| Various plans and projects - funding welcome |
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Saturday, May 27th, 2017 01:28:10 GMT |
| Software |
Last edited May 27, 2017 at 1:45 AM EDT.
For various reasons, I have wanted for years (actually, decades) to be able to move into my own place. But, my financial problems and health problems have so far made that impossible. (Or at least, not at all realistically feasible.)
Even just having enough money to realistically be able to move out would probably improve my situation dramatically - even if I ultimately decide to stay where I am to save money.
So, if anyone would like to help fund my possible move out to my own place, or any of my other plans or projects, donations and microdonations are welcome.
Been too stressed out to feel like dealing with (or even reading) a lot of my email, so, I probably won't respond to messages, and might not even check for a long time to see if I got any donations, because as long as I don't look, I can maintain my hope that maybe someone has financially rescued me and I just don't know it yet. :-)
So, please don't be worried if you don't get a reply for a long time. I will check my mail, etc. eventually when I'm feeling sufficiently better.
Thanks again to all you kind people out there. Because of you, I'm doing much better now than I otherwise would have been.
I still think my severe sleep issues are probably incurable, but, as long as I have sufficient energy for a good long while after I wake up, I don't mind being wide awake and energetic even at often unusual times. Fortunately, more and more lately, I've been able to feel that way despite (and surely partly because of) no caffeine.
For too much information on my health struggles, read this. :-)
So, I'd much rather just keep working on renovating my Puppy Linux Setup Kit (primarily), among other things.
That (and a lot else in my life) has gotten much easier lately, thanks to the wonderful concept mapping software VUE, which I forked and modified to make it more comfortable to use as my main note-taking tool.
And the magnificent GNU Emacs and multifiles-apmod.el continue to be very helpful.
So far, I still have only read part of The Art of Unix Programming by Eric S. Raymond. But that, and doing so much with Bash scripting since early 2016, and seeing even more clearly how naive the monolithic designs of many of my past projects were, have encouraged me to improve the overall architecture of my projects by splitting things up into smaller, more independent tools, rather than having so much stuff unnecessarily blobbed together.
I actually probably would have used PHP and HJSON if they were available at startup in most Puppy Linuxes, because PHP is still my favorite, most comfortable language, and you can do more with HJSON files than INI files, like put in values with multiple lines.
But, I don't know of any Puppy Linuxes which have PHP and HJSON built in, and it seems unreasonable to expect users (or even myself) to compile PHP from scratch (even with helpful scripts walking users through the process) every time they switch to a new Puppy, just so the users can get on with using the rest of the setup kit.
Bash is still definitely not my favorite language, but, it's a lot better and more capable of doing what I need than I originally thought.
Here's a cool blog post I ran across a while back which shows how object-oriented programming can be done in Bash!
Then I won't have to struggle to remember details like the rather complicated series of characters sometimes needed to refer to an array in Bash - "${array[@]}". Instead, I'll be able to just put only the array's name in a specially-decorated bubble. Then, my visual programming system will somehow know to wrap the array name with those mysterious hard to remember characters automatically when the VUE map is converted to Bash source code.
I suspect being able to rename things, hide clutter away, easily put nicely-styled comments and/or lolcat pictures wherever I want, and not have to type </> and quotes all the time, might make XSLT and XML code a lot more fun to read and easier to write, too.
But, instead, I ended up pondering and working on the renovated design for my Puppy Linux Setup Kit, and trying to see how far I could get with just .ini files and Bash scripts. Fortunately, pretty far.
Don't know how long it will take for me to finish, but, at the moment, I'm more interested in continuing with that than with returning to trying to build a visual programming system yet. I'm quite pleased with how the setup kit is evolving, despite (and probably also partly because of) the limited tools I'm restricting myself to.
It won't actually be a version control system, though, since it's not going to save old versions of files, and is mainly just going to deal with the repos as they currently are. One of its main jobs will be to make it easy to locate things by nickname rather than by their filepaths. That will be quite convenient, and make it so trying to reorganize my files won't cause as much chaos anymore.
Even though it will have a variety of shell commands, it's probably usually not going to require you to open a terminal window and type in commands. One of the top goals of my Puppy Linux Setup Kit is ease of use even for non-technical people, so, I want it to have plenty more GUI (graphical user interface) stuff than the previous versions did, and prettier terminal text with customizable colors.
Again, not sure how long it will take, since it probably will depend a lot on my future health and energy levels, which I'm not at all sure I can predict, though I seem to have been getting better lately.
Going to continue to encourage my improvement by reducing (and continuing to avoid) stress in various ways, eating better, exercising more, taking my vitamins, and doing various other life-improving things, like reading a lot, getting more organized, cleaning my room, and the rest of the house. And working on my programming projects - without overdoing it to the point where I neglect much of the rest of my life.
And, asking publicly for donations and microdonations, in addition to sometimes being truly helpful on a financial level, also enables me to indulge in the comforting, stress-reducing (and thus possibly health-boosting) fantasy that maybe someday someone (or many people) will, through their generosity, rescue me and my family from ever having to worry about money ever again.
And even much smaller amounts of money definitely helped tremendously. Thank you all!
I actually will probably end up staying here, but even if I do stay here, having more money will make things much better and might also help me get over my possible adrenal fatigue and possible PTSD faster.
I think I might actually be en route to becoming healthier (except for being older) than I ever was in the past, back when I was still a headachy caffeine addict who too often ate poorly (often just due to lack of interest in food - not always for lack of appealing food).
I still don't yet feel up to seeking work, such as freelance work at Upwork.com (formerly known as oDesk). I'm not yet sure if my recently improved energy is going to last or not, and I'm concerned that feeling obligated to get things done quickly and well might stress me out and thereby harm me more than the money from jobs might relieve my stress. I'd probably feel most comfortable doing very easy, relatively mindless stuff like transcription, but the pay for that is generally so low it's probably not worth the trouble it would be for me and the time it would waste.
So far, it's looking like the core of the renovated Puppy Linux Setup Kit might turn out to be .ini files and Bash shell scripts after all, rather than PHP or Perl and HJSON. (However, I have so many old-style Puppy Linux Setup Kit scripts that I'm definitely working on keeping them perfectly useable, with some slight improvements.)
I suspect I'll like Bash even more if or when I build a visual programming system using my modified version of VUE as the GUI (graphical user interface), and some separate PHP and XSLT scripts to convert VUE maps (which are in XML format) into source code in any programming language I want.
At first I intended to only update my Puppy Linux Setup Kit minimally in the old-fashioned way, with more scripts in the style of the released version of the setup kit, just so I could easily get back PHP, PHP-GTK, XSLT, etc. anytime I restart my computer.
The new design is actually reminiscent in some ways of version control systems like Mercurial and Git, because repos are one of the basic building blocks of my in-progress, unreleased, renovated Puppy Linux Setup Kit, and it's going to have shell commands like "apsk init" and "apsk commit". (APSK is short for Apollia's Puppy Setup Kit.)
Anyway, I'd rather just keep working on it than try to explain everything about it, since I'm still hazy myself on a lot of details. I'm trying to get it done as fast as I can, without messing it up by being overly hasty.