 The T2 Tile project is building an indefinitely scalable computational stack. Follow our progress here on T Tuesday updates. Our top stories this week is every week in the month of November at Nano Remo, the National Novel Month, Day 26. I'm committed to try to write a 50,000 word science fiction novel in the month of November called Best Effort. I'm not going to achieve it, but my word count as of yesterday was almost 27,000 words. I'm expecting to be at something like 30,000 words by the end of the month. This was my internal data. I made great progress last week. I had this great zooming up, wrote a couple of scenes involving my major characters, and then I kind of stalled. I was not making a whole lot of apparent gains in the word count here, but what was actually going on was I was realizing that the way I had my characters interacting with my technology, which is what connects it to living computation and the T2 Tile project, the idea of the micro-computer tone, that we are going to have computing machinery like the great, great, great grandson of the personal digital assistant, the smartphone, and so forth, that it's going to be hours alone, 100% dedicated to supporting us, to protecting us from the digital environments around us, and I'm trying to flesh that out in this story, and the way that they were interacting with it, it just wasn't really working. It didn't really make a lot of sense, and the little stories I was writing really wasn't taken advantage of the micro-computer tone, this technology that it was supposed to be there, so I needed to go back and rethink it and rethink how the technology when people were going to interface with it, and really I think the result of that is maybe better for the T2 Tile project as well, and I'll talk about that another week a little bit later after this stuff settles down, but the notion of, you know, everybody always wants to know what the killer app is for this technology, and what I really think is the killer app is this idea of the micro-computer tone, personal hardware dedicated to you, knows you, doesn't have, you don't have a password to talk to this hardware because this hardware is with you all the time, it knows where you are, it knows what you're doing, so you never have to authenticate to your micro-computer home. It's just like you never have to authenticate to your microbiome all the bacteria that lives inside you because they're living inside you, it's there continuously. Passwords are for reauthentication once you've separated, if you don't separate you don't need them, so that I think is a worthy update to how I'm thinking about the whole thing, but it didn't actually get me much word count. Yesterday I did have a jump up here and that was very suspicious because you don't see a lot of saves in the middle of that, that was because I tried the Google voice typing again and this time I actually managed to dictate a scene of like story words, I mean they're not great, but the plot moves on, things happen, people meet each other, well not, you know, computational agents meet each other, have chats and so forth, and a lot of that I think is usable, it needs to be tightened up and cleaned up and so forth, but once a scene actually goes somewhere, it feels okay, it feels tolerable, I mean all of this needs to be cleaned up later, so that was encouraging and at least it got me back up above my personal trend line which is like a thousand words a day, so that was where we're at currently, last week Nano Remo was telling me I was going to be done on December 16th at the rate I was going, this week it's telling me I'm going to be done on December 16th, which you know says I'm really kind of apparently settling in, so a thousand words a day is something that I can do if I really push, I'm not going to continue pushing at this level after the month of November because there's so much other stuff I want to look at, but so here's, well and you know here's my actual progress, that's what it looks like a thousand words a day, up down, up down and so forth, so that's Nano Remo. Here's my plan, the bucket list is not try to write a novel, the bucket list is finish a novel, so what I'm going to say is, you know, I don't know if I'm continue posting stats ever certainly not every, well I don't know on Nano Remo or whatever, it's not actually very hard to do now that I have all this technology set up locally, maybe I'll keep posting when updating with them and not I don't know, but I'm going to keep updating with you folks and so every week you want to hold me to 2,000 more words than the previous week, 2,000 words a week is should be a couple of days worth of work leaving, you know, many more days to do other stuff, so what done means is something, I'm not sure, but at least a big chunk of words something, you know, 150 pages or more, whatever it turns out to be, that comes to some kind of conclusion, if it's volume one let it be volume one and so forth, exactly how I surface that and get it out to the world, I don't know, I'm not sure, I mean, you know, should I be starting a Patreon that it seems like it's a, I don't know, it seems like it's not something I really want to do, but I admit that it is a way for people to get involved and it would be a way to have a closed circle that some of, or semi-closed circle, whatever, that some of this stuff could perhaps circulate in ahead of trying to find who knows what, you know, self-publish it, send it around to people who knows, we shall see. The bucket list item is to get stuff done and get it out there somehow, so we'll see. All right, and whoops, and okay, and what's going to happen once we can get back to actually working on stuff is a refresh of the software starting at the lowest level of the Linux system, the boot system and going back up to user space. So, you know, the current, you know, these are images that the Beagle board organization is currently distributing, so the one that really I would be supposed to be using is this stretch IoT, stretch internet of things based on DBN 9.9, blah, blah, blah, blah, that came out this summer and so forth. And just to put it in perspective, what the T2 tile is currently using is, so here are the older Debian images that you can still download if you want to use them, which is good, because I'm using them. So, where's the one that I'm using? No, it's not from the 9.5 2018, nope, nope, nope, nope, not it, nope, not it, nope, haven't got there. Yeah, here it is, Debian 8.7 from 2017, it's ancient. The problem is, is between the different versions of Linux that go into 8.7 and 9.9, a bunch of internal stuff changed in the Linux kernel, as often happens, and also the whole way of booting the relationship between the boot loader, the very lowest little bit of hardware on the Beaglebone greens and the way that Linux boots changed fundamentally as well. So, in order to do the refreshing, in order to get to it, it's going to take a significant redo. And in particular, let me get into this. The lowest level thing is called U-boot. And that is the stuff that controls the hardware first. And in the more recent versions of Linux, the thing called the device tree, which describes the hardware that's available, which used to be done in more in the Linux kernel itself in a kind of dynamically loaded way, which was kind of a terrible idea from the start, is no longer done in the Linux kernel in a dynamically loaded way. Instead, it's done by U-boot, the early booter that configures the hardware according to this device tree that describes what you've got. It makes a lot more sense, but it's not the way the stuff was set up when I first got this going again. So that all has to be redone. Then the Linux kernel itself has a whole bunch of changes as a result of that. And for the longest time, I was trying to avoid doing this. I was trying to say, let's just sprint with the old version, get it working, get the demo done, and start to use it at the higher level. The movable feast machine is not going to care about the lowest level stuff. It's going to care about the movable feast engine and performing events and doing intertile events. But as we saw, for example, this thing, SystemD, the program that controls how the Linux kernel boots up all its processes. It's been locking up on me in completely mysterious ways. And the answer is use a newer version of Linux. So we're going to address that. We're going to have to get SystemD working so that we get reliable booting, at least unless the hardware underneath it is actually unreliable. We're going to have to revisit the Linux kernel modules and then finally we can return to user space. So the goal for December is to check off as much of that as possible. In December 1, we want to download Debian 9.9, get it on to a new or new for this purpose T2 tile that is going to become the new key master and so forth and start building that process up and also just make that process a lot more robust so that when we get to be eventually having little mini SD, micro SD cards that we're trying to put the boot software, the original MFM T2 tile software on 150 tiles, it'll be fresh and reasonably solid. That's the plan for December. I'm eager to get back to work. Although, Nano Remo has been an extremely valuable experience for me. I think I can say that already, even though I don't have my bucket list item yet to check off. I'll stop here and I'll hope to see you next week. And I hope you'll be bugging me about how's the new version of Linux coming and have a good week if you're in the United States. Have a good Thanksgiving or whatever you're up to this week if you're around the world. Have a good week for you as well. Hope to see you next week.