Hi,

Thanks for visiting "down here"; I have many interests, but don't ever seem to take time to create a full-blown personal web page. When I do find time, I'll probably write about:

• My suite of micro web services, Chore. (A bunch of related source is on sources.vsta.org
• My ham radio setup
• My old microkernel operating system VSTa
• My work on the embedded operating system ForthOS
• We cook with cast iron, and I wrote up Lessons Learned
• I host a fun little bubble shooting web game. Size your browser window pretty narrow, then go to: Bubble Shoot. The source is here.
• An interesting parallel cpu
• I also hacked on a Tetris program for UNIX; you can download the (ANSI, POSIX, C) source code here
• Tim Budd wrote a really cool Little Smalltalk which I enhanced with stuff like a symbolic debugger and other fixes. You can grab a copy here
• I don't use Google/Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Snapchat services. I wrote this paper on what I use instead.

In the meantime, let me attach a couple links:

Traveller is my personal solution for the spam problem. Both me and my wife have been living with it for many years now.

I live in the Puget Sound, and sometimes depend on the Washington State Ferries. I have a dynamic page which pulls their remaining sailings for the boats I depend upon. It's right here.

My design for a 64-bit Forth engine.

Fred on Everything is a web columnist I enjoy reading very much. In a somewhat related vein, I also listen to the No Agenda Podcast. I make it available via a Peer to Peer network at No Agenda Torrents.

I wrote a CLI based PIM in Python. Compact and powerful, and works in the classic UNIX fashion. I call it myPIM and you can download the project page.

Even if you don't want the PIM, if you deal with calendar dates you might want the xcal.py module within that source. It's a port of FreeBSD's libcalendar, written by Wolfgang Helbig, and handles a much wider range of dates than Python's "time" module.

Larry Wall is famous for creating the programming language perl. But did you know that a long, long time ago he wrote a really cool ASCII game named "warp"? I resurrected it and made it work right on Linux with modern console speeds. If you're interested, please grab the source for Warp8.

I needed an efficient way to directly feed a PostScript file to a PostScript printer (my system's CUPS printing subsystem took forever to needlessly grind on the files). I found a simple script lpr.py which I tidied up. It'll directly feed a PS file to a network-attached PS printer, which might save you a *lot* of time. If you link the command to lpq.py and run it under that name, it'll also query the print queue of a PS printer.

Back before Yahoo's implosion reached their discussion groups, I ran groups concerning the Commodore SuperPET, the Goldoni walk behind tractor, the Gizmo three-wheeled EV, the SeaForth CPU, and the imported Chinese tractor "Foton FT404".

The Gizmo is an electric motorcycle, and the SuperPET is a funky old 6809 microcomputer made by Commodore a long, long time ago. The SEAforth is a cool microprocessor with 24 parallel CPUs running inside. The Nortrac 40XT is the main work tractor at our home.

I dug up a really good essay written a long time ago after I saw a billboard which asked "What is the difference between a democracy and a constitutional republic?". I think it does an excellent job of explaining this.

Don't build in King County.
We built a small passive solar house in King County. It was a brutal experience because of the building department. Here is a writeup I did, which I hope might help others thinking about building here.

The Propeller is a multiprocessor CPU. The company is completely awesome (the President himself wrote code to bit-bang both RS-232 and VGA video!), and they've made the CPU one of the most open in the industry. There's Verilog source for the processor, and they've converted their Spin programming language to C and provided an open source implementation of it. It doesn't include a loader, but Remy Blank wrote a loader in Python years ago, but the source is hard to dig up. I'm serving a copy here.

I did some custom ANSI terminal emulation software for the Propeller: ajvTerm

Georgie Sheldon (a pen name) wrote many books, all now public domain. Project Gutenberg has a fair selection, including Virgie's Inheritance. Strangely, this is a two-part story, and the part supplied by Gutenberg leaves the story hanging! It bothered me enough that I bought a copy of the second part, scanned it in, and corrected it. Project Gutenberg turns out to be quite a beast to try and work with, but even without them you can still help yourself to a copy of Threads Gathered Up. I hope you enjoy the conclusion to the story!

Oh, epub seems like the easiest to use these days; it's available in epub format here.

I wrote some fanfic based on the old TV series Probe. It's a post-apocalyptic romp through the Probe universe. Here it is as an epub. Or you can read it (and comment) via Archive of Our Own.

Speaking of writing, Scott Adams wrote a little gem on the subject.

For many years I was reached via vandys@zendo.com, vandys@vsta.org, or vandys@cisco.com. Due to the spam problem, none of these addresses work any more; please see my contact form if you do not have a current address for me and would like to reach me. I look forward to hearing from you, unless you're a spammer.

If you're looking for a social networking sort of thing, I'm on Mastodon, and run my own instance.