04-18-2023 - Tax day roundup
====

Tax day -- in America, at least. ...and that is as much as I'm going
to say about taxes, actually.  Today will just be a roundup of items
I've been meaning to commit to the phlog for a while.  In fact, I've
got these nice, little notes tacked up on my corkboard with each of
these great ideas for phlog posts...  In an effort to clear this
backlog, I'll just touch on each of these items briefly, and if any
of them are deemed worthy of deeper exposition, I'll revisit them.

## "ppc64 Gentoo details"

This note suggests that I get into all of the details of setting up
Gentoo on my PowerMac G5.  Long story short -- some assembly is
required, and arriving at a functional kernel / rootfs was a real
challenge.  In the end, as I am authoring this post from this box, it
turned out to be pretty worthwhile.  Highlights of this journey
include:
 - revisiting distcc
 - using crosstool-ng to build Gentoo-compatible PowerPC toolchains
 - building distcc cluster of heterogenous nodes -- each one easily
    / likely more powerful than the G5 ;)
 - WindowMaker desktop
 - build of 'st' terminal using JetBrains Mono font -- the result is a
    beautiful, modern terminal experience!
 - lots of leaning into cli tools/apps wherever possible/necessary

## "kbd details"

I've been working on a couple of new chocv builds, but am awaiting a
few remaining parts.  Will post more when I can wrap these up.

## "Gopher for file storage"

Gopher is so perfectly suited to host a repository of retrocomputing
files!  Building out my gopher site has been remarkably practical --
as even some of my oldest machines have great gopher clients.  I
really do hope that my retro files archive can offer something to the
community, as well.

## Site updates

I've been tweaking the site a bit lately -- simple style changes,
reorganization, new files in the retro files area, etc.
Here's a summary:
 - Reorganized / condensed gophermaps in order to be friendlier to
    "short" terminals
 - Started messing about with a zig phlog engine to bring some more
    advanced functionality to the site
 - Apple 1 iPod interface doc
 - SSH2 for DOS
 - DOS files
 - Old FPGA-related datasheets / product / developer kit docs

## Teasers for future items

 - PCD-68 / FRST Computers: Getting into my attempt to realize my
    vision for "bespoke" computing.  This is a big one, y'all... 
    I'll be posting a lot about it in the future, I hope, as I 
    continue to chip away at this beast.
 - LLVM deep-dive series -- Taking my fascination for LLVM and going
    deeper...
 - "Software that should (have) exist(ed)"
.