We hope to release the digital version early next year, and the printed version a bit later.

Our friend Erik(d6) designed a bespoke chat server so that the Uxn community could meet up through an interface designed specifically to interface nicely with tiny clients so we hacked together a little rom for it. Get in touch if you'd like to hang out on there!

Devine is performing in Montreal on October 11th, as Aliceffekt, at the AMP Festival 2025. They've also released a new album this month, called Ver'Iystl(Bandcamp), adding further dimension to the many places populating the Neauismetica. Let us know if you're planning to come!

Book Club: This month we are reading The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, and we are continuing to read Middlemarch by George Eliot.

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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of August.

• Wiktopher, updated songs.
• 100r.ca, updated cast iron cookware(seasoning oil suggestions).
• Punk Rabbits, completed 15 new rabbits(#19-34).
• Orca, pushed a little update that includes the string operator.
• Solresol, illustrated some curwen signs.

In preparation for a programming class that's coming up, we've implemented a graphical tiny-BASIC runtime called Sunflower BASIC. It contains the essential blocks of a BASIC language interpreter with enough features to communicate elementary programming concepts and how each one is implemented. We've also released the Permacomputing 101 talk given at Critical Signals 2025 which covered a few interesting aspect of digital preservation and some tactics to craft software in a way that may last.

Choosing to remain in the Southern Gulf islands in August this year has permitted us to pick blackberries, plums and apples. We have incorporated the fruit into cakes, or just squished whole berries over morning toast. We processed some of the apples into jam, and are currently delighting in eating through the rest. We've also been experimenting with the solar cooker, preparing some cinnamon buns in it for the first time! See our cameo in our friend Peter's latest video.

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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of July.

• Catjam 2025, finished a small game called Polycat!
• 100r.ca, added Vancouver Island West Coast, Ucluelet, Port San Juan, Juan de Fuca Strait and Cadboro Bay.
• Theme Editor, made a nicer theme editor for our tools ecosystem.
• Punk Rabbits, started a drawing series of rabbit characters with the goal of making one hundred.

This month we sailed into the Juan de Fuca Strait, escorted by pods of orcas and a lone young humpback whale. The last time we had been here was in July 2020, on our way back from Japan. After weathering gale force winds at anchor in Becher Bay, we stopped in Port San Juan. The beaches there are covered in old growth driftwood, carried there by winter storms. Some trees are so large and have been there so long that people have installed swings on them. The way to Barkley Sound was bleak, we spent 10 hours of it in a fog bank, only to emerge near Cape Beale to a bright sun over jade-colored waters. We pulled into Ucluelet the next day, just in time to meet up with our friend Avi to view the building site for their upcoming boatyard project.

We spent a few days anchored in Barkley Sound, in an anchorage with the biggest population of hummingbirds we'd ever seen. The hummingbird visits were constant, with 3-4 buzzing around us at all times. During our stay there we completed our game entry for Catjam named Polycat. The game is very hard, but also very short. Watch a video of Devine playing the game.

In the second half of July, Pino sailed back to the Southern Gulf islands and stayed anchored alongside a friend, messing with their laser engraver, hiking, picking blackberries, and working on projects. Instead of hummingbirds, in Fulford, we had kingfishers, they really liked sitting on the wind vane's arrow on top of the mast. See this amazing drone footage shot by our friends aboard MV Poem.

Devine has been invited to talk about permacomputing at Critical Signals on August 12th. They will try to introduce some of the ideas that they find most interesting via practical examples. Save the date!

Book Club: This month we are reading Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie.

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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of June.

• 100r.ca, updated costs, hauling out, united states and teapot gelcoat. Added san juan islands.
• Rabbit Waves, added all content links to the main page, released a new page called Boatswain's Call.
• Orca, embedded runtime in the reference guide.
• Left, made lots of little improvements and optimizations!
• Solresol, learnt some profanities in a musical conlang?

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.

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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of May.

• 100r.ca, updated Oquonie and water.
• Modal, the interpreter was ported to Uxn!
• Uxntal, the documentation has been completely redone!
• Hakum, added page 7 and page 8 of Sabotage Study.

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.

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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of April.

• 100r.ca, 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.

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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of March.

Summary Of Changes

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).

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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of February.

Summary Of Changes

• 100r.ca, added Dinghy gelcoat, Week 10, Week 11, and Week 12 of the Victoria to Sitka logbook. Updated solar with new pictures and corrected information (this page used to be called solar tips).
• Nebu, released a spreadsheet editor.
• Grimgrains, added a new recipe: Stovetop zaatar pizza.
• Store, added maritime flag stickers for sale.
• Rabbit Waves, added a new page: Emergency Bag. Updated Morse Code with Flags page with animations, released a printable zine(see how to fold a zine).

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.

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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of January.

Summary Of Changes

• 100r.ca, added a new page: tote. Added Week 8 and Week 9 of the Victoria to Sitka logbook.
• Tote, released the project on itch.io.
• Grimgrains, added a new recipe: chocolate turtles.
• Left, added an option to collapse the nav bar on the left.
• Orca, added community links.

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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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of December.

Summary Of Changes

• 100r.ca, updated the documentation for our various projects.
• Left, added support for unicode input(Mastodon).
• Rabbit Waves, added a page on Air to Ground Signals.
• December Adventure, collected Devine's code experiments.

Before diving into the ins and outs of the past year, we'd like to begin by sending our very warmest thanks to everyone who generously hosted us, drove us to the hardware store, invited us out for fries to cheer us up, fixed typos in the books, improved the documentation, lent us power-tools, donated to the studio, spent hours to show us how to fix broken things and corrected us when we were wrong.

During the first few weeks of the year, we were busy with planning our upcoming sail north to Alaska, during which a DDoS attack took down many of our repositories and precipitated our decentralizing of the project source files. Mirroring our projects across multiple forges and diversifying the means in which they were available became necessary.

In preparation for the heavy weather up north, we strengthened the chainplates and replaced a few experienced halyards. In fact, our most vivid memories of the early spring was of the blisters we made splicing dyneema. We've also built ourselves a gimballed stove with space for an open pantry allowing us to store more fresh vegetables by doing away with the oven.

Our summer was spent exploring the Northern Canada and Alaskan coastline to test the recent boat projects, a sort of shakedown if you will, in preparation for plans we may divulge in a future update. During our transit, we began writing down notes on various forms of analog communication which have now mostly fallen into obscurity. These notes later became an integral part of the Rabbit Waves project, created with the hope of sparking an interest in these valuable but vanishing skillsets.

Through it all, we continued improving the Uxn ecosystem documentation and toolchain, which has played a central role in our work now for four years! We've also explored other enticing avenues where small robust virtual machines could be used for knowledge preservation, namely Conway's Fractran, which all came together into the Shining Sand talk given at the the year's end.

We're looking cautiously forward to the challenges that awaits us all in 2025. Approaching these adversarial forces with collective tactical preparedness and clarity is more important than ever, and we shall all rise to the occasion!

We had a lot of really good wildlife moments this year, and so the last drawing of 2024 is of a half-mooning seal.

Book Club: This month we are reading The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Our favorite book this year was West with the Night by Beryl Markham, see all of the other books we read in 2024.

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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of November.

Summary Of Changes

• 100r.ca, added an article named A Shining Place Built Upon The Sand, and Week 6 to the Victoria to Sitka Logbook.
• Rabbit Waves, added a page on Morse Code and on Morse Code with flags.
• Left, redesigned with a bigger font, for aging eyes.

Our website has a new look! The illustrated algae-eared rabbit nav helped solve the problem of navigating on mobile. We added a lot of information to this wiki over the years, creating separate portals for its evergrowing content was inevitable, we hope you like the re-design. Some of the content has shifted, and we've simplified many of the pages.

A couple of folks on Merveilles got together recently and made a Diablo Tribute tape. A limited run of physical cassettes are currently in production, but in the meantime the tribute album is available to download on Bandcamp.

Next month on December 6th, Devine will share the stage with Iszoloscope, Oddie(Orphx) & Creature at Foufounes Electriques in Montréal as part of AMP Industrial Events. Then on the 7th, we will both(remotely) present a summary of all the interesting analog communication schemes that inspired and found their way into Rabbit Waves and Wiktopher for Iterations 2024 organized by Creative Coding Utrecht.

Devine's talk for Handmade Seattle 2024 entitled A Shining Palace Built Upon the Sand was released online(YouTube), we also released the written transcript.

Due to the ongoing Canada Post strike we had to close the sale of stickers in our store, we'll let you know once we resume operations (this also applies to Patreon supporters, we'll ship perks your way as soon as we can).

Book Club: This month we are still reading The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle.

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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of October.

Summary Of Changes

• 100r.ca, added Rabbit Waves and Logbooks. Updated woodstove installation, no windlass with 1 photo, mini dodger and Victoria to Sitka logbook with Week 3 and 4.

Pino is back in Victoria. Being back in a city also means that we are shipping sticker sheets again! Devine found a spirograph set at a thrift store for 5$, we now make patterns on every letter we ship.

We are happy to announce the official release of Rabbit Waves! The idea for the project came after discussing the disappearance of certain traditional seasteading skills and maritime communication knowledge that we believe are valuable when electronics misbehave, but that are also just generally fun to learn and use. The world of the micro-site will grow as we think of new ideas to expand it.

Devine participated in Drawtober again this year and completed a zine that teaches the basics of multiset rewriting with examples, it also includes the source for a tiny Fractran interpreter. Since its release, many people have printed their own. Avanier went a step further and re-drew the zine on black paper! Devine also released an interactive version, and CapitalEx created with it a beautiful little world to explore! Handmade Seattle 2024 is coming up, Devine will be there to talk about weird computer stuff, and will hand out copies of the zine too.

This year, we carved a Calcifer pumpkin (see our other Halloween pumpkins).

Book Club: This month we read The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle.

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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of September.

Summary Of Changes

• 100r.ca, added a new page: Victoria to Sitka logbook.
• M291, added support for Cyrillic glyphs.
• Fractran, released what might be the most in-depth documentation of Conway's programming language out there.
• Now Lie In It, a look back at what has happened with Uxn since its creation 4 years ago.

September started off warm, but got cold and windy fast, we spent lots of time sitting by the woodstove drinking tea. As promised, we have begun transcribing the Victoria to Sitka logbook digitally, we release one week's worth of logs at a time. We populated the logs with photos and Rek's sketches(also sourced from the handwritten logbook). End of the month, we closed our summer 2024 sailing route, Pino has traveled very far this year! We made 76(!!!) stops over a period of 5 months, sailing 1900 NM.

We announced a new project this month named Rabbit Waves. It will serve as a vessel to expand, in a playful way, on some of our favourite things. Expect lots of art featuring root vegetable root-shaped sailboats, rabbits, and seabirds! The website will host more content next month.

For 3 years now, we've had a monthly hand-drawn calendar in the galley that we cover with doodles, at the end of the year, Rek binds the 12 pages together, and it makes it easy to look back at where we were, what we were doing at a previous time. Everyday has some kind of highlight or other. It's one of our favourite habits.

Listen to Devine's remix of SOPHIE's One More Time feat. Popstar.

Book Club: This month we read Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. We are forever in love with Rocky.

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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of August.

Summary Of Changes

• 100r.ca, added new pages: Sointula, Johnstone Strait anchorages, and Central coast anchorages. Updated existing pages: added Yuculta and Dent rapids with southbound tactics, no windlass with 3 new photos, lpg with troubleshooting, and gimballed stove with performance tests.
• Left, added support for macros.
• Uxnfor, added support for macros.
• Uxn, found a tiny optimization that makes things a bit faster.
• M291, started a little music player for Uxn11.
• Wiktopher, updated some Solresol words in the Ilken songs featured in the book.
• Hakum, added a new comic named Smile.
• Wunderland Rabbits, added a new rabbit pic.

This month, Pino reached the northern tip of Vancouver Island, sailed south through Johnstone Strait, and into calmer, familiar waters on the 11th of August. Both of us were eager for a taste of summer weather, we hoped to catch what was left of it. Our legs demanded an anchorage with options for walking, so we chose to anchor in Hathayim Marine Park. The lovely people on the sailboat Nanamuk were anchored here too, they mapped many of the trails in the area, even the overgrown, less-traveled routes. We updated our summer route map through northern B.C.

From May 1st to August 11th, like with our book Busy Doing Nothing, Rek kept a detailed logbook of daily happenings onboard. We hope to publish these notes to this wiki soon.

Book Club: This month we are reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, and Everyday Utopia: What 2000 years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life by Kristen R. Ghodsee.

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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of July.

Summary Of Changes

• 100r.ca, added Sitka, and completed route in us se alaska.
• Left, can now paste binary directly from programs like Nasu.
• Hakum, added two drawings to the Characters section, and a new very short comic called Shoes.
• Wiktopher, fixed some typos.
• Markl, we don't have much of anything to show for it yet, but who knows, maybe this time it will work out!
• Solrela, expanded Solresol dictionary.
• Malleable Systems, wrote a little thing about extending compiled software with devtools.

Pino and crew have moved a lot in the past month. On the first of July, we were in Sitka, Southeast Alaska, and then on the last day of the month we were back in Millbrook Cove, very near to the top of Vancouver Island. We sailed 590 NM and stopped in 15 different anchorages.

Leaving Sitka, we sailed along the west coast of Southeast Alaska for a few days to try and take advantage of a good weather window, we had some engine issues which too motivated the need for such a long passage(see our track)—we spent two days troubleshooting the issue while anchored in Port Bazan, a bay far from everything, with no internet connection or way to talk to anybody, we were glad to have the physical engine manual on board. Sailing on open waters is always nice, we saw black-footed albatrosses, horned puffins, a whale per hour, and many more sea otters(Port Bazan was full of them).

After checking back into Prince Rupert, the way back south through Northern Canada was plagued with unfavorable winds, we had to beat into it, or travel on quiet waters to make progress. We resorted to doing short hops between anchorages, conditions did not permit for long distances. Doing short hops though did allow us to discover beautiful places we might have otherwise missed. We spent many grey days waiting for weather, reading, drawing, and beginning work on markl, we're giving it another go).

Book Club: This month we read Erewhon by Samuel Butler, Technophilia and Its Discontents by Ellen Ullman, The Democracy Of Species by Robin Wall Kimmerer, I Will Fight No More Forever by Merrill D. Beal, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, and Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.

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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of June.

Summary Of Changes

• 100r.ca, added Ketchikan, Snug Cove, Ratz Harbor, Frosty Bay, Berg Bay, Wrangell, Petersburg and Ruth Island Cove. Updated library.
• Oekaki, optimized and added a selection tool.
• Nasu, fixed selection issue.
• Uxn5, redesigned and made responsive for mobile.
• Uxndis, wrote a disassembler.
• Uxnrepl, added step-by-step evaluation.

We spent all of June cruising through Southeast Alaska, we visited 4 cities and stopped by 14 different anchorages. On June 27th, 420 nautical miles later, we arrived in the beautiful town of Sitka — our favorite city so far.

We have sailed as far north as we are willing to go this year, at 57°N — the same latitude as Kodiak. Sailing in these waters has been challenging, there is a lot of current, and the wind is often light, or absent. Because of these frequent calms, Calcifer II has seen a lot of use this year. We will now slowly make our way back south, exploring new anchorages along the west coast of Southeast Alaska all the while. We continue to update our path in Alaska here, when we cross back into Canada we'll resume updates here.

Book Club: This month we are reading West With the Night by Beryl Markham.

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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of May.

Summary Of Changes

• 100r.ca, added Frances Bay, Yuculta and Dent Rapids, Shoal Bay, Port Neville, Telegraph Cove, Port McNeill, Fury Cove, Prince Rupert, B.C. north coast anchorages, US Southeast Alaska and United States.
• Paradise, implemented paradise in Modal.
• Note Pad, added pen tool and line styles.
• Oekaki, rect tool uses brush settings.
• Adelie, tga images are now dithered.
• Left, fixed issue for non-qwerty keyboards.

We spent this month moving northward through both southern and northern British Columbia. We've been moving almost every day, stopping every night to anchor, sleep and recuperate. Sailing near land is not as relaxing as sailing offshore, this reef-strewn coast requires careful navigation. We've had many long days of endless tacking from one side of the channel to the other, almost all the way to Port McNeill, then after that we started to get more weather from the south for some mostly pleasant, but cold and rainy, downwind sailing. We've been using our woodstove a lot, in evenings it helps warm the boat after a long sail.

On May 29th, 623 nautical miles miles after leaving Victoria, we arrived in Prince Rupert, our last major port in British Columbia before we head north to Southeast Alaska. Then, on June 2nd, we arrived in Ketchikan, Southeast Alaska. Most of our updates this month detail some of the places we've been(see the above list). To see our path, look at Western Canada and us se alaska. We update the map as we find internet.

We've seen sea otters, lots of humpback whales, two pods of orcas(one pod had a baby tagging along), eagles, and lots of mountains. In other non-travel related news, Devine is going to speak again at Handmade Seattle this upcoming November!

Pino book & movie club

Book Club: This month we are reading The Martian by Andy Weir.

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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of April.

Summary Of Changes

• 100r.ca, added Twilight, updated our notes on chainplates, wheel to tiller conversion, cabin lights standing rigging replacement, Princess Louisa Inlet(added maps), Goji no Chaimu(added maps), and Sailing to Japan(fixed some dead links).
• Hakum, released a new comic sequence called Kaizah.
• Wunderland Rabbits, released a new Rabbit travel photo
• Orca, added a note on the repository for the Javascript version titled Is Orca dead?

Devine has been busy working on the implementation and documentation of wryl's fantastic programming language Modal. Rewriting systems are a computation paradigm that is generally unknown and under-explored that might have some fascinating features that might be able help us to tackle some of our future projects.

In other news, Pino is ready to head northward! We finished all of our boats projects and left the dock on May 1st. See a photo of our first day of the year on the water, taken as we exited Enterprise Channel, just north of Trial Island south of Victoria. On our travels we will continue to push updates every month like usual, but the updates will only go live when we find internet, and this may or may not coincide with the start of every month. We will keep a log of our travels, populated with plenty of drawings!

Pino book & movie club

Book Club: This month we are reading The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of March.

Summary Of Changes

• 100r.ca, added chainplates, knots, washing dishes, receiving mail, updated our notes on diy carbonation system, and refrigeration.
• Uxn, added 2 new commands to Varvara's System/expansion port and rewrote uxnasm.
• Some toys, made a two-player implementation of Pong, and an orca that follows the cursor like that old classic flash web toy.
• Left, improved the object inspector, it's much prettier now!
• Kokorobot has a new splash page.

News

Pino now has all-new chainplates! We removed the original ones earlier this month to inspect them and found some pit corrosion(as well as a small crack), replacing them was necessary. With the chainplates gone, we removed the entire starboard side cabinet to see what was behind it—it's always nice to see parts of our boat we've never seen. We also replaced 3 old halyards on Pino. Devine earned themself a couple of blisters splicing dyneema onto some of our existing halyards.

Sejo revisited the Uxn tutorial, and appended corrections. The most important change is that the tutorial is now targeting the learn-uxn platform(online) maintained by metasyn. Now, people can jump right in and experiment without having to set up a dev environment. Tsoding, someone who can code in front of the camera in a language they've never used or read the docs for, did a pretty funny session in Uxntal, you can watch it here.

There has been too many exciting Uxn projects coming out these past few days, so we'll just put a link to the hashtag. Someone also created a Discord channel, it's a good place to learn about other concatenative languages and an alternative for people who have trouble with #uxn, in irc.libera.chat.

Pino book & movie club

This month we are reading The Last Great Sea by Terry Glavin, and we watched the movie Tenet.

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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of February.

Summary Of Changes

• 100r.ca, added gimballed stove, open pantry, Little Ninj and LPG fume detection system. Updated galley refit and Western Canada(includes tidal/current resources).
• Uxn, with the help of the community, we defined a specification on how labels and sublabels should be nested into each other. Assemblers were updated to reflect that change, including the Uxn REPL.
• Left, added accented latin characters support, so you can read and write French and Spanish text files.
• Potato, released a final version, added a screensaver(Mastodon).
• Hakum, finished Ruler of the Taiga.

News

Late last month we started re-modeling part of our galley, the work is now complete! It's subtle, but the splash image for the log now includes the re-design. We will test our new galley when we go out cruising.

Pino will be adventuring a bit more north this summer, we're planning to explore the north coast of British Columbia, all the way to Prince Rupert, or possibly Ketchikan(AK), areas with little to no cell coverage. How far we go depends on what we find on the way. If the seas and winds are kind, and if we have time, we might go farther. We spend our days studying charts, gathering supplies, and fixing up the boat to make sure the passage is safe and pleasant. More updates on our plans soon!

Want to see something cool? Xsodect made Tetris(Mastodon) in Orca.

Pino book & movie club

This month we watched The Race to Alaska Movie.

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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of January.

Summary Of Changes

• 100r.ca, added galley refit, updated lifelines, seamed box cushions, and moisture prevention underliner.
• Permacomputing, revamped the page.
• Flappy Bird, released an Uxn version of the Flappy Bird game.
• Grimgrains, released a new basic recipe: Whole Wheat Pancakes.
• Aliceffekt, Devine wrote some new music.

On January 10th the forge that we use to host our projects was taken down by DDoS attacks and was struggling to come back online(it's back now, read the post-mortem), the event reminded us that we ought to host mirrors and release versions of these source files ourselves. We have begun to host copies across our various websites. The builds are still accessible through itch.io. These will be automatically updated as we work on them in their individual repositories, but mirrored there for reliability. We are thankful for Sourcehut's tireless work on resolving the issue and for taking the time to communicate important changes.

In keeping with the spirit of improving the resilience of the tools we use we've taken a moment to write a kind of pocket version of the console emulator and self-hosted assembler as to see how many lines are needed to start from the seed assembler and replicate it. A copy of the pocket emulator, the source for the assembler and its hexadecimal representation have been documented.

On January 17th Victoria got its first snowfall, with it came temperatures below freezing. We got to test our recent improvements, like a new louvered closet vent to help ventilate the space(there are also two existing vents at the top, one on each side). The closet has been dry for the first time in 3 years. We've made an effort not to keep too many items on the floor so the area can breathe. We got ice inside of the windows for the first time ever though... not ideal.

See Uxn running on a Zaurus Husky(Mastodon).

Pino book club

This month we are reading The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.

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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of December.

Summary Of Changes

• 100r.ca, added solar cooking experiment, making seamed box cushions, making saloon cushions, moisture prevention underliner, and board games. Updated charging electronics, and upholstery.
• Wiktopher, released the book on paperback.
• Wunderland Rabbits, added a new photo.
• GrimGrains, added millet dumplings, and vegetable curry.
• December Adventure, Devine wrote a daily devlog for the month, documenting various projects like Porporo(an OS).
• Lispkit, wrote a PureLisp compiler and emulator for the SECD stack-machine.
• Grail, made a little shorthand calligraphy and interpreter.

News

Wiktopher was released on paperback! Our small collection of self-published books is growing.

We finished the upholstery in the saloon, Pino feels like a new boat. We also published an article on this past summer's Solar Cooking Experiment.

Last September Devine and a group of people went on a 3-day train ride from Seattle to St Louis for the last edition of Strange Loop 2023. This video documents that journey.

As mentionned in November's update, Tinyletter, the service we use to send out our monthly newsletter, is shutting down in February 2024. We will now be using Sourcehut to send our monthly updates. With this new system our emails will be leaner than ever, using plain text(no html). We cannot transfer accounts to this new list ourselves, so if you want to keep receiving updates by email please sign up again here. Clicking on the subscribe button will open your email client, you can leave the body and subject of the email blank. We will keep sending newsletters with TinyLetter until the end of January 2024, so as to give people time to make the switch. If you sign up to this new list, unsuscribe from the old newsletter to avoid getting two emails with the same content for December and January. We hope you continue to follow our updates.

Note that since it's our first time sending updates with the new newsletter format, it may look a little wonky. We'll improve on it next month.

2023 was kind to us, we look forward to seeing what 2024 brings! We hope the coming year treats you all well.

Pino book & movie club

This month we are reading The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati, and we went to see 君たちはどう生きるか(The Boy and the Heron).

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This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of November.

Summary Of Changes

• Wiktopher, drew some new art(Mastodon), finalized a few translations(Mastodon), and released it the project on Itchio!
• Thousand Rooms, translated the book(Mastodon) into Solresol.
• 100r.ca, added a still map of our Pacific circumnavigation in where, added repair, effect of combining dissimilar metals, bikes on a boat, upholstery and updated lifelines.
• Busy Doing Nothing, added GPS coordinates(Mastodon) for every listed day of travel.
• Hakum, designed handwritten font for the comic and wrote a post about the process.
• Elmet Brae, released a collaborative album with members of the Merveilles community and friends. Made the album cover in collaboration with Rostiger, who also made the Varvara Zine.
• Solrela, released a Solresol translator website to replace the now defunct Sidosi translator.

News

Wiktopher is finally finished. We started this book in 2017 while in French Polynesia, constrained by power limitations and hardware failures. Writing demanded less energy than drawing digitally, Rek could use the Chromebook to work (see tools ecosystem). You can read the first two chapters of the finished story here[4.1 MiB] as a PDF. If you liked what you've read, we hope you'll consider reading the rest!

We treated ourselves this month to new saloon cushions(see upholstery). We sleep and live on these, it's so nice to have plump cushions again!

IMPORTANT. You may have heard but the service we use to send our newsletter(TinyLetter) is shutting down early next year (Feb 2024). We are in the process of setting up an alternative, we'll provide details on that in December's newsletter and on this website.

Pino book & movie club

We are reading Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, and enjoyed watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

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Summary Of Changes

• Thousand Rooms, added a Brazilian Portuguese version.
• Wunderland Rabbits, traveled to a botanical garden, and went to pick apples.
• Uxn5, Alex W. is writing a Vanilla JS implementation, in which you can drag roms into the window(Mastodon) to play them. Eiríkr wrote an guide on how to use signed numbers.
• Hakum, added 3 pages.
• 100r.ca, added 3 travel maps in Western Canada.

News

This month we got tattooed(Mastodon) by the very talented Lizbeth. Check out her tattoo art.

Devine's Strange Loop 2023 talk was released online, watch it here(YouTube). We also released the talk as a text version, Computing and sustainability, for those who prefer to read. We talked with the members of Frugarilla on their latest podcast(French), in which we finally admit that our whole thing is a sneaky way of getting programmers interested in food preservation.

Every year we carve halloween pumpkins, this year we made a Uxn pumpkin!

See Oquonie running on a linux handheld(Mastodon).

Pino book club

We are reading Selma Lagerlöf's The Wonderful Adventures of Nils.

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Summary Of Changes

• Wiktopher, adapted Solresol, edited other conlangs.
• Niju, fixed a drawing bug.
• Oquonie, working on the Playdate version.

News

Pino returned to the Victoria docks a little early this year so Devine could go to Strange Loop 2023. We had a lovely sail that day, with clear skies, and 10 kts on the beam. Despite being a little food and sleep deprived, Devine's presentation went well, we will share the recording here once it is released.

Rek has been busy editing Wiktopher, finessing the conlangs featured in the story. One of the featured languages is Ilken, a whistled language, designed for long-distance communication, and playable with instruments. A few years ago Devine designed a language for it, but we decided to instead use a modern variation of Solresol, a musical language by Jean-François Sudre. Rek drew a fanart of the mascot of Solresol, and Devine a communication lantern.

Currently, Devine is working at translating Thousand Rooms(Famimi Remisolla) in Solresol as practice. We're also editing a Brazilian Portuguese version, to be released next month.

We've been toying with the idea of making an audiobook for the story, and asked Paul B. to use their voice synthesis tool Gesture to try and hear what a poem in Ilken(Solresol) sounds like. The result was so lovely that it made Rek cry of joy.

Rek's sketch thread(Mastodon) is still going. Devine will be producing a lot more art next month for Drawtober!

Pino book club

We are reading J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, and B. F. Skinner's Walden Two.

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Summary Of Changes

• 100r.ca, added Heriot Bay, Ballet Bay Octopus Islands, and updated Hathayim Marine Park, rain, and boom tent.
• Oekaki, released a new drawing program.
• Varvara, began versioning.

News

Pino sailed a bit more northward this month and went all the way to the Octopus Islands. We visited this place during a very windy week, with winds blowing 30-35 kts the entire time. We got acquainted with a few northern rapids, like Hole in the Wall and Surge Narrows. It is a bit of a mindfuck to think that in these waters the tide ebbs north and floods south.

This summer has been especially arid, and because of it the province has seen a lot forest fires (see pictures of our smokey transit). Trails that we know and love on Cortes Island, that are usually wet and muddy, were bone dry this year. We had a few days of hard rain, during that time we collect rain water and go for walks to look for slugs and snails.

Both of us have been drawing a lot this month, see this Neoneve portrait(Mastodon) by Devine (drawn with Oekaki), and this sketch thread(Mastodon) by Rek..

Pino book club

We have read Adam Wisniewski-Snerg's Robot, George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, and Michael A. Hiltzik's Dealers of Ligthning.

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Summary Of Changes

• Slide Rule, released a little slide rule toy(Mastodon).
• 100r.ca, added roscoe bay, updated LPG refit.
• wiktopher, we finished doing the entire first pass of corrections.
• Left, made a couple of interface improvements, it's not only prettier now, but faster.
• Drifblim, added support for lambdas in Uxntal, now also supported in uxnasm.

News

We spent many quiet days in Roscoe Bay, and then wandered over to melanie cove for a few days before moving to our favorite anchorage in Desolation Sound, Hathayim Marine Park. This inlet is quiet, and not overly busy, it is ideal for focusing on projects. We walk the 3 km trail to Squirrel Cove everyday.

We have been hard at work reviewing Wiktopher, and we're happy to announce that we've finished the first pass of corrections! We'll be doing many more passes, but this was a very big step. Rek has been drawing(Mastodon) a lot, and Devine has been working on their presentation for Strange Loop 2023.

Check out this amazing Uxn cheat sheet by Nettie!

Pino book & movie club

We are reading Lewis Carrol's Bruno and Sylvie. We re-watched Vampire Hunter D for the hundredth time.

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Summary Of Changes

• 100r.ca, added propeller maintenance, Maple Bay, Telegraph Cove, Smuggler Cove and Princess Louisa Inlet.
• Wiktopher, added back the revised/corrected version of Chapter 10, back online, and Chapter 11 has been corrected but is not yet live.
• UxnFor, created an uxntal code formatter.
• Bicycle, added lots of little improvements.
• Adelie, added speaker's notes and a pen mode.

News

Pino spent the first few days of the month on land, having its bottom re-painted, and its various bits serviced and checked. We took our propeller apart for the first time.

We've added a few write-ups of our travels so far (see above entry with links under 100r.ca), but the most significant one is our 46nmi sail up to Princess Louisa Inlet, a long fjord on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast, with an incredible gem at the end. It is an amazing, and unique place. We're glad we finally got to go. As we write this, we are in Roscoe Bay on West Redonda Island, tethering off a phone hoisted up the mast (it works quite well).

This summer we are power stable. We had issues last year because of parisitic draws due to old wiring (see DC electrical refit), but now everything is working as it should. We're charging our computers without an inverter, and that too is working out quite well so far (see charging electronics).

Together, Hikari and Lynn made chibicc-uxn, a c compiler for Uxn, and with it also released a port of the classic software Neko(xneko, oneko sakura).

Pino book & movie club

We are reading Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic. We've been re-watching Kaamelott(the series, book 1 though 6) for the hundredth time.

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Summary Of Changes

• 100r.ca, updated jib cars, and added new recommendations on the offshore checklist(new entries labelled with dates).
• Donsol, Asie made some 3DS and NDS roms(Mastodon).
• Wiktopher, added the revised and corrected version of Chapter 8, and Chapter 9, back online.
• Uxnbal, wrote a type-checker, it's still very experimental, but it can infer most imbalancing stack-effects.
• Bicycle, created a little interactive evaluator designed to be a teaching aid.

News

Pino is off the dock, and spending time at anchor. The weather has been excellent, and with days of full comes sun solar cooking! We baked some bread, and roasted some green coffee beans in the sun. We are enjoying some quiet days before we haul the boat out of the water at the start of June.

Devine's talk proposal to Strange Loop 2023 has been accepted, so parts of the summer will be collecting our notes and writing slides for the presentation in September.

The recording for the show Devine(Alicef) did with Anju Singh and Reylinn(visuals) last march for Biosonic on Galiano Island is online, watch it here.

We had a small impromptu logo jam event on Merveilles this month. Members of the community re-interpreted the logo, with illustrations, photo collages, and even food. See all of the entries so far. Nf just completed Fourtette, a block game. Devine provided guidance, Rek made the title screen art, and d6 provided music.

Pino book & movie club

We went to the theater for the first time in a long time, to see Suzume(2023). We have also finished reading Saint-Exupery's Courrier Sud.

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Summary Of Changes

• 100r.ca, added charging electronics, solar cooking and solar evacuated tube cooking, and updated insulation, thruhulls.
• Oquonie, released the game for Uxn. We have a Windows95+ compatible version[Mastodon video].
• Left, various UX improvements, including negative length selection.
• Note Pad, ported the classic macintosh Note Pad application to Varvara, download it here.
• Turye, total redesign.
• Beetbug, added support for comments in symbol files.

Oquonie is out and it is playable! A big thank you to those who helped us test the game on a variety of devices and systems all the way to Windows95. This version of Oquonie differs a little from the original, in that some of the puzzles and secrets have changed. We hope that those who played the original will too enjoy this one. We have a special build of the game on itchio with the emulator and rom combined, if you have a false-negative virus warning on Windows 10, you will need to use the standard uxn32 emulator and rom.

We have watched as people implemented their own emulators and were able to play Oquonie on a Varvara of their own making. The current implementation documentation might need to be improved, if you have feedback for things that could be clearer, please let us know!

We published our experiments with solar cooking this month, and wrote a more detailed post on solar evacuated tube cooking. The real test will happen this summer. We plan to keep a log of everything we cook, how long it takes, and the conditions(sun, overcast, temp etc).

We're still closing a few projects aboard Pino, to get it ready for some summer sailing. Our plans for now are loose, we're hauling the boat out of the water in early June, with plans to sail back towards Desolation Sound afterward, with a possible stop by Jervis Inlet.

Pino book & movie club

We're watching La Belle Verte by Coline Serreau.

Continue Reading

Summary Of Changes

• Donsol, added 100r logo to splash screen on the rom.
• 100r.ca, added a new page: diy carbonation system. Updated Saving fuel, Engine rebuild and sprouting.
• Grimgrains, added two new recipes: Beet Sauce Pasta, and Mac and Faux Cheese.
• Left, added all sorts of fun new things like routine definition highlight and graphics support.
• Hakum, new comics named Who Did What and Disengaging.
• Orca, added $bpm command to the uxn version.
• Uxn, revamped Uxntal documentation based on the feedback from the community (thanks everyone).
• Interaction Nets, spent time in the deep-end of the pool.

News

We spent the first half of March on Galiano Island in the Salish Sea for BioSonic(by ActivePassive), an event series exploring the intersections of music, art and biodiversity. On March 10th we gave a talk titled What Are Computers For?, see the art from the talk. The next day, Devine and Anju Singh performed together using Orca, with Reylinn on visuals. A video of the perfomance and of the talk will be released soon, in the meantime, see photos of the talk and of the show, taken by photographer Dayna Szyndrowski.

We are still working on re-releasing Oquonie. We spent the month of March playing the game, finding bugs, and fixing them. Oquonie will be playable next month.

This month we've been experimenting with solar cooking, to try to save on cooking fuel this summer. We are currently making tests, gathering data, and hope to share this with you all end of April. In the meantime, enjoy this amazing music by Xsodect, made using Orca.

Pino book club

We're reading Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay and Julie Sussman.

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Summary Of Changes

• Wiktopher, added back corrected chapters 1-7 to online.
• Left, made a ton of improvements including a new directory navigation, better navbar labels and performance.
• Orca, fixed an issue where copy/paste/drag would move characters off-screen.
• Catclock, ported to new opcodes and improved monochromatic mode.
• Beetbug, added an interactive mode that interprets uxntal on the fly.
• Hakum, added a comic sequence named Tracking.
• 100r.ca, added updates to battery connections.
• Grimgrains, added some notes on Temperature for lacto-fermentation.

News

On February 14th, we celebrated our 7th year living aboard our beloved Pino. It's also around this time 10 years ago that we were still living in Odaiba(Japan), and beginning our work on what would be our first game collaboration: oquonie.

The uxn port of Oquonie has advanced in incredible leaps this month. Rek has finished re-doing all of the assets. Devine is now working on the music, and finalizing some of the levels. We are testing the game as we go, and hope to release it sometime next month. Oquonie will be playable on a number of platforms, including the Nintendo DS(Mastodon), as well as the Playdate. See a small preview(Mastodon).

Early next month we are traveling to Galiano Island in the Salish Sea for BioSonic(by ActivePassive). We'll be part of an event series exploring the intersections of music, art and biodiversity. We'll give a talk on March 10th, and Devine will perform with Orca on the 11th at the Galiano South Hall.

Watch Devine's set for Lovebyte 2023.

Pino book club

We're reading Courrier Sud by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Continue Reading

Summary Of Changes

• 100r.ca, added electrical refit(portal for AC & DC electrical refit), and updated LPG refit.
• Wiktopher, corrected chapter 8, and nearly done with lexicon.
• Weathering software winter, video(Vimeo) now has closed-captionning (same goes for YouTube version). Rek spent time cleaning up the auto-generated transcript.
• Uxn, Andrew released Uxn32 2.0.
• Potato, added updates, potato can now assemble roms from tal files.

News

This month, we started porting Oquonie to Uxn. This is a long time coming, but we weren't sure if it was possible to do, and we still had a lot to learn before even thinking of taking it on. Now, we think we are ready. We are re-drawing the sprites(Mastodon), and they look amazing. This is an important test for us, and for Uxn.

Here is a very adorable little Uxn sprite for Potato that comes up when a rom path was mistyped, see it also on the Uxn page.

Pino book club

We're reading The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West by Edward Abbey.

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Summary Of Changes

• 100r.ca, added a new page: electrical refit, fuel sensor, marine wire termination, also added updates to XPS and EPS in winter insulation.
• Orca, released a new build that improves the look and feel, added app icon(Mastodon) to the about modal.
• Busy Doing Nothing, released a new version, in which we fixed extra typing errors (thanks Igor), and added explanations for certain sailing terms like reefing, etc.
• Wiktopher, corrected chapter 6 and 7.
• Beetbug, added break-point and symbols supports.
• Took a detour into computer science to learn about arity testing and stack effect checking, learn more about it here.
• TinyCode2022, spent some time doing demoscene experiments.

News

The rabbits are re-wiring Pino. So far this month, we spent entire afternoons removing, and passing new wires into the boat's walls and ceiling. This project has taken up most of our time this month. For updates on the project, see electrical refit. We also released an edited transcript of Devine's talk weathering software winter, for those who prefer to read.

We forgot to mention it in the last update, but Compudanzas just released a new version of their introduction to uxn programming book! The online tutorial also had some updates.

Happy new year everyone! See more photos of Pino(on the far left) and friends decorated for the occasion.

Pino book club

We're reading Le Péril Bleu by Maurice Renard.

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Summary Of Changes

• GrimGrains, added a quick grilled cheese recipe.
• Noodle, updated the guide, and added app icon(Mastodon) to the about modal.
• Nasu, added app icon(Mastodon) to the about modal.
• Store, added sheets of Ecosystem Rabbit Stickers(gen2) to the store.
• Uxntal, created a list of Uxntal examples with equivalent C sources, you can find them here.
• Wiktopher, made a progress bar (50% in the correction process) on the project page. We have finished processing chapter 5, and are currently applying corrections to chapter 6 & 7.
• Donsol, updated GBA rom with a few fixes.
• Soroban, made a little desktop graphical abacus(Mastodon).
• Uxn, ported to DuskOS(SourceHut).
• Dexe, redesigned and much faster(SourceHut).

We put some red lights on Pino, to help combat winter gloom. We also started growing another lion's mane mushroom on board(we grew the same variety last fall), it already has a little tuft!

Devine's talk Weathering Software Winter for Handmade Seattle was recorded, watch it here(Vimeo). The video is for the entire first day of the conference, so for your convenience Devine's talk starts at 1h25min.

A little while ago Rostiger drew an amazing series of illustrations explaining Uxn, and how it works. Ben made a zine out of it and gave us a copy. Make your own Uxn zine using this PDF[1.38 MB].

Pino book club

We're reading Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, and How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm.

Continue Reading

Summary Of Changes

• TinyBASIC, implemented TinyBASIC in Uxntal.
• Left, added a variant of the Smalltalk-76 font.
• Hakum, released a short comic sequence called Chase.
• Wunderland Rabbits, added a new rabbit pic.
• 100r.ca, updated galley plumbing(serviced our water pump) and curtains(modified the design). Added lazy lazy jacks.

News

Pino is in Victoria again, and we're diving back into our favorite fall activities like pumpkin carving (see halloween pumpkins), and fruit picking. The boat is now filled with apple jam. October was a drawing month for the both of us. Devine participated in drawtober and completed 28 drawings using Noodle. Rek finished a sequence for the ongoing comic project Hakum.

For those in the Pacific Northwest, Devine will be giving a talk called Weathering Software Winter at Handmade Seattle on November 17th.

As you know, we share a community online with a fantastic group of people. Some months ago Lizbeth designed a burgee for Merveilles and this month we decided to make one for Pino. See the Merveilles burgee.

Pino book club

We're reading Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams, and What The Doormouse Said by John Markoff.

Continue Reading

Summary Of Changes

• Uxn, updated Playdate implementation to the latest core, started emulator for Arduino.
• Left, added lots of little improvements for various reported drawing bugs.
• Bouc, wrote a document reader.
• Orca, added monochromatic mode.
• CCCC, added monochromatic mode.
• Catclock, added monochromatic mode(Reddit).
• 100r.ca, added lifelines in boat projects.

News

The days are getting shorter, and so is the time that we can spend on the computer, due to our batteries depleting earlier a bit each day. So, Devine spends evenings proof-reading the wiktopher manuscript, reading and messing around with the Playdate, and Rek continues ink work on an upcoming project(Mastodon, no project page yet).

While cleaning up the boat, Devine found two small black notebooks. We started paging through them, to see if we should keep them. The notebooks were full of sketches, interspersed with shopping lists, and incomplete logs from earlier sailing trips we'd done. We found logs detailing our very first attempt at sailing offshore, our sail down the US West Coast and Mexico, and our passage from Tonga to New Zealand. We read the logs, and decided to transcribe and publish them online. Read the lost logbook.

Devine wrote a little timer program for the Adafruit Playground.

Pino book club

We're reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

Continue Reading

Summary Of Changes

• Left, added a navigation bar to navigate larger codebases.
• potato, implemented file system APIs so new files can be renamed, copied and deleted.
• Noodle, added various optimizations, improved TGA support.
• Drifblim, completed rewrite. The assembler is now used to build all of our projects, with no more dependence on the C toolchain to make roms.
• Uxnlin, added a lot of recipes, making it better at finding possible code optimizations.

News

Pino is back in the land of faster internet, and our boat's belly has been re-filled with food. We returned to the Gulf Islands, and are busy eating as many wild blackberries as we can stomach ('tis the season).

Our last anchorage in Desolation Sound was Tenedos Bay, a really lovely place with an amazing (vertical) hike, and clear, clear waters. We also wrote a post on Sturt Bay on Texada Island, a place we stopped on the way up earlier this year, and again when we traveled back south.

As mentioned brieftly in our last post, Devine has been working on an OS called Potato. Rek drew a mascot, and another illustration featuring Varvara and Potato together. Potato is for the Varvara computer, designed to fill the gaps where a host device might not have an underlying file system, like handheld consoles (many people use Uxn on Nintendo DS).

Rek has been drawing a lot, their winter will consist of scanning and processing a sketchbook-full of art. We are still proofreading Wiktopher. A recent stop in Sidney permitted us to print the entire book on paper to make it easier (and more pleasant) to make corrections. The result is 70 (double-sided) pages of text. As of today, we have gone over and marked in red the first chapter (out of 12). Editing books is never easy or fast, but we'll get there.

We know a couple of people have made hako dice sets, so we feel bad for "patching" a physical game, but the face organization of the die has changed somewhat, now, the opposing sides are always of equal value. If any of you are looking for a simple 2-player boardgame to play, try Conway's Phutball. Devine transcribed the rules on their wiki.

Pino book club

We're reading Mathematical Puzzles & Diversions by Martin Gardner.

Continue Reading

Summary Of Changes

• Adelie, added image maps, animation controls, and wrote a guide. Rek also drew an Adelie penguin mascot.
• Cccc, created a graphical calculator.
• Orca, added new font to make it easier to discern letters and numbers from afar (if projected onto a screen).
• Noodle, re-designed noodle.
• Minesweeper, completed the game.

News

Sometimes we find an anchorage that is so nice, so ideal, that we end up staying for weeks. We stayed in Von Donop Bay (hathayim marine park) for well over a month. The southernmost anchorage is near many trails that snake and branch out deep into the woods, and the bay is so large that we kept finding new corners to explore by dinghy. The water in the area is warmer than in Victoria, we can dive, and check Pino's bottom without freezing. This is our first real summer on the boat, when we have no big boat projects to do, nor big transits to plan, and it feels amazing.

We have stretched our food stores to the limit (it has been 2 months since we last stocked up in full). A 5 km trek through the woods takes us to a little General Store, they never have fresh produce (or it gets bought out before we get there) but we go once in a while to replenish our stock of potatoes and onions. We are relying on sprouts a lot (see growing food).

This month, we made a Keynote talk for Nime 2022, and Devine started work on a little OS project called Potato, see some footage(Mastodon). There is no documentation yet, but soon.

Pino book club

We're reading The Stories of Ray Bradbury by Ray Bradbury.

Continue Reading

Summary Of Changes

• Uxn, improved the Uxntal reference sheet and improved the Uxntal cheatsheet.
• Dexe, added menu bar.
• Nasu, added menu bar.
• Noodle, added menu bar.
• 100r.ca, updated boom tent, and added lpg refit (backdated update).

News

Pino is currently in Desolation Sound, enjoying the quiet. We've written a few posts about some of the anchorages we've visited, like melanie cove, grace harbour and hathayim marine park. We're updating our track as we go.

Devine has been adding a lot of notes to the permacomputing wiki this month. We also started a little arcade game named Inle, something that we could play together on the boat in the style of Gunbound/Tank Wars... but with rabbits (we finished reading Watership Down last month, so we blame that, haha). We don't have a project page yet for it, but we shared some images on the post for grace harbour, where we started working on the game.

Rek produced a video about image optimization for the Photographer's Gallery (as part of their Green Hacks video series) last month.

Pino book club

We're reading The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks.

Continue Reading

]]> https://100r.ca/site/2022.html#may2022 2022.html#may2022 Wed, 01 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT Hey everyone! This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects and apps during the month of May. We'll also be reporting in our on position in the world, and on our future plans.

Summary Of Changes

• Combinatory Logic, wrote a guide to combinatory logic, using talking birds.
• , released a linter, and optimized uxnasm.
• Dexe, released an updated version.
• 100r.ca, added batteries, and regulator.

News

From this month until next October, our updates may be delayed. We are sailing northward, towards Desolation Sound and the Broughtons, where cell towers are few. We will wander in and out of such regions all summer. So far, we sailed up to the Gulf Islands, and over to Nanaimo from Victoria, and then crossed the Strait of Georgia over to the Sunshine Coast(close-reaching in 20-knot winds). This was a good shakedown for Pino, a good way to re-awaken our little vessel. All went well, but we ought to have secured our produce better... some of our potatoes escaped their nest and went out for an afternoon roll around the cabin floor.

Start of May, we had some issues with our batteries. They've been acting out for some time, we think because of a dead cell. We have been operating at half battery capacity for a month, and realized that yet again we don't need that much power, especially in the summer when the days are long.

The combinatory logic guide is the first of many projects we plan to release this summer. We also released an sign language version of Uxntal.

In other news, a version of Collapse OS was ported to Uxn.

Pino book club

We're reading Watership Down by Richard Adams.

Continue Reading

]]> https://100r.ca/site/2022.html#apr2022 2022.html#apr2022 Sun, 01 May 2022 00:00:00 GMT Hey everyone! This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects and apps during the month of April. We'll also be reporting in our on position in the world, and on our future plans.

Summary Of Changes

• Bicycle, released an Uxntal playground. See Varvara riding a Sinclair bike.
• Uxn, wrote a linux native implementation of Varvara, as well as an HTML5 implementation of the virtual machine.
• Turquoise, released a little line plotting system.
• 100r.ca, added sewing, Shimoda, Cathedral Grove, and mini dodger.
• Nebu, working on a spreadsheet editor in Uxn.

News

The month of April was a time of boat projects. We built a mini dodger to cover the companionway, and installed a large spindle for floating rope on Pino's stern (marine stores give those spindles away for free, usually). In these waters, it is often necessary to stern tie to shore when anchoring and the spindle will make it easier to uncoil the line.

We also took some time off to visit some ancient trees in Cathedral Grove on Vancouver Island.

Devine found some slide rules and wrote a guide on how to use them.

If you want to play Catpot, the little Hypercard game we made for Merveilles Hyperjam 2020, you can play it with this Hypercard Simulator (thank you Dan).

Pino book club

We're reading The Stranger by Albert Camus.

Continue Reading

]]> https://100r.ca/site/2022.html#mar2022 2022.html#mar2022 Thu, 31 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT Hey everyone! This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects and apps during the month of March. We'll also be reporting in our on position in the world, and on our future plans.

Summary Of Changes

• 100r, released a guide to diesel Engine Care.
• Wunderland Rabbits, released a new rabbit image.
• Toys, finished re-creating the classic bouncing ball for the Amiga for Uxn.
• Uxn, released a 23kb implementation of the Varvara emulator in plain X11(without SDL2), started a mailing list & newsletter to document changes, events and exciting projects, released a second devlog, and wrote a little single-file uxntal assembler called Drifblim.
• Noodle, re-worked entire tool, added native TGA import(Mastodon), implemented file size loading specified in the pathname(Mastodon), added the possiblity to drag the canvas to resize it(Mastodon), and implemented a floating tool pane(Mastodon) etc.

News

A major update to our wiki is that we've put together a text with our stance on various political aspects. Because of the decentralized nature of some of our work, and because of the overlap of libertarians and right-wing doomsday preppers and our documenting survivalism at sea, there were things that just had to be spelled out quite clearly. See philosophy. We've appended a notice to our off the grid page too, since it gets shared the most.

A lot of our time this month was dedicated to preparing for our keynote talk for LibrePlanet 2022 called Software Doldrums. If you missed it the talk was recorded, watch it here. Rek illustrated all of the slides for the presentation, gathered here. These images are now scattered on our wiki. Devine built the Uxn slideshow program Adelie for that presentation, we plan to use it again for all future talks.

The day prior, Devine gave a short performance(YouTube) for Algorave's 10-year anniversary, alongside over 140+ artists. The event was 24 hours, with everyone playing a 10-minute set.

Uxn was featured on The Verge, in an article entitled These artists are making tiny ROMs that will probably outlive us all. And Devine was interviewed(Medium) for Behind the Screens.

In other news, we finally made some Uxn sticker sheets!

Pino book club

We're reading We Have Always Lives in the Castle by Shirley Jackson.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/2022.html#feb2022 2022.html#feb2022 Mon, 28 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT Hey everyone! This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects and apps during the month of February. We'll also be reporting in our on position in the world, and on our future plans.

Summary Of Changes

• Adelie, released a program to create slideshows.
• GrimGrains, added a new recipe: Bean chili.
• Thousand Rooms, released Catalan version, a translation by Dani Sevilla.
• 100r.ca, added a new project: Gravity water filter.
• Uxn, Cancel(Andrew R.) released a new version of uxn32 with complete step debugging tools. Added new art for the Varvara docs..
• Orca, implemented injections(YouTube), and J and Y wiring(YouTube).
• Toys, released Uxn versions of Minesweeper(Mastodon), and Wireworld.

News

This month it was announced that we joined LibrePlanet 2022 as keynote speakers. The annual technology and social justice conference will be held virtually on March 19 and 20, 2022, with the theme Living Liberation. Our talk is named Software Doldrums.

Rek is putting the finishing touches to Wiktopher, and Devine designed a game that the people of Irideri could be playing. The result was a dice game combining the capture mechanism of Go and the randomness of the Domino. Learn to play Hako. Each player has a Sonozai, a set of 4 dice on a rope. Merveillans have been making their own sets:

• recycled construction wood set
• 3d-printed bracelet set
• 3d-printable concept

Rostiger has been making illustrated notes for Uxn, and they are fabulous.

Pino book club

We're reading Underland by Robert Macfarlane.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/2022.html#jan2022 2022.html#jan2022 Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT Hey everyone! This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects and apps during the month of January. We'll also be reporting in our on position in the world, and on our future plans.

Summary Of Changes

• Left, re-wrote documentation, redesigned the UX for save-as/open-as.
• Orca, re-wrote documentation, and added the operators manual on launch.
• Thousand Rooms, released 3 new languages: Polish, Hungarian and Serbian. Now offering book as an ePUB.
• Uxn, re-wrote entire documentation, and started a project devlog.
• Nasu, improved zoom tool, it is now possible to move between tiles(Masto) while zoomed.
• Yufo, released a small game for the Virtual Pet Jam.
• 100r, added new page: cast-iron cookware, and updated medical.

News

On January 28th Uxn turned 1 year old! We'd like to thank everyone who has contributed code, ideas, time and laughs to help this project grow into what it is now. It was a wonderful year for smol ordinators. See an image that Rek made for uxn's birthday.

We finally released versions of the Uxn emulator for all major systems(Linux, OS X and Windows), with the option of a version bundled with a few starter roms. We simplified the guide too, to make it easier to install and use.

Our lion's mane mushroom grew another full head, we harvested it and made some mushroom pakoras.

In other news, Devine was interviewed on Anonradio, listen to it here. Also, Compudanzas released an Introduction to Uxn Programming book, with a foreword by Devine.

Pino book club

We're reading The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, and The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber.

Continue Reading

]]> https://100r.ca/site/2021.html#dec2021 2021.html#dec2021 Fri, 31 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT Hey everyone! This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects and apps during the month of December. We'll also be reporting in our on position in the world, and on our future plans.

Summary Of Changes

• Grimgrains, published a tofu from soy flour recipe, and reduced the amount of ingredients appearing on the main page so it loads faster.
• Left, created inline image support, and implemented a search feature(Birdsite) inspired by the Canon Cat(1987)'s LEAP™ key.
• Cat Clock, released our very own cat clock.
• Turye, released a font editor.
• TGA parser, released a tool to make it easier to bring images into the Uxn ecosystem.
• Wunderland Rabbits, released a new image.

News

It is snowing, and we are cocooning. Our little woodstove is working hard. This month, we finally decided to release a paperback version of Busy Doing Nothing.

In our last update log, we mentioned that we were trying to grow Lion's Mane mushroom, and we are happy to report that it was a success! It grew beautifully. Rek was so excited about the mushroom that they decided to draw some this month, this series focuses on varieties that grow on Vancouver Island.

In other news, we had an interview with the founder of Sourcehut, read it here. Also, our good friend Alderwick make us a very cool gift(YouTube).

Pino book club

We're reading Fantômes: Issue 1, with work by 18 talented artists, put together by Lizbeth. It is a eerie, and gorgeous zine, we strongly recommend the Mike Wolf version.

Pino's location: 48° 42.230'N, 123° 36.900'W

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/2021.html#nov2021 2021.html#nov2021 Wed, 01 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT Hey everyone! This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects and apps during the month of November. We'll also be reporting in our on position in the world, and on our future plans.

Summary Of Changes

• Donsol, designed a donsol turnip.
• Uxn, wrote a file browser rom(Mastodon), improved on uxn utilities (clock, calculator.
• Nasu, added nametable to preview items on the spritesheet, and added option to flip a sprite horizontally or vertically in the blend view.
• 100r, added an information section on Drownspire, the studio we had prior to hundredrabbits.
• Oquonie, started tests to port the game to Uxntal(Birdsite).
• Left, fixed bugs and improved speed.

News

This month, there was an intro to Uxn Programming(YouTube) workshop by Compudanzas, an event by Babycastles Academy. Give it a watch!

November was a very rainy month in Victoria, a perfect time for experiments in the galley. We are growing Lion's Mane mushrooms currently (a first for us), and we are continuing to lacto-ferment vegetables like kohlrabi, turnips, daikon, cauliflower and red onion. To learn how to do it, see our guide to lactofermentation.

Pino book club

We're reading The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (it's such a lovely book).

Pino's location: 48° 42.230'N, 123° 36.900'W

Continue Reading

]]> https://100r.ca/site/2021.html#oct2021 2021.html#oct2021 Wed, 03 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT Hey everyone! This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects and apps during the month of October. We'll also be reporting in our on position in the world, and on our future plans.

Summary Of Changes

• donsol, ported our Famicom(6502) code to Varvara(uxn).
• uxn, wrote a reference guide and created a list of community projects.
• noodle, added guides for the line and rectangle tool and updated shortcuts in the documentation.
• grimgrains, optimized images and published a Chunky Apple Jam recipe.
• 100r, optimized images (see Rek's notes). Added new pages: boom tent, grinder and small space.
• left, optimized code.
• nasu, fixed crashing bug with large selections.

News

This month, we found a used grain mill for Pino! Flour doesn't keep as well as whole grains, so we decided to start milling flour (wheat berries, soy beans or chickpeas) only as we need it. We only released a Guide to Lacto-fermenting vegetables on grimgrains.

Donsol is now available as an uxn rom on itchio.

See Devine's daily drawings series for October.

Pino book club

We're continuing our readings of The Stories of Ray Bradbury by Ray Bradbury. Favorite shorts this month include The Long Rain, The City and Kaleidoscope.

Pino's location: 48° 42.230'N, 123° 36.900'W

Continue Reading

]]> https://100r.ca/site/2021.html#sep2021 2021.html#sep2021 Sun, 03 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT Hey everyone! This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects and apps during the month of September. We'll also be reporting in our on position in the world, and on our future plans.

Summary Of Changes

• Orca, added way for instances of Orca to talk to each other.
• Calc, wrote a little graphical calculator to help with learning binary and hexadecimal.
• Dexe, added option to copy the textual value of a selection.
• Uxn, updated UxnDS emulator.
• Wiktopher, added Chapter 16: The Big Dark.
• 100R, added new pages: Western Canada, alcohol stove, decorations and shore power cord repair. The site also has a new splash.

News

It is an early announcement, but end of June 2022 we will be giving a keynote presentation, alongside Khyam Allami, at NIME(New Interfaces for Musical Expression).

Rek wrote an article on Saving Energy When Cooking Aboard for Noonsite.

Check out Eli's guide on installing Uxn on OS X, and Keijiro's version of Flappy Bird in UxnTal.

Our friends at Compudanzas have released part 6 of their Introduction to Uxn Programming tutorial. This new chapter basically shows you how to build Pong!

Pino book club

We started reading The Stories of Ray Bradbury by Ray Bradbury. Favorite shorts so far include There Will Come Soft Rains, The Coffin and There Was an Old Woman.

Pino's location: 48° 42.230'N, 123° 36.900'W

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/2021.html#aug2021 2021.html#aug2021 Sat, 04 Sep 2021 00:00:00 GMT Hey everyone! This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects and apps during the month of August. We'll also be reporting in our on position in the world, and on our future plans.

Summary Of Changes

• Nasu, implemented a way to shift multiple tiles at once, and added a snarf buffer to copy/paste data between instances of Nasu.
• Niju, completed, and released the project on itch.io.
• Orca, implemented snarf buffer to easily bring patches in and out of it (uxn version).
• Uxn, massive re-write of the Uxn VM, and CollapseOS now runs on Uxn.
• Paradise, started on a Uxn-native version.
• noodle, created a mascot, and added a tiny animation toolkit.
• 100r.ca, added various hand drawn images to the knowledge base.

News

This month, our little engine was fixed (read about it here) we've been sailing around the Gulf Islands, working from anchor. We also found Iggy's successor, a used fiberglass dinghy that we've named Teapot. We've been rowing it from ship to shore, and it's so, so nice. We stopped by Saltspring Island and got to meet the sailors on BosunBird, a couple who have traveled around the world on a Vancouver27. Their blog was an invaluable resource for us on our travels through Japan.

We've released a solid version of noodle, our drawing tool. Follow the tutorial on our website, or check out this amazing quick start guide by Polyducks. We also released niju, our little kana-learning game. Niju was a trial to see if we could design, write and assemble a project entirely within the Uxn computer.

Our friends at Compudanzas have released part 3, 4 and 5 of their Introduction to Uxn Programming tutorial.

Pino book club

Help. We still haven't finished The Swarm by Frank Schatzing. It is terrible, but we can't stop.

Pino's location: 48° 53.370'N, 123° 23.734'W

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/2021.html#july2021 2021.html#july2021 Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT Hey everyone! This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects and apps during the month of July. We'll also be reporting in our on position in the world, and on our future plans.

Summary Of Changes

• Nasu, implemented the export of .theme files, and theme support.
• Left, worked on Uxn-native version, and implemented theme support.
• Niju, progressed on animations and started implementing controls.
• Grimgrains, added a new recipe: Stovetop Blackberry Cake.
• Wiktopher, added a new chapter: Lupin's Logbook.
• Uxn, created a proportional font format for Uxn, and improved documention for Varvara.
• Orca, implemented theme support
• Noodle, published tutorial, and implemented theme support

News

This month, Calcifer is being re-built. While we wait for that, we're working on more projects aboard. We added insulation to the v-berth, an attempt to keep Pino warm this winter. We created a new portal called boat projects on our wiki that covers most of the major construction projects we've done to the boat.

Our friends at Compudanzas have started writing an Introduction to Uxn Programming tutorial. We recommend it to anyone interested in programming for the Uxn Computer. No prior understanding of stack-machines, or Assembly, required! The first covers basics, and the latest chapter focuses on learning to draw pixels on the screen.

If you missed Devine's performance at Flash Crash, you can watch it here.

Pino book club

We're reading Mingming & the Art of Minimal Ocean Sailing by Roger Taylor and The Swarm by Frank Schatzing.

Pino's location: 48° 40.768'N, 123° 24.802'W

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/dry_toilet_installation.html dry_toilet_installation.html Wed, 28 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMT

The work is done. Building a dry toilet was more work than we had anticipated, but we still prefer it over the ready-made models. We learned tons doing it, and now our toilet is perfectly suited to our space. The pandemic has pushed more people into boat and van living (to travel within their own countries) and towards simple systems. Looking at the Nature's Head website, they've had a 8-week waiting list for ages. It's either you wait for the thing, or you build the thing.

Dry toilets are simple to use and have few parts, but it doesn't mean that they are simple to build. Simple is hard, it costs time, and requires a ton of creativity.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/2021.html#june2021 2021.html#june2021 Thu, 01 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMT Hey everyone! This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects and apps during the month of June. We'll also be reporting in our on position in the world, and on our future plans.

Summary Of Changes

• Nasu, released a nasu guide, and updated the look of the icon. We have also discontinued the old javascript version.
• Uxn, released an uxn guide.
• Orca, working on the Uxn port.
• Niju, started work on sprites. Implemented hover states.
• Noodle, made Noodle responsive for small screens and added highlight to save state

News

Pino and crew spent the first half of the month in the boatyard. We splashed back into the water on the 14th and moved to North Saanich to have access to a workshop with the goal of completing our dry toilet. We are documenting the entire installation, with plans to update the page when we begin to use it. We are ALMOST done with this project.

We started working on Niju, a hiragana/katakana review application. We used this project to test our the latest iteration of Nasu so we could finalize the documentation.

On June 26 2021, Devine met up with the London SF reading group to talk about solarpunk, see their notes. On July 10th UTC 20:00, Devine will also perform with Orca for flash crash.

See Uxn running on the ESP32. It is TOO adorable!

Pino book club

We're reading Nature as Measure by Wes Jackson, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall and Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges.

Pino's location: 48° 40.768'N, 123° 24.802'W

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/2021.html#may2021 2021.html#may2021 Tue, 08 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT Hey everyone! This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects and apps during the month of May. We'll also be reporting in our on position in the world, and on our future plans.

Summary Of Changes

• Noodle, released Uxn version. Improved UX to resize the canvas and fixed stylus picking for Nintendo DS version.
• Nasu, completed port to Uxn.
• Uxn, runs on 9front and Raspberry pi.
• GrimGrains, added Buckwheat Dumpling recipe.
• Wunderland Rabbits, added two new travel pics: Rhodo Ravine and Patricia Bay.

News

There has been a lot of activity on Uxn this month! It's exciting to see it work on a variety of devices, like the PS vita, Gameboy Advance and the Nintendo DS. We love the idea that most people already have the all hardware necessary to run our software.

We hosted a small cooking jam on Merveilles, feel free to peruse The Galley tag to see the recipes.

In Pino related news, we are moving north. First stop, the boatyard. We'll be doing a bunch of changes to the studio this week, like removing and replacing old thru-hulls and installing a dry toilet.

Pino book club

We're reading Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

Pino's location: 48° 40.768'N, 123° 24.802'W

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/2021.html#apr2021 2021.html#apr2021 Tue, 02 Mar 2021 00:00:00 GMT Hey everyone! This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects and apps during the month of April. We'll also be reporting in our on position in the world, and on our future plans.

Summary Of Changes

• Uxn, improved documentation, implemented MIDI and sound chip, and drew some new art for the documentation.
• Birfucan, ported to Uxn.
• Nasu, general improvements.
• Wiktopher, released Chapter 14: Tarka.

News

This month, we converted the old static version of our website into a wiki, with pages for each of the various projects we've been working on aboard Pino. We hope you like it!

We also finished installing our wood stove. Our timing could have been better (it's summer now), but we'll be able to keep warm while at anchor next winter. We have many projects to do, including the removal and replacement of many thru-hulls and plumbing, as well as the installation of a dry toilet. Looks like Pino will have to come out of the water again this year!

Pino book club

We're reading Terre des Hommes by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll.

Pino's location: 48° 42.230'N, 123° 36.900'W

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/woodstove_installation.html woodstove_installation.html Thu, 22 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

It was our dream to have a little wood stove aboard Pino. After researching stoves, we decided that the best model was the cast iron Sardine from Navigator Stoveworks.

Our Espar forced air diesel heater broke on our last passage, and we decided not to replace it. There are few low-power alternatives to a gas/diesel heater for heating a boat when off the grid. A wood stove was our best low-tech option. We also like that it doubles as a cook top...

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/2021.html#mar2021 2021.html#mar2021 Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:00:00 GMT Hey everyone! This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects and apps during the month of March. We'll also be reporting in our on position in the world, and on our future plans.

Summary Of Changes

• Uxn, lots of progress on Uxn, started documenting the assembly syntax, built a Uxn emulator with a handful of devices, from date/time support, to graphics, mouse, and soon audio and midi support. Rek designed some additional mascots for the project.
• Noodle, implemented Noodle into Uxn, with presentation modes, save/load and various patterns to create 1-bit graphics.
• Busy Doing Nothing, fixed type and formatting errors, and removed the fixed font. It is now easier to read on phones.
• Grimgrains, added a Sourdough spelt flatbread recipe.
• Wunderland rabbits, released a small photo project involving traveling, and rabbits.

News

This month, the rabbits have been busy making new holes in Pino, cutting metal, and building a support platform for their new tiny woodstove. When the installation is complete, we have plans to write a blog post about the process.

If you're seeing this update on the 100r.ca website, you'll notice that all logs are now in the same file. It is easier for us to manage, and we think, more pleasant for you to read.

We have received a lot of really good feedback and corrections for our book Busy Doing Nothing, thank you for reading it. Rek has updated their notes on creating e-books with Pandoc to include exports to epub and mobi (for those interested).

Pino book club

We're reading The Complete Rigger’s Apprentice by Brion Toss and Thinking Forth by Leo Brody.

Pino's location: 48° 42.230'N, 123° 36.900'W

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/2021.html#feb2021 summary_of_changes_2021_feb Sun, 28 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT Hey everyone! This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects and apps during the month of February. We'll also be reporting in our on position in the world, and on our future plans.

Summary Of Changes

• Uxn, started working on a fantasy console called Uxn, and designed a mascot.
• 100r.ca, added a dark mode as an accessibility feature, and added new drawings to cooking and sailing.
• Grimgrains, also added a dark mode.
• Wiktopher, what is this? Another dark mode. Now our eyes are happy.

News

This month, we released the e-book version of the North Pacific Logbook titled Busy Doing Nothing. The book is 217 pages long, and is available as a PDF, mobi or EPUB. We're happy it's out, and hope that you like it!

In other news, Esoteric.Codes interviewed our studio, and we heard that the Toronto Public Library was hosting an online Orca workshop on March 1st—how cool is that?

Pino book club

We're reading A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/2021.html#jan2021 summary_of_changes_2021_jan Sun, 31 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT Hey everyone! This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects and apps during the month of January. We'll also be reporting in our on position in the world, and on our future plans.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/2020.html#nov2020 summary_of_changes_2020_dec Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMT Hey everyone! This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects and apps during the month of December. We'll also be reporting in our on position in the world, and on our future plans.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/2020.html#oct2020 summary_of_changes_2020_nov Mon, 30 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT Hey everyone! This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects and apps during the month of November. We'll also be reporting in our on position in the world, and on our future plans.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/2020.html#sep2020 summary_of_changes_2020_oct Sat, 31 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT Hey everyone! This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects and apps during the month of October. We'll also be reporting in our on position in the world, and on our future plans.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/working_offgrid_efficiently.html working_offgrid_efficiently Tue, 13 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Our traveling studio has operated off-the-grid for 4 1/2 years.

For the first 3 years we tested the limits of our space, and at first, it was difficult to create new things, as we had to make time to learn how to solve underlying problems. Our boat was not just an office, it was also our house and transport. As for us, we were artists, but also plumbers, deckhands, electricians, captains, janitors and accountants.

Our main problems as a studio were internet scarcity, power management, data storage as well as hardware and software failures. Overtime we found ways to balance work, pleasure and maintenance. Here are some of the lessons we learnt.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/north_pacific_logbook.html north_pacific_logbook Fri, 31 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT

The passage from Japan (Shimoda) to Canada (Victoria) took 51 days, and it was the hardest thing we've ever done. We decided to keep a logbook, to better remember it and so it can help others who wish to make this trip.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/typhoons_and_mold.html typhoons_and_mold Fri, 28 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

For every traveling sailor, comes a time when the boat has to stay alone in a foreign country. For us, this happened this year in Japan. We'd never left Pino alone before, never for more than a week. We were apprehensive at first, but decided it would be a good learning experience, for us and our beloved.

Whenever we mentioned leaving our boat in Japan, people would say, 'Aren't you afraid of typhoons?' Our 6 month leave coincided with the time of year when typhoons affect Japan, with August to October being the worse months. We were worried, but knew that if we prepared well, Pino would be fine. We spent weeks planning our departure, doing research on how to keep a boat safe in a storm, but also, how to keep mold and insects at bay in our absence.

While in Canada, I had anxiety at night, vivid dreams about what was happening to Pino. These dreams involved us returning to the boat, only to find it turned into a moldy, water-logged cockroach motel. Having no experience leaving our home behind, I had no guarantee that we had done enough.

When we returned 6 months later, we found no mold, no bugs and little to no damage, in fact, we slept in that same night. Pino endured weeks of hot Japanese summers, tropical rain and typhoon-strength winds. We're happy to say that overall, our preparations were indeed enough.

Below is a short list of things to remember, things we learned, when came time to prepare our boat for long-term storage:

• Ventilation is key.
• Clear the decks.
• Don't keep food.
• Clean everything.
• Store away everything.
• Don't leave openings.
• Tie everything down.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/a_home_for_pino.html a_home_for_pino Sun, 11 Aug 2019 00:00:00 GMT We left Shimizu on a sunny morning, pushing off the dock at 6am. Early. We wanted to make sure we'd arrive at our destination on time. There was 126nm between us and Shima Yacht harbor, a distance we needed to do in part at night. This wasn't ideal. We knew that. Many people warned us about sailing at night in these waters, but as the Japanese say: 'Shoganai' (it is what it is!). We needed to cross a big stretch of water called Enshu Nada, an area with a lot of traffic. In truth, the entire coastline is full of ships, but it gets very busy north of the Kii Peninsula.

We left Shimizu on a sunny morning, pushing off the dock at 6am. We discussed our plans with our friends Masa and Shu from Dawntreader, they too recommended a non-stop trip because the ports between Omaezaki and Mie are few. There is the port of Fukuda 福田, located at the mouth of Ota Kawa, but the depth of the water is inconsistent and prone to silting. Locals also warned us it wasn't very yacht-friendly, and so we put an X on Fukuda.

Shu instructed us to stay 10nm from shore, to avoid the many nets lining the coast, and to avoid small fishing vessels idling there at night. We did as told.

Coming out of Shimizu port, we came face to face with a large container ship named 'One'. A beautiful ship. Red, with a peculiar shape. The marina had warned us about its coming, that its entrance into Shimizu port was scheduled at 6am during our exit. Avoiding it was not a problem.

We powered out of the harbor and into Suruga Bay. There was no wind, but we raised the mainsail anyway. We wanted to test our new slugs (what keeps the mainsail attached to the mast). It was the first time since Fiji that we'd raised a full main. The black moon shook off its wrinkles, presenting its belly to the sun.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/tools_ecosystem.html tools_ecosystem Mon, 22 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT How did the Hundredrabbits ecosystem come into being? It's a long story, but here's a summary.

In 2016, we left Canada, armed with our two iPhones and 2 MacBooks Pros. We didn't know the wattage of any of the devices we owned, and even less about the amount of solar needed to power them. When living on land we didn't pay attention to how many amps our devices required daily. Electricity felt limitless.

When we started sailing in BC, we had no dinghy and so we'd go from dock to dock. When we purchased Iggy in Nanaimo, we spent more days on the hook. The first anchorage we went to was a small bight east of Eagle Point, it offered a great view of metro Vancouver. From that point on we spent more and more time at anchor, moving every 5 days or so. We had no power concerns because our route always included marinas, or guest slips at yacht clubs. Our batteries were always topped up.

Life off-grid was new to us then, as was spending lots of time outdoors. We liked it, a lot. When at anchor we'd go explore, spend a few hours working, cooking, then we'd read or play card games in evenings. When living on land, we'd work from 8h-19h, sitting in front of our respective screens, but now things were different. We wanted to do less of that, to take long bike ride around islands or to sit on the deck in evenings to watch the sun set. Then, at marinas where we had both power and internet, we'd go back to working longer hours to get things done. This was a fine setup, we thought, but, there was problem: what happens when we start living AND working at anchor full time? We liked being outdoors, but that's not all we wanted to do. We're creatives, and we need to make things. We were relying on powered docks to work, and so we never got to test our current power setup off-grid. If we had spent a month or so away from civilization, we would have learnt that we had to change something.

And so, to continue with the story, we left Canada and cruised down the coast of the US. True to our old habits, we continued to alternate between staying in a marina and at anchor. The longest we spent off-grid during that time was 3 weeks in San Francisco, anchored off Treasure Island. During that time we discovered that working aboard, running two Macbook Pros, a refrigerator and our phones was not possible. To save on power, we started turning the fridge off at night, and taking trips into town during the day to work from cafes. SF was grey on most days, our solar couldn't keep up with our demanding work schedules. Going to work from cafes in town worked well for us, most had outlets we could use. Our routine started with working from cafes until lunch, then wandering around in the afternoons. We would return home before dark to turn the fridge off, but doing it didn't make sense because the constant shifts in temperatures produced too much moisture. Moisture meant rot and mold. We decided that keeping it off was a better idea for both our batteries and our produce. With the fridge out of the equation, we figured that we'd have more power left-over for our laptops.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/hello_fujisan.html hello_fujisan Wed, 13 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT It's 8h00 pm on a cold dark winter night, we are outside of Shimizu harbor motoring in circles and waiting for a response from Shimizu Port Control. The temperature is 4 °C, the wind is blowing hard and our clothes are wet and caked with salt. We’re tired and hungry, waiting for permission to enter the Port. Prior to this, we had a rough 4-day passage, riding under 30-40 knot winds on the nose. This passage was a true test of strength, for us and for Pino... but first, let’s go back and see exactly what happened…

We'd planned to go to Wakayama, riding on the back of a passing low with winds from the NE, shifting to the S and then to the SW, but the wind decided to turn earlier making it impossible for us to go east. We found ourselves close-reaching in 40 knot winds, heading straight north. Looking at the weather we could see that it would blow from the W for 3-4 days, so we made a new plan to head to Omaezaki. We'd read of other sailors taking refuge there in big weather and thought it would be possible to go, but again, the wind kept pushing us further and further east. The next port on our list was Shimizu, tucked in deep into the bay. We were able to point Pino to the cape just past Shimizu, but we weren't sure if again the wind and current would allow us to make some easting.

At that point both of us were frozen solid. Wave after wave splashed over the boat and into the cockpit. The starboard rail was constantly submerged, our starboard side lee cloth was gone and the diesel bins were threatening to fall overboard. We had 3 reefs in our main, but 5 slides had snapped off (yet again), I wondered when the rest would break.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/goji_no_chaimu.html goji_no_chaimu Fri, 01 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT After a long 21-day passage, seeing the shape of the island of Chichijima in the distance was unreal; this was our prize, our first step onto Japanese soil. We used to make many trips to Japan by plane, but getting there by our own efforts — by sailboat — is a lot slower and harder. If we had stuck to our plan of sailing there via Hawaii, we would have been there sooner, but I’m glad we took the long route. We passed through 9 countries, learned a lot about the world and, through it all, we've surpassed ourselves.

During that time, we often talked about what it would be like to arrive in Japan, about what would happen when we did. You have to remember that this was a big deal for us, a milestone in our lives and the culmination of 3 years of hard work. A fantasy made real is a hell of an achievement. A part of me couldn’t believe we’d made it — anytime now I’d wake up mid-ocean in transit in the South Pacific. Even when I’d have my feet planted on the ground, with a Japanese flag flying above my head, I knew I’d be anxious, waiting for something horrible to happen that would rob us of our victory.

'They’ll turn us away.', 'We’ve landed on the wrong island.' or 'We died in the pacific some months ago, and this is limbo.'

My eyes were set on the phantasmic island ahead. The sun fell out of the sky then, drawing down a star-studded curtain; the wind blew itself out, leaving the sea to settle into an unmoving and creepy oil slick. Limbo.

A bright circle appeared on the horizon then. It isn’t the first or the last time that I mistake the moonrise for a ship, or the bright eye of some mythological beast.

At this point, it looked like we’d be entering Futami port at night, but at least we had the eye of Sauron to light the way. The island in the distance stopped being a vague black patch, and we began to see details in it.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/the_promise_of_pancakes.html the_promise_of_pancakes Mon, 26 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT As soon as we'd tied to our mooring ball in Majuro's lagoon, the worries of the previous 24 days had vanished only to replaced by the crushing weight of responsibility. Devine, being worry-free, wanted to have pancakes, sleep and check-in tomorrow, but Devine knows how uptight I am, and that this was not what we'd be doing first (even if it is what I wanted too *sigh*). My thinking was that I'd rather get the paperwork out of the way first, to get all of that worrying out of me so I can then eat pancakes in peace.
• 'Shut up and get dressed.'

We needed to be presentable for the officials, we had to wear clean clothes with pants that reach over your knees. A lot of countries in the pacific don't want to see your knees — I get it, knees are weird. We dug out some clothes from our bins, and then went back on deck to give Iggy the dinghy the kiss of life.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/doldrumming.html doldrumming Tue, 20 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT Here we go again, time for another passage. We left Fiji on October 23rd 2018, eager to spend some time on the water again. Our plan, was to stop by Tuvalu, maybe Kiribati, before arriving in Majuro in the Marshall islands where we'd be spending two months before moving off west to Micronesia. We left, knowing that this was wasn't going to be an easy ride...

Two areas of calms lie north of Fiji: the SPCZ (south pacific convergence zone) and the ITCZ (intertropical convergence zone). If you look at windy, hovering around the countries of Tuvalu and Kiribati are two bands of blue - blue means there is no wind. The size and location of these bands varies from day to day, week to week.. they phase in and out of existence with the weather and influence of the trade winds.

Sailors fear these blue bands because the weather there is difficult, not only do you suffer calms, but also a continuous ballet of squalls and thunderstorms. We've been through the doldrums (the ITCZ) once already when we crossed from Mexico to the Marquesas.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/leleuvia.html leleuvia Wed, 05 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT We've never been on a tiny island, a place you can run the width of under just a few minutes. We found a place like this, Leleuvia, an island in the Lomaitivi archipelago in Fiji.

This island went through many hands over the years, it now belongs to a resort that too bears the name of the island. We decided to make a stop there on our way to Suva, to wait for favorable winds to go south.

Also, we wanted a taste of tiny-island living.

We arrived at Moturiki pass around 1pm. SY Scoots gave us a number to phone the resort on arrival, so they could send a boat to guide us through the reef. We realized then, that our phone plan didn't include calls within Fiji, all we had was data — woops! That's ok! We still had the option of calling them on VHF. I hailed them repeatedly on CH10 — no luck.

I had waypoints for the entrance, but not all the way to the anchorage. Many areas in Fiji aren't charted well, you can find yourself navigating over an area with the depth sounder reading '10m' but the chart will display a patch of green, an area too shallow to pass. It's always disconcerting, to find yourself anchored in a patch of green, like sitting in a negative space, a secret place that you didn't think existed.

We got closer and closer to the green area, growing ever-so nervous, and continuing to try and hail the resort. Eventually, they picked up my call.

• 'Vessel calling, this is Leleuvia resort.'
• 'This is sailing vessel Pino, d'you have any moorings available?'
• 'Yes. When you come near the pier we'll send a boat to escort you to it.'
• 'Great, thanks!'

We wouldn't be entering the anchorage in the blind after all. We would have eyes to guide us to a safe spot.

We motored on, nearing the pier, and spotted the escort boat. The driver came within shouting range, instructing us to follow, which we promptly did. They led us to a mooring, and assured us it was strong and that it could take our weight — not that Pino is heavy. We grabbed the line from the water, with a bit of difficulty, sometimes the mooring 'eye' for the buoys are submerged, and you need to figure out which bit to grab to get to it. We missed the mooring ball the first time, the whole endeavour was made worse by the up and down motion of the bow — there was a bit of swell coming into the anchorage from the north at the time. We rounded again to grab the mooring ball, i spied a thin loop at the top of the ball, and thrusted the boat hook in it. I hurriedly pulled the float out of the water, and my hands and the line found the mooring loop. This is not my favorite type of mooring ball, where you need to pull the ball up itself to find the rope hanging far underneath it, usually they'll put a separate float on the line to keep it buoyant. All moorings are different.

The northerly swell would stop soon, the forecast called for 20-25kts out of the SE tomorrow. On the chart, the area looked protected from swell, with a reef belt around it, but looking around now, aside from the tiny spit of land that is Leleuvia, there was only water. At low tide the reef became evident, as the water receded sand banks came into view, fencing us in from all directions but from the North. Phew. The reef would break most of the waves, but at high tide some swell would make it past it for sure — not ideal, but we would have some protection.

The next day the wind did freshen, and as expected, at high tide the waves spilled into the anchorage. It was bumpy, but not overly so.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/where_is_the_turtle_farm.html where_is_the_turtle_farm Mon, 20 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT Pino spent a long time in Savusavu, but by then, we were growing tired of this scenery, not of the market, or of the company to be found here, but just of having that same view every morning. We love this city, but when it's time to go, it's time to go!

We left our mooring at 9am, and moved along over to Cousteau's resort to anchor (16 48.623S, 179 17.331E). The water was unclear, and the clouded sky made it difficult to see bommies beneath us. Devine dove in and checked out our anchor, which was set in sand, and we weren't near any huge coral that we could see, that is, unless the wind shifted - it was hard to see that far in cloudy water to be honest.

SV Privateer arrived shortly after us, having made the short passage by sail, we saw them manoeuver around, looking for a place to drop the hook.

• 'What's the bottom like?' Lila shouted, baby Chance strapped to her back.
• 'Sand. A few bommies!' I shouted back.

They hovered around some more, opening the headsail, furling it, in and out again, and moving the main in and out to make their way around the anchorage. It's always impressive to watch, not many will rely on wings alone to do this. They'll do as many tacks as necessary to get where they need to go - engines be damned!

We tried swimming at the beach that afternoon, but it was full of seaweed and unclear, we much preferred staying on the tiny slab of beach lining the shore to watch the hundreds of tiny hermit crabs moving about. They were different sizes, wearing a grand variety of shells - some spirally, others conical, stained with purples and whites, oranges and cream. We sat there in silence, listening to the sound of their shells rubbing against bits of broken coral. Such a pleasant sound, small scratching noises. Crkk, crkk... crkk.

• 'Move along little ones - move along now! Tide's rising!'

We left our hermit crab friends behind, and went back aboard Pino. Tomorrow morning we had to get up at 4am to sail to Makogai (pronounced ma-kon-guy), 49NM away.

The wind changed in the night, we could hear the chain rubbing against bit of coral, catching, before coming off again with a jerk, the sound traveling to us by the chain through the hull. We should have probably buoyed the chain, we thought then, but it was dark, and too late to think of doing this now. Hopefully, the chain wouldn't have this macramé thing going on with the bits of coral down there.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/projects_and_pain.html projects_and_pain Sat, 02 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMT We arrived in New Zealand with a long scary list of things to fix or replace on Pino. We needed new batteries, a new mainsail, a fresh coat of bottom-paint, galley plumbing, new intermediates shrouds, new backstay, new top hatch, new windows, new control cables etc.
• 'If we can't finish all of these projects, then we can't leave.'

That was the deal. There was too much ocean between us and Japan. Our vessel needed to be made safe to endure it, and to ensure our safe passage.

When we landed in the country, we had grand ideas, 'grand illusions' I should say, about what we thought we could get done by ourselves. We wanted to learn, but we also wanted to save money. By now, we knew how much it cost to offload the work to others, and it's not something we knew we could do.

Below, is a detailed account of all the repairs we did on Pino during the 9 months we spent in New Zealand. This is a technical post, interspersed with bits of story, present and past. For those who don't know the terms, but that are interested, I'll do my best to explain them all throughout the text.

Here I go!

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/an_island_to_oneself.html an_island_to_oneself Fri, 01 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMT Traveling to New Zealand, after a year of unknown, was a great comfort to us. There are a few things Devine and I were really looking forward to, like a good latte, craft beer, a fresh food market and a bulk food store. I found a city that checked all of the boxes.

Many of the cruisers we know want to arrive in Opua – with reason. It's warm, damn gorgeous, and you know you'll find friends there, because that's where everyone goes during the cyclone season. Arriving in a strange place, with familiar faces, always makes the experience better, but knowing this, we still chose Whangarei.

I first pronounced Whangarei as 'one-gah-rey', but the proper way to say it is: 'fah-ngah-rey'. A friend corrected me early on, sparing me the embarrassment of mispronouncing it aloud in public. I know that no one would think me a fool for making a mistake like this, but I do like learning the correct way to say things.

Why did we choose to go there? Because staying in the Whangarei Town Basin is inexpensive, convenient, with everything just a short walk away. We'd also read that it was a good place for boat projects, and since Pino needed a lot of attention, this too, we thought, tipped the scale in its favor. We also noted that it was close to Auckland — well, it looked closer on a map. We became very familiar with that stretch of land, and of the actual distance between the two places during the 8 months we spent there.

The first thing we did when we arrived, was to replenish our store of dried goods at Bin Inn, a really great bulk food store. The second thing, was purchasing a home brew kit - priorities amirite? The third thing, was to get a latte.

I'll never forget the look on Devine's face after taking a sip of a cup of freshly brewed beans, a delicious pool of dark liquid topped with a pillowy cloud of plant milk.

Joy incarnate.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/captain_what_is_this.html captain_what_is_this Tue, 12 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMT After 15 days on the water, we were to get into port. It was the 27th of June, and we'd left Opua on the 12th. We hove-to for the night, waiting for sunrise before entering Savusavu bay. 'Entering a strange harbor at night is for morons and fools,' people told us. We didn't listen right away, but they were right. In this particular case, there was no point in arriving early, considering yachts cannot anchor in Fiji waters before checking in, and that check-in is only possible after 8am.

At dawn, we pointed towards the island of Vanua Levu and sailed on, with the wind at our backs. I went below to make some coffee, as both of us needed a boost. Devine was in the cockpit, keeping an eye on a large storm cloud ahead. The wind increased as we neared it, but it did not trouble us long. We made our way inside the reef, which offered some protection from the building swells, and moved closer to land. We could see rows of hills ahead, and caught the perfume of greenery. After that, came a sure sign of civilization: buildings, low, with green and red roofs. As we got nearer, came an even more obvious sign of civilization: cars, and small power boats. We'd arrived.

We neared the entrance to Nakama creek around 9am, and radio'ed the authorities on channel 16.

I hailed them 3 times, no answer. We slowed down, awaiting a reply. The commercial wharf lay ahead, we could see boats on moorings, some abandoned, others belonging to people we'd seen or met accross the Pacific. Eventually, they replied and asked us about the details of our trip, and if we had sent a pre-arrival notice. Sending it ahead of time was mandatory, and was about 10 pages too long. I'd sent it to the proper people by email, although half of the messages bounced back, and other cruisers reported the same thing happening. With the document being so large, it's no wonder their inboxes are always full. I even tried sending it again while underway, no luck. No matter. I'd received a reply from the custom office, at least one of the messages made it. They told us to look for a white building on our starboard side.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/the_rock_of_polynesia.html the_rock_of_polynesia Sat, 29 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT Niue, pronounced 'New-ay', a rock in the Pacific, one of the largest coral islands on earth. It's the first country to offer free, state-funded, wireless internet to all its residents and has a goal of being completely solar powered— uuuh... wow?

We'd also heard that the school gave all of the kids laptops, this, with free internet, makes it a paradise for people like us. Already then, we made plans to move there — like all places in the tropics with a good connection and supply of coconuts and beer. I remember when we were speaking of staying in Nuku Hiva too, and in La Paz. We make a home everywhere we go. This, makes it hard to leave, but this ease of adaptation also makes us eager to go forward, to see where else we could live. This is what we do, we set up house in different places, sometimes for 8 months at a time.

We weren't going to be staying long in Niue though, but not by choice.

Alofi Bay, the only anchorage on the island, is not protected in any wind other than east. If the wind turns in an unfavorable direction, staying could be dangerous and we'd be forced to leave.

One other troublesome thing about the 'rock of Polynesia', is that they hiked the departure fees from 35$ to 80$ per person. Anyone who enters Niue, when leaving, need pay this fee. That's a lot of money, we thought, to visit a place so small.

In the end I'm glad we went, because of all the places we'd been, Niue was our favorite.

We arrived at 6am in the morning, rounding the island to Alofi bay that lay on the west side. A squall lay between me and the anchorage, a puffy cloud with a thick wet skirt. I pulled my hood on, grabbed the helm firmly and quickly skipped through songs on my phone till I landed on anything by Purity ring. Ah! Sea castles. Yes, perfect.

WOOSH! A gust of wind comes, but I'm ready. The song begins then too... 'I could build a machine—' The boat heels, '—draw pictures for the walls.' Then comes the rain, heavy droplets, washing the salt crystals away. It left as quickly as it came, giving way to the sun, its face reflected in a thousand wet pools on the deck. 'Hang up all my fragile frights—' I point Pino towards the anchorage. Tall masts ahead, signs of life. The water, a deep blue, spotted with brightly-colored floaters. '—Display that you may see.' I sing aloud, turning the music off. 'We're here!' I shout to Devine.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/internet_in_paradise.html internet_in_paradise Sat, 01 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT Huahine, one of the many grouped islands in French Polynesia. Our plans for future ocean voyaging could have ended here, because we almost crashed onto a reef.

Because we always time our arrival with the morning sun, I always get the first look of every island. Huahine stood in front of us, a series of volcanic peaks marked by deep valleys and blanketed in green, an island that came into being million of years ago.

We were heading for Baie d'Avea, to the south of the island.

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]]> https://100r.ca/site/rainy_with_a_chance_of_mosquitoes.html rainy_with_a_chance_of_mosquitoes Sat, 01 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT Nuku Hiva, a green mountainous island in the Pacific, straight out of Jurassic Park. Just as foreign and just as wild, except instead of hungry lizards there are mosquitoes, also known as the vampires of the Marquesas.

Before arriving, we didn't know what it was going to be like there, we'd barely read anything about it. We knew where we'd anchor, that people there spoke french and that there would be tropical fruit, but beyond that it was a blur, a black spot in our minds. We read the book Fourteen during our 28-day transit from La Paz. In this book, the family sailed to Nuku Hiva, but their experience there was not so good. It wasn't bad because of the Marquesans, or the island itself, but because of no-no's, little biting bugs that hide in sand. We took a mental note of this: "Avoid sand beaches, and you will have a great time!"

On day 27 of our voyage, I could see the outline of the island in the distance. I stood at the bow, trying to take footage of the event, but was disappointed with the shot. Far-away wonders have a way of looking unimpressive on camera. I was about to put the camera away, when I heard a 'wooshing' sound. I looked over the side, and saw an orca whale swimming next to Pino, its length matching our own. It stayed with us for a long while, it's white belly making it easy to spot it in the water. This unusual encounter was a great start to our Marquesian adventure.

Pino arrived at the entrance to Taiohae bay. I sat on the bow with Iggy's deflated corpse. I pumped life back into it, while it, sucked mine out. I was sweaty, a constant stream of body water oozing down my back. We had no dinghy pump, having broken it ages ago. All we had was a jury-rigged contraption using a bike pump, a bike tube and the hose from the old pump. It worked, but it took twice as long to put air into anything.

A super yacht was anchored in the mouth of the bay, called 'Ethereal'. "How fitting", I thought.

It's as if the yacht was a sign, a warning of the view to come — one, that was definitely ethereal.

A chain of mountains, green and fuzzy, and ahead a bay filled with boats flying flags from all over the world. We found a spot in 12 m of water, mud bottom, and dropped anchor. The sky was clear, but clouds clung to the peaks of every mountain. It was a rare thing, we realized afterwards, for the skies to be clear. Most days were grey. While grey often means rain, it also means less sun. It was over 30 degrees every day, so hot that at times we couldn't work, our bodies shiny with sweat, driving us mad. Mad to the point that we seriously considered flooding the cockpit with water to turn it into a pool.

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