In March 2023 we got our hands on a solar evacuated tube, which is an all-glass double-tube co-axial structure originally designed for heating water from solar, typically installed on the rooftops of houses. These tubes can harness the sun's energy to heat bath water, but they can also be useful to heat and cook food.
In short, solar evacuated tubes are like a well-designed thermos, in which he...
2023-05-13 16:01:51 +0000 UTC View Post
For the past two months, we've spent time porting Oquonie for its 10th year anniversary, and 4 years after iOS updates broke it beyond repair.
It has been rewritten to target a virtual machine, which should(hopefully) help us keeping it playable. In the next few days, we'll release a document that explains how to write an emulator to run the game.
get game: https://hundredrabbits.itch.io/oquonie
get ...
For the past 3 winters, Devine & I have agonized over the fact that Oquonie was still reliant on Electron.
Every year we'd ask ourselves if it was possible to re-write it, and to re-build it without any dependencies. Uxn is still very new to us, it took some time to learn enough to gather up the skills and confidence to attempt a more complex project like Oquonie. For a while, we weren't ...
Devine attended Handmade Seattle 2022 and gave a talk called Weathering Software Winter. The talk was recorded and uploaded on both Vimeo (above video) and Twitch.
The video is a recording of all the talks of the first day of the confe...
Hey everyone,
We are currently anchored in Lyall Harbour off Saturna Island in British Columbia, Canada.
We've been getting a lot of emails because we haven't sent the newsletter for the past 2 months. The newsletter isn't cancelled. The reason it was not sent out was because our internet has been very terrible, all summer long.
We have continued to push updates on our
2022-08-30 15:52:35 +0000 UTC
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Busy Doing Nothing is now available on paperback!
The book is distributed by Lulu. They work with printers all over the world, so that most copies are produced locally and travel relatively short distances. It is the same service employed by 2021-12-05 17:23:46 +0000 UTC View Post
Our little kana study game is out!
The project was a trial to see if we could design, write and assemble a project entirely within the Uxn computer. It was also a way to fully test Nasu, our sprite sheet editor. In all, it was a success!
Try Ni...
2021-08-27 16:23:37 +0000 UTC View PostMany years ago, we released a hiragana/katakana review application called Nijuniju.
This app then became Alphavetist when we introduced more languages, like Hebrew, Cyrillic, Korean, Inuktitut, Greek and Morse.
WIP of Nijuniju.
We are reviving it for 2021-06-22 16:20:42 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey everyone!
We're happy to announce that we're working on a C version of Left, the straggler of the gang. It's not done yet, we need to implement insert mode, and sort out a few remaining bugs.
Our tiny collection of graphical tools is growing. We wrote 2021-02-02 20:16:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Our highlights of 2020:
- Sailed from Japan to Canada for 7 weeks.
- Released Nasu, Moogle, 2021-01-01 21:00:23 +0000 UTC
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Hey everyone!
Pino and crew are doing well. We are in Victoria still, working on new tools, and doing some improvements to our floating home.
Noton
This month, we launched Noton, a live-drawing playground. Noton works by drawing cables between time...
2020-12-02 19:01:39 +0000 UTC View PostThis month, we've been busy with our new boat garden, centered around mini-crops of sprouts. After reading Sailing the Farm by Kenneth Neumeyer, we started growing lentil and fenugreek microgreens.
Sprouting and growing microgreens is a good way to have a stable and nutrient-rich source of fresh foods, for both sailors and land dwellers. Seeds keep for a long time (if stored well), and are inexpensive when purchased in bulk.&n...
Hey everyone!
This is the changes we've done to our projects and apps during the month of September.
This month we focused our work on Nasu and Donsol.
There it is, the last video of our Pacific circumnavigation.
The video isn't as detailed as our written transcript, but it offers some moving images of the things we mention in it. We don't have much footage of the transit, as we had a lot of rough ocean, and we tend not to film in such conditions.
What's next for us? Well, we're going to stay put for the winter. Pino needs a good l...
2020-09-15 23:44:57 +0000 UTC View Post
This is the first time we release a video of a time we didn't just experience, this happened in May 2020. Editing this video was strange for that reason, but we were able to slip back into the moment with ease. I've got such vivid memories of that time.
During that month, we were both nervous because of our imminent departure from Japan, this and trying to get the boat ocean-ready while constantly checking the news to see if Japan eased restrictions on travel because of covid. Uncertain...
2020-08-26 03:08:29 +0000 UTC View Post
We're getting used to living near land again, returning to our old habits. We had some computer issues, which slowed things a bit, but they've been largely resolved. Today, we're resuming work on the physical release of Donsol.
Above is a prototype of the cart label with the final art. We hope you like it! We still have sounds left to do, then we'll work at producing a physical copy of the game. This wil...
2020-08-24 03:00:37 +0000 UTC View Post
While crossing from Shimoda, JP to Victoria CA, we kept a logbook. I would write the happenings of the day. It is long, as I poured much of my mind into it, it kept me sane on this difficult journey.
You can read it here, on our blog: North Pacific Logbook.
We'll release more daily. I have about a week and half left to transcribe. Be warned, some of this might be distressing to some people. 2020-08-05 18:34:25 +0000 UTC View Post
After 7 weeks at sea non-stop, we have sailed 8000 km from Shimoda, Japan to Victoria, Canada -- Effectively completing a 4 years circumnavigation of the Pacific Ocean.
We kept a journal of the trip and are currently transcribing it, we'll release the entire thing for you all to read soon!
We are under quarantine for 14 days right now, as is the rule for new arrivals into the country, and have limited access to land and internet. When we get out of arrival limbo, we'll...
2020-07-31 22:57:41 +0000 UTC View Post
Many things happened since we last posted on here.
Pino stretched its wings and flew to a new perch in 下田市 Shimoda. This place with its iconic green hills is the real-world inspiration for Pallet Town in Pokemon, and the place where Commodore Perry landed and opened Japan up to American trade.
Shimoda is also our last port in Japan. We have been here for a few days, waiting f...
2020-06-08 00:41:58 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey everyone!
Rekka wrote a guide on living off-the-grid for Noonsite, we thought we'd share it here too!
Enjoy,
Rek & Dev
Living off-grid
People chose to live off-grid for self-sufficience, resilience, or ecological reasons. For us, to live off-grid, is most of all letting go of the numbing culture of convenience. Whe...
Our boat broke the marina's lift. It's okay Pino, it wasn't your fault, the system was over 40 years old and was going to break at some point. It was bad luck to be on it, but that's life?
For now we are staying still, waiting for the marina worker's to fix the lift. It's fine anyway, because we can't travel within Japan because of covid-19.
We've got many projects to occupy our minds and bodies. Pino needs attention and we are working at completing the work on the
2020-04-10 05:27:54 +0000 UTC
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Hello friends,
We hosted a game jam last weekend gathering a few devs and artists interested in learning Hypercard. It was very successful. The jam ended with 25 entries.
Hyperjam entries had to be interactive, in black and white and 5 minutes long(max).
Following these restrictions, we collaborated to create a little cooking game named 2020-04-07 17:01:01 +0000 UTC View Post
After a brief hiatus, we're back to making these again.
We're especially pleased with this video, because it was our first time composing, illustrating and editing a video entirely on Linux.
Keep an eye out for the plump squirrel.
Hope you like it!
Rek & Dev
SY Pino
We are back in Japan!
Pino is safe, we are happy. We enjoyed our time in Canada. Leaving family and friends is always hard, but at least, we know we'll be seeing them again soon, because we'll be returning to the Pacific Northwest this year! Wow. It feels weird to say that.
We've been working non-stop to make Pino comfortable to live in again. There were no major problems, but we had a lot of sorting and cleaning to do. We have a haul-out scheduled for next week, we'll be re-do...
Today we released Nasu, our spritesheet and nametable editor. We created it to design and assemble the assets of our future famicon games. It can import and export both .chr spritesheets and .asm nametables.
The tool is available to download on itch.io.
Whenever we release new tools, we ...
In 2019, we achieved our dream of sailing to Japan. We released a handful of free and open-source software that grew to considerable popularity, and ended the year by giving a talk at XOXO in Portland. We travelled back to Canada for the holidays, to spend time with family, and to figure out what we wanted to do next.
Our plan for 2020 is to keep sailing, to make our way north and up...
2020-01-06 18:57:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello everyone!
We just released part 2 of 3 of the Orca Workshop at Foulab. You can follow along with this tutorial.
This second video is about other operators. The third (and last) video will be released very soon!
2019-11-10 19:09:56 +0000 UTC
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Hello everyone!
We finally put together the video for the Orca Workshop! This is a recording of the event at Foulab in Montreal on October 25th.
This is one of 3 videos, the other 2 will be uploaded shortly. It was a long recording, lasting about 1h45 minutes. This first video is about some of the basic operators and on setting up.
You can follow along with 2019-11-07 14:21:34 +0000 UTC
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We hosted an Orca workshop last night, the turn out was amazing! Thank you all for coming, we had a lot of fun!
We'd also like to thank Foulab for welcoming us in their space!
We will put a video together for you guys to see very soon. In the meantime, here are more photos from last night:
2019-10-26 22:37:31 +0000 UTC
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We're taking the month off, so that means, no video for the first time in 4 years. So instead, we're happy to share with you our talk from XOXO 2019!
It covers some of our ideas and the challenges we faced.
We hope you enjoy it!
2019-10-10 20:14:40 +0000 UTC View Post