IdealOS Thinking
June 25th, 2024
One of my original IdealOS blog posts from 2017 showed up on the front page of Hackernews the other day (comments here). This got me thinking about IdealOS again. I haven’t worked on it in a couple of years, but as I read through the comments and links to articles by people with similar ideas, I came to a realization. I am still working on it. Maybe not directly, but I’m still exploring ideas that are needed to build IdealOS. So with that in mind let’s take a look at what I’ve been working on lately.
Circuit Python Watch Status
July 25th, 2023
It's been a bit since I've posted on my round screen watch project. Most of my time has been taken up by work, travel, and family stuff, but I did have a few seconds to add a feature or two.
CSS Text Style Builder
July 12th, 2023
It’s a truism of the web that when something becomes free it turns to crap. This is largely due to advertising, tracking, and SEO hackers getting their crappy version of something to the top of the search index. When this has happened to a tool I want to use I can’t fix the underlying problem, but I can make my own non-tracking version and share it with the web, doing my little part to make the world a better place. Today it’s a CSS Text Style builder.
Fonts and Icons on Circuit Python
June 25th, 2023
I’m continuing to work on a little smartwatch prototype using a little round LCD and I want to have nice looking text. The default font for CircuitPython is fine, but it’s very tiny. This LCD has a pretty high DPI compared to other hobbyist screens( > 200 ppi), so I need to find a new font. CP has a way of importing new fonts, but there are a few pitfalls and tricks I discovered, so that’s what I’m covering today.
Performance Limitations of CircuitPython's DisplayIO Graphics
June 12th, 2023
Playing with a Pico based Round LCD screen
June 8th, 2023
I'm enamored of all of cheap and hackable screens and embedded CPUs coming onto the market. I'm frustrated, however, that despite embedded computing being more accessible than ever, the mass manufacturers products are all becoming more and more the same. Where are the phones with oval screens? Where are the steam punk pocket calculators? We have the technology to make devices that are ever more niche and increasingly creative and different, yet what you can actually buy is more glowing rectangles. I'd like to fix this.
Canvas Scaling and Smoothing Tricks
April 15th, 2023
I love HTML Canvas. I even wrote a book about it once. Canvas is good drawing API and it runs everywhere. However, despite the magic that is the Canvas API, it can still be tricky to use when it interacts with CSS. I often have people ask me how to make their canvas fill the screen, or resize with the window, or to have a fixed aspect ratio but still scale to fit inside the window without overlap. All of these require understanding some internal details about how Canvas works. So let’s dive in.
One Hour Pong
January 12th, 2023
I’ve been teaching my nephew to code for the past few years and we did a game jam together over the winter break. He said to me: “Uncle Josh, you sure can code fast.” I reminded him that I’ve been programming for 30+ years, and one day he’ll be even better than I am.
Why you can’t build a web browser and why you should anyway.
December 14th, 2022
In the last couple of years I’ve seen a lot of lamenting about the browser mono-culture. I even wrote about it myself. Some complains focus on how complicated the web specs have become. So big that only a few companies can implement a browser from scratch. I think these complaints are misplaced. Even if the web platform didn’t have such a large API surface it still wouldn’t matter. You can’t build a large scale browser with large marketshare. The browser market would still be a monoculture. You can't solve a business problem with a technology solution. I also don't think that replacing the web with something smaller like Gemini is the answer.
Canvas Computing Prototype 1
December 3rd, 2022
I've been working for a while on some new ideas around the future of programming, but I haven't done a great job of sharing these with the world. It's not science if you don't publish your results, so here we go.
Make Rects Fast, in Rust
September 29th, 2022
How can you draw a filled rectangle fast? By making it not slow! Great if you are using a GPU to accelerate rectangle drawing for you, but what if you are doing it oldskool with an in memory frame-buffer? You'd probably write some code like this:
Ideal OS Mark 6
September 21st, 2022
Yeah, it’s been a while, but not forgotten! In between moving homes and jobs and pets I found to do a new release of my IdealOS prototype. And not just a new release, but an actual full rewrite! Let’s take a look at what’s new in IdealOS Mark 6!
Life Moves Fast
August 2nd, 2022
It’s been a while since I’ve talked tech and much longer since I’ve talked about anything personal. There's a lot of updates to share, so buckle up.
Why are Browser Engine Monocultures a bad thing?
April 14th, 2022
It is often mentioned in Hacker News comments and the Twitters that it’s a tragedy that the web ecosystem is now dependent one only three renderers: Chromium, WebKit, and Gecko. Every time a new browser is announced I see comments like:
Gameboy Emulator Progress
February 23rd, 2022
After a few weeks of work I’ve been able to get Tetris to boot and play. I can also run Dr Mario to enter the play screen but all of the pieces are hidden for some reason.
Starting a Gameboy Emulator
January 24th, 2022
A week or so ago I ran across a video called The Ultimate Gameboy Talk, and indeed it was. Inspired by the simplicity and elegance of the original Gameboy, I decided to try my hand at building an emulator. A week later I have this:
Roku IDK on Mac
November 20th, 2021
I have long loved my series of TV streaming Roku devices. The UI isn’t as fancy as the Apple TV, but it’s very stable, very responsive, and far easier to use than Apple’s insane remote. Historically the Roku SDK was really only targeted at streaming TV apps (which makes sense), but there wasn’t a way to write games or other high performance apps using anything but Roku’s own BrightScript SDK. However, about a month ago Roku announced the Independent Developer Kit that lets anyone build and side load apps onto their own Roku’s using C++ and OpenGL. I was thrilled but bummed that you have to run the SDK on Linux. However, it’s just some command line scripts, so maybe we could run it in a Docker container. After a little experimenation I figured out how. Let's dig in.
Make a Markdown Parser with OhmJS
July 16th, 2021
In many of my projects I need to parse something, usually a text based language. Sometimes it's inline docs. Sometimes it's a custom DSL for generating code. And sometimes it's markdown files. My goto tool for this type of work is OhmJS, an open source parser language for JavaScript based on PEGs.
IdealOS Mark 5
July 6th, 2021
After a few weeks long sprint I’ve got another build ready for Ideal OS. Visually it’s starting to come together nicely. Check it out.
IdealOS Mark 4
June 18th, 2021
It's been a whole lot of work to get to Mark 4 of Ideal OS. My real goal for this sprint was to have something that at least visually looks like a real operating system. What do you think?