Geir's Everything

Seven apps since the map

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A month ago I drew a map of everything I have built. It is already out of date. Seven apps have landed since. Six on the laptop, one on the phone.

I’m not standing still. Speed is crazy these days.

fleet

I run several Claude Code sessions at once. Which one has finished and waits for me? Which workspace is it on? How much context has it burned? fleet is my TUI app for that. Enter jumps to the session, and a new session opens on the workspace and with the background colour I set for it.

hl2web

When writing a HyperList I used to distribute it as a PDF or a screenshot. hl2web turns it into one HTML file: folding, search and the colours from my original hyperlist.vim. No frameworks, nothing but the html file. The first one I made was the TEG argument.

hl

I keep a lot of HyperLists. The question is often “where did I write that?”. hl has every list I have into one solution. hl --open shows every unchecked box across all of them. hl --tag teg, hl --ref "THEOREM" and hl --tree get hits that grep can’t get to. Monday morning in one screen.

beam

With a workspace pinned to the projector, its active tab is what the room sees. beam shows thumbnails of the windows parked there. I pick one, Enter, and the room sees it… while I keep typing on the laptop, with the keyboard where it was.

folio

I’ve used zathura for many years. I needed something even better. A PDF is two documents in one: the words, and the rendered page. Most readers show only the rendered page. folio shows either, or both side by side. z blows a scan up to the width of the terminal. e opens the .md or .tex beside the PDF, rebuilds on save and reloads the page. s searches every PDF I have indexed. y copies the text with file name and page number attached.

yank

CopyQ hung a helper process every time it fought my terminal over the clipboard. Its process swarm ate my X server’s (frame) selection slots. I wanted something simpler. yank records every copy and every mouse selection, woken only by frame when a selection changes. Mod4+v opens the history in a terminal window. Enter pastes the entry into the window I came from. No tray icon. No polling. Nothing running between copies.

fresh

On the phone: fresh lists the ten most recently installed apps, newest first. Tap to open, long-press to uninstall. I install a lot of apps to try them, and this is where I keep or ditch them easily.

Under the hood

Two new libraries carry shared plumbing: feed parses RSS and Atom, mail does the pure-logic parts of email. The desktop kastrup and the phone kastrup now share one implementation instead of earning the same bugs twice.

Summary

Seven apps in a month. The map keeps morphing.

Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/09/Since-The-Map.html

Harald V, King of Norway (1937-2026)

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by my good friend Trond Alexander Tune (Zander).

Our King died yesterday.

He represented Norway in a transition from the old and formal to the modern age. His warmth and inclusive mindset helped shape Norway to what it is today. He was funny and serious, down-to-earth and yet royal. He did most everything right.

He even died at the right time. Missteps by other members of the royal family had been weighing down the support for the monarchy in the population. I believe his death will wash away much of that corrosion.

A man of integrity and heart. I hope he will make further impact in his next time around.

Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/08/King-Harald.html

A map of itches scratched

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I started programming when I was 13. Basic, then lots of work in FOCAL on the HP-41 calculator, then OPL, Pascal, MCODE, Assembly, Visual Basic, Ruby, Fortran, Python, Forth and more obscure languages. Lately with the use of Claude Code it’s been a massive amount of Rust and Assembly.

I’m starting to lose track of it all, and being a somewhat visual guy, I decided to make a map of most of my programming projects. There are more fringe projects also, but here are the main ones: 146 programs. Seven shelves. In one map.

Click it for the full size. The arrows move, and they move the way they point.

What the shelves are

HP-41 is where the line starts. Programs, ROMs and the tools around them for a calculator from 1979, plus the other machines that came with it.

Ruby is the first shelf on a computer. Twenty-three gems, and ten of them have a descendant somewhere else on the map.

Fe₂O₃ is the Rust terminal suite as it stands: 30 apps, seven libraries and the four configurators, which sit in their own group because they configure something that is not Rust at all.

CHasm is that something. A shell, a terminal emulator, a window manager, a status bar, a pager, a font rasteriser, a screen locker, presenter tools and fifteen tiny status widgets. All of it in x86_64 assembly, with no libc.

nomad is the phone. Thirteen Android apps, most of them the desktop tool again in a different shape.

Simpler is a programming language small enough to hold in a prompt, and it compiles itself.

Simplicity OS is bare metal, where everything is a WORD. Inspired by Forth.

What the lines say

Three kinds.

Dotted amber: was rewritten as. rsh became rush became bare. The shell has been written three times: Ruby, Rust, assembly. Each one faster and smaller than the last.

rcurses became crust, RTFM became pointer, termpix became glow, termchart became plot, astropanel became astro. And xrpn, an HP-41 in Ruby, became rpnx.

Dashed blue: the same idea, other platform. Nine of them, all between Fe₂O₃ and the phone.

Solid grey: uses. The libraries and the four configurators, each reaching across to the assembly tool it sets up.

The shape of it

Nothing on this map was planned as a map. Every one of those programs was an itch that I scratched. The pattern only shows up afterwards: the same tools keep getting rebuilt, one layer closer to the metal, and the ideas keep crossing to whatever machine is in my hand.

That is decades of scratching, in one screen.

Summary

The map is drawn by a small program, so it can be redrawn whenever a shelf grows. The logos come straight from the app repos. Shape says what a thing is, colour says what it is for, and the arrows say where it came from.

Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/08/Map.html

Pictures out of text

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Been doing digital art since the mid-90s. Since I am living in the terminal, I decided to improve the ascii part of image displays. Usually I get images to show inline in the terminal via the kitty protocol, but now and then I am on a server via ssh and still want to see some images - or at least what they look like. Hence an update to my graphics engine.

Kitty on the left is the real thing: actual pixels, handed to the terminal through the graphics protocol. The other two are text. Every cell is a character with a colour on it.

The middle one is new

glow is the suite’s image library. It has always had a text fallback for terminals with no graphics protocol. That fallback was poor. It lit a braille dot wherever a pixel came out darker than a fixed threshold, and everything in between was lost. A bright photo came out empty, a dark one solid.

Now it draws half blocks. A cell gets ▀, the foreground colour painting the top half and the background the bottom, so every cell carries two full-colour pixels. A cell is about twice as tall as it is wide, so both come out square.

Two more things came along with it.

The braille renderer dithers. A dot lights when its own value clears an ordered threshold. How many light up inside a cell now tracks the brightness there. Flat grey gives four dots of eight, where the old cut gave none or all.

Scaling happens in linear light. Average sRGB bytes directly and every shrunken picture comes out too dark. Half black and half white gives 128, where the real answer is 188. glow converts to linear, averages the source rectangle each output pixel covers, and converts back.

No external program needed. PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, BMP and TIFF are decoded in-process. ImageMagick is only there for the formats the Rust decoder cannot read.

Which one wins

That depends on the picture.

The lighthouse at the top is all gradient. Half blocks keep the glow around the sun smooth. chafa breaks it into steps and lays horizontal streaks across the water.

Now a picture made of nothing but fine structure:

Here chafa wins. It picks from a wide set of glyphs, so a cell can hold a corner or an edge, and the lattice survives. Half blocks have one shape to work with and the detail turns to mush.

Gradients to the blocks, fine structure to the glyphs.

The five second mystery

chafa also looked unusable. Five and a half seconds for one picture, every time. The same command piped to a file took a third of a second.

It was waiting. chafa asks the terminal what it can do and waits up to five seconds for an answer. glass, my terminal, never answers, so chafa sat out the full timeout on every image.

One flag. --probe off, since glow has already decided what it wants:

	lighthouse, 4000x3000	fractal, 1920x1080
kitty protocol	27 ms	101 ms
glow, half blocks	221 ms	59 ms
chafa, before	5356 ms	5072 ms
chafa, after	358 ms	63 ms

The kitty numbers move around because glow caches the scaled image on disk, and the lighthouse was already in there. The text renderers cache nothing.

Try it

imgcompare puts any picture in three panels and times each one.

git clone https://github.com/isene/glow
cd glow && cargo run --release --example imgcompare -- photo.jpg

Summary

Built with Claude. Eight tests cover the light tables, the linear-light average, the alpha weighting and the dither staircase. “The picture looks about right” is not a test.

The lesson I keep relearning: measure the thing where it runs. Piped to a file, chafa looked fine.

Public Domain, like everything I make.

glow

Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/07/Pictures-Out-Of-Text.html

Three more science apps

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve always been drawn to the really big and the really small. From astrophysics and cosmology to particle physics and quantum mechanics.

I am fascinated about what happens at the edges of reality. I started wondering about the elements beyond 120 when I was a little boy and the structure of those nuclei and their break-downs. I read frontier articles on astronomy and wondered what a 6-star system would be like. The books and the series 3-body-problem explore that. Then the exoplanets started cropping up, then pouring in. I’ve been following that frontier ever since.

It’s also interesting to zoom in and out in mathematics, so fractals caught my eye.

So, here we are; Three more TUI apps in the science category.

isotopes

The chart of the nuclides. Neutrons run across, protons up, one cell per nuclide, 3,386 of them. The valley of stability is not drawn in. It falls out of the data, the way the main sequence falls out of an HR diagram.

Colour by decay mode and the chart sorts itself. White down the middle where the stable ones sit. Blue below for the neutron-rich, red above for the proton-rich, gold at the heavy end where alpha takes over.

Five colour modes in all. Half-life over 26 decades. Binding energy, where the iron peak is right there in the middle. Natural abundance. The year each one was first reported, which fills the chart outward over a century.

Press Enter on uranium-238.

Fourteen steps down to lead-206, every half-life on the way, from 4.468 billion years to 164 microseconds. A chain follows the dominant mode only. Bi-214 splits 99.979 to 0.021 and it takes the big side, but the detail line shows every branch.

The data is the IAEA’s evaluated table: half-lives, decay modes with their branchings, spin and parity, binding energy, mass excess. It ships inside the binary. Press z for all 3,386 at once in braille, eight nuclides per character.

elements knows about it too. Press i on any element and the chart opens on that element’s isotopes.

exoplanets

Every known world outside the solar system. How far out it orbits runs across, how big it is runs up, 6,309 of them.

Our own eight are in white for scale, and once you see where they sit the rest of the picture reads itself. Jupiter is out at 5 AU with almost nothing around it. The blue pileup at the top left is hot Jupiters, gas giants closer to their star than Mercury is to ours. Orange is the wobble method, which finds the heavy ones far out. Green at the right edge is direct imaging.

The gap at 1.8 Earth radii is real. Planets avoid it.

Press Enter and the system unfolds.

TRAPPIST-1, seven planets around a red dwarf, all of them closer in than Mercury. The green band is where water could stay liquid on a rocky world, worked out from the star’s size and temperature. For that star it lands between 0.0225 and 0.0324 AU, and e sits in it.

Numbers from the NASA Exoplanet Archive. 747 of the orbits came with only a period or only a distance. The app fills in the other with Kepler’s third law and marks it. Without that the microlensing finds would have nowhere to stand.

fractal

Five pictures of one idea: repeat something simple, and watch what it settles into.

If you want the gentle version first: 3Blue1Brown on what a fractal actually is, and Numberphile on the Mandelbrot set.

The Mandelbrot set, in braille. Arrows pan, + and - zoom, and the iteration count climbs as you go deeper. Press J and the point you are standing on becomes the c of its own Julia set. Press J again and you are back where you were.

A braille cell is 2x4 dots and one colour, which is a choice. The dots carry eight times the detail, the colour only one value per cell. So the dots are dithered. How many light up inside a cell tracks the value there, and the colour is that cell’s average. Fine structure in the dots, broad shape in the colour.

The logistic map. One fixed point, then two, then four, then chaos, with windows of order inside it. δ = 4.669199 and the r = 3.569946 where the doubling gives way are computed while the app runs, not looked up. It hunts the superstable cycles and measures the gaps. Veritasium made a whole film about this one picture.

Then the Lorenz attractor with ρ on a knob, and the Hénon map, 300,000 points folded onto a fractal.

Summary

Three apps, built with Claude. Same rules as the rest of the suite: a single static binary, instant start, everything offline, zero cost when idle. Nothing animates and nothing polls. A frame is drawn when a key asks for one.

Press c in any of them and ask Claude about whatever is on screen, with the numbers as context.

Public Domain, like everything I make.

The science shelf

Seven apps now, covering some 36 orders of magnitude. From a quark, smaller than an attometre, out to a star 500 light-years away.

astro: the sky tonight, the moon, the planets, your telescope
stars: the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram
particles: the Standard Model, down to one quark
elements: the periodic table
isotopes: the chart of the nuclides
exoplanets: the known worlds
fractal: chaos and fractals

All of them are in the fe2o3 launcher, which will install them for you.

Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/07/Three-More-Science-Apps.html

The sky, drawn in braille

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I love our sky. I love the terminal. Now they fuse.

My astro app has always shown a star chart for the hour I pick. It fetched it from a website, as a picture, one per hour, converted through ImageMagick and cached on disk.

Now it draws its own… in braille.

What it draws

9,096 stars from the Yale Bright Star Catalogue, and the constellation figures. The sun, moon and planets where they actually are for that hour. Zenith at the centre, horizon at the rim, north up and east to the left.

Every star wears its own colour, worked out from its B-V index. Braille cells carry a 2x4 dot matrix, and those dots come out close to square. So the sky is round without any fudging.

It sits in the main pane and follows the hour selected on the left. Press s and it takes the whole screen, where ← and → walk the night an hour at a time. The left pane follows along.

Details

The faintest star it plots comes from the Bortle number in the config. Bortle 4 gives magnitude 6.4, Bortle 9 gives 4.0. A city sky draws a city sky.

The chart also scales to the room it has. Two thousand stars in a pane fifteen rows high is one solid block of braille. Star counts run about half a magnitude per factor of ten… invert that, fill a tenth of the dots, and the pattern comes back.

The moon covers 13 degrees of sky in a day. Positions had to move to the hour, not the day, or it lands a handful of moon widths off.

Summary

Built with Claude in a couple of hours. The sky drawn in astro needs no network, no image protocol, no cache. Just arithmetic over two tables in the binary. One frame takes 2 ms, and between keypresses it does nothing at all.

Public Domain, like everything I make.

astro

Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/07/The-Sky-Drawn-In-Braille.html

A rusty front door

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Two days ago I posted five new tools. Yesterday two more. That puts 27 apps in the Fe₂O₃ suite, and I am starting to lose sight of all the wonderful apps. So the suite got a front door, simply called fe2o3.

The grid

Every app as a card: its logo, what it is, one line on why. Arrow keys move. Enter runs it in the same terminal, and when you quit you are back on the grid. ? pops up that app’s own help, w opens its repo, / filters.

Six groups, each with its own tint; daily drivers, desk, science, media, play, system. Plus the retired shelf, where rush and crush now sit.

It installs, too

Grab this one binary and it fetches the rest.

i downloads the app under the cursor from its latest release. I downloads every missing one on screen. Solid frame and a green tick means you have it. Dashed frame and an amber down-arrow means it’s one keypress away.

You can take the launcher, walk the grid, and pick up only what you fancy.

Binaries land in ~/bin, or ~/.local/bin if you have no ~/bin.

Summary

Built with Claude in an evening. One static binary, logos baked in. It does one blocking read on stdin and nothing else while it waits, like the rest of the suite.

curl -L "https://github.com/isene/fe2o3/releases/latest/download/fe2o3-linux-x86_64" \
  -o ~/bin/fe2o3 && chmod +x ~/bin/fe2o3
fe2o3

Then press I for all of it, or i for the one you want.

Public Domain, like everything I make.

fe2o3

Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/07/A-Rusty-Front-Door.html

Stars and particles

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I posted five new tools. Today there are two more, and they are both science.

My mother got me going when I was 8. She pointed to the sky just above the apartment building where we lived (Tveita, Oslo) and said, “Do you see those three stars up there? That’s the belt of Orion”. I was hooked. Four years later I was hanging out at Oslo University bugging professors in astrophysics with questions about the cosmos. Then I got into particle physics and started pestering professors at the physics campus as well.

Together the two new apps cover about 36 orders of magnitude. Betelgeuse is 500 light-years out. A quark is smaller than an attometre. Both fit in a terminal.

stars

The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. Temperature across, luminosity up. Stars land where their physics puts them, and the shape that falls out of that is the main sequence, running diagonally from the hot blue stars down to the cool red dwarfs.

461 named stars from the HYG catalog. Walk the diagram cell by cell with the arrow keys. Several stars often share one cell, so Tab cycles them and Enter lists them all. Each one brings its numbers and its full Wikipedia article, cached locally.

Press t and a schematic evolutionary track is laid over the plot: 1, 5 or 15 solar masses, with every stage named below. Up the giant branch, back across the top at constant brightness while the core burns out, then down and left onto the white dwarf cooling track. The one solar mass track is the Sun’s future.

Measured values come from Wikidata. The rest are derived from spectral type and absolute magnitude, and one color mode paints the diagram by which is which.

particles

The Standard Model. Seventeen fundamental particles, three generations of quarks and leptons, the four force carriers, the Higgs, plus the proton and neutron they build.

Mass, charge, spin, color charge, which of the four forces it feels, its antiparticle, the year it was found. The neutrinos only have upper limits.

Then press Tab and it takes a carbon atom apart. Four levels, each labelled with its real size. The atom, almost entirely empty. The nucleus, six protons and six neutrons. One proton. One quark.

That is a proton: three valence quarks, red, green and blue, held by gluon flux tubes, in a haze of virtual pairs. The quarks account for about 1% of its mass. The rest is the energy of the field itself.

One level down you try to pull a quark out. The string stretches, stores energy, and snaps into a new quark-antiquark pair. You end up holding two mesons. You never get a free quark.

It rotates with the arrow keys. There is no animation loop, so a still model costs nothing. Drawn in braille, eight sub-pixels per character cell.

Summary

Two apps, both built today with Claude. “particles” was an Opus 5 one-shot from a rather slim prompt (but with knowledge drawn from “stars” and “elements”). Same rules as the rest of the suite: a single static binary, instant start, zero cost when idle.

Both fetch once and then work offline. Press c and ask Claude about whatever is on screen, with the data and the article as context.

Public Domain, like everything I make.

Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/07/Stars-And-Particles.html

Five new Rust tools

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I keep building the tools I use. I know, the world doesn’t need another calculator, but I do. My Fe₂O₃ suite of Rust terminal tools has swallowed almost everything I run in a day. Over the last five weeks it got five new members.

I have an itch. I scratch. Or I get an urge, and by evening it was a binary in ~/bin.

elements

The periodic table in the terminal. All 118 of them, plus the hypothesized ones out to 126 that nobody has made yet. Move with the arrow keys. Every element brings its full Wikipedia article, cached locally. No browser, no network, snappy.

The colors are the fun part. Eight modes recolor the whole table: category, phase, block, electronegativity, melting point, density. My favourite is cosmic origin, which paints each element by how it came into existence. Hydrogen and helium from the Big Bang. Carbon and lead from dying stars. Gold and platinum from neutron stars colliding. The heavy end made by us. You can see the history of the universe in one screen of colored squares.

Press c and you get Claude in the pane, with that element’s data and article as context. I asked why Osmium is so dense and got lanthanide contraction, relativistic orbitals and hexagonal packing… a better answer than I would have found on my own.

rpnx

The HP-41 grabbed me when I was a young teen and just wouldn’t let go. Reverse Polish Notation has no = and no parentheses. You push values on a stack and the operators act on what is there. Once that is in your fingers, everything else feels like extra typing… no parenthesis and you see every intermediate result.

The X/Y/Z/T stack, Last X, the full math, trig, log, stats and base-conversion set. It also runs XRPN programs, so my old HP-41 FOCAL code still executes. The calculation engine is a shared crate. The terminal version and the one on my phone give identical answers.

typo

A touch typing tutor. It’s idiotic that I still can’t touch type at the age of 59. This app is long overdue for me. Eight lessons, home row to full sentences. Strict mode, live WPM and accuracy, personal bests. It knows the US and Norwegian layouts. Here æ, ø and å get their own drills.

Strict means the drill does not move until you hit the right key. No skipping ahead, no fudging the numbers. Typing is the one interface I use for everything, so it needs sharpening.

melody

A piano roll in the terminal. Put notes down, jam freely on the keyboard, or record against a metronome. What you play is quantized to the grid. Then tweak each note’s pitch, length and strength until the line sits right.

It exports a clean WAV, which is the whole point. I sketch a melody here and hand it to something bigger to build a real track around. No audio library. Notes are synthesised to raw PCM and streamed to whatever player is on the system. The WAV file is written by hand. The sound device only wakes when something actually plays.

fonts

A font picker that shows you the actual font, in your terminal. Every family on the system, rendered in its own typeface as you move down the list.

It exists because I was tired of running xfontsel or guessing from names. It hands back the family and point size. My editor scribe calls it as a picker, the way it calls prism for colors. The preview in that screenshot is the Amar font Claude made for my role-playing world.

Summary

Five tools, five weeks, all built with Claude in the evenings. Each is a single static binary. It starts instantly and burns nothing while it waits. That is the rule the whole suite obeys: when idle, it does NOTHING. No timers, no polling, no wakeups.

All of it is Public Domain, like everything I make. Take it, fork it, or ignore it.

Software built for everyone fits everyone a little. This fits one person exactly. That person can be you too, if you build your own.

Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/07/Five-New-Rust-Tools.html

A font for Amar

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For a couple of years I have used one task as my litmus test for AI models: Create a fantasy font suitable for the Kingdom of Amar, my role-playing world. I want a TTF file I can install and write with. Every model has failed. Say hello to Fable.

Why is this hard? A font is pure geometry. The model must place every point of every letter by numbers, blind. It cannot look at what it draws. If the leg of the R lands wrong, the R is broken. And a font is a hundred glyphs that must also look like family.

Here is what Opus 4.7 delivered in December:

There is no font here. It painted a PICTURE of an alphabet and declared victory. The S is in two pieces, the small r lost its arm, the 3 and the 5 fell apart. Opus 4.8 was not much better.

Today I handed the same task to Claude Fable 5. It read up on the Amar world and picked a chisel-cut style, like letters carved in stone. Then he wrote a program that outputs a real TTF, rendered a specimen sheet, looked at his own work and fixed what he did not like. Then he installed the font on my machine and showed me this:

Runes with diamond accents. Every letter solid, consistent and readable. This is an actual font. But straight strokes are the easy part of type design, so I raised the bar: make me a more Celtic one, one that is even more suitable to the Kingdom of Amar.

Minutes later I had an uncial font in the style of the Book of Kells. Curved strokes drawn with a simulated broad-nib pen. Thick verticals, thin horizontals, wedge serifs. Even the old insular letterforms are there; the g is the flat-topped squiggle the monks actually wrote:

Both fonts are Public Domain, like everything I make. My litmus test finally has a passing grade. Now I need a new test.

Got any ideas?

Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/07/A-Font-For-Amar.html