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» Keep It Simple Text (KIST)

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Minibook Publishing Tool
Books How_To Projects Technology 2026

I first encountered this delightful self-publishing format while visiting family in Sacramento. The city has many older neighborhoods with small houses and small yards. The locals take great pride in their sidewalk-facing gardens, including pro-social embellishments like little library boxes and such. One house had a dispenser with these little pamphlets. I was impressed and intrigued.
Baking Good Bread On Demand
Books How_To Projects Reviews 2026

I've been a novice bread baker over the years, specifically breads leavened with yeast. I've made bagels and pizza crusts from scratch. I have a pizza stone in my oven and a wooden peel for that purpose. My last big endeavor was using my bread machine to make no knead bread (based on the famous NY Times recipe) with some success. All of this pales by comparison with the Five Minute approach outlined in the book discussed here.
Sailing Kayak Mods & Camping
Boats Camping Everglades How_To Projects 2024

In 2018 I acquired a used Hobie Adventure Island sailing kayak. It came with trampolines that fit between the outriggers. As I learned the particulars of the craft it became obvious that getting out of the cockpit and sitting in/on the tramps wasn’t going to work for me. They also make it impossible to paddle the craft in any meaningful way.
BLIS (BLog It Simple)
Projects 2024

BLIS is an alternative to Wordpress and other database-dependent online publishing environments. One obvious problem with such systems is portability. They generally store text in a database—while media such as images are stored in nested directories by date. It can be daunting to put all these scattered parts back together again outside the original site. (I'm working on converting my WP materials now…it may take several months!)
Action Journaling (AJ)
Projects 2022

I developed this todo list format in 2016. It allows you to easily translate from paper to digital—and back again! This approach is compatible with other journaling formats such as KIST, Bullet Journaling and GTD.
Fire Ecology Simulator
Projects Video 2022

Fire is a necessary feature of many ecosystems. It helps clear out old growth and often prevents dominance by one or more climax species. Some plants even specialize to exploit the ecological opportunities created by fire. This simulator attempts to capture some of these dynamics.
Treehugger Hitch (or Tree-Hook Knot)
Camping How_To Projects 2023

This is an idea I’ve been incubating for some time as a non-destructive “place anywhere” alternative to nails in trees or breaking living branches to hang things on. The knots required are very simple. Shown here is my first successful field test! It is tied using a short stick or similar object found locally.
Notewell - Command Line Notetaker
Projects 2025

My take on Yet Another CLI Note Taking App. Moving from MacOS to Linux I'm in the process of moving some of my most important textual information from Apple Notes to… ?? This Perl script is my first attempt at a do-it-yourself solution.
BLIS User Guide & Technical Details
Projects 2024

Meta tag modsecs must be present to be considered an article. This should be the system time in seconds that the source file was lasted updated (as returned by the Perl time function or similar).
Wisdom in Space (Python/Mastodon Project)
Projects 2023

No regrets! Mastodon has been so much better! I decided to try my hand at creating an automated robot to post quotations alongside some of my photographs. And this is the result…
Self-Organizing Hypertext Notebooks (Jrju)
Medicine Medinfo Projects 1997

Jrju (Chinese for spider) is a Perl program that weaves hypertext 'notebooks' from plain text files. An author creates notebook pages using the JTX markup format. Jrju will process a directory of JTX files into a cross-linked collection of HTML pages. Jrju rebuilds the entire notebook each time so there are no broken links or orphan pages.
DIY Neck Strap Phone Holder
Commentary How_To Projects 2024

I've used two-part holster cases for my phone over the past ten years. Now that phones are nominally waterproof I converted one into a neck strap phone holder for sailing, kayaking, canoeing, etc. This is a vast improvement over the bag cases which protect the device from water (not needed) but degrade the camera (not acceptable).
Action Journaling (Tasks & Projects)
Projects 2022

AJ focuses on Action Items defined as discrete activities that can be performed, decided, or otherwise resolved (aka a todo list). This is the lowest level of organization—a shopping list for example. The higher level Task is to go shopping. The shopping list is an aid to complete this task. If you are planning a party with food and guests you must complete several tasks to ensure a successful event. Let's call this top level outcome a Project. As an outline it might appear something like this:
Hypertext before the World Wide Web (1988)
History Projects 1988

When I was a resident in 1988 I wrote a bit of software called HYTEXT—a hypertext publishing system for MS-DOS computers. I knew nothing about networks at the time, but I did create a markup language that anticipated HTML in many ways. I recently came across a paper copy of my original documentation and thought it would be a good idea to reproduce a few pages here for posterity. The original program and documentation are on 5.25 inch floppy discs that I have no way to read. But I found my 22 year old documentation file online! So the circle is complete.

This is a slide!