MyKoz: AReal/OS, An Independent, Nomatic Digital Home
Discover MyKoz AReal/OS, an independent, nomadic digital home that offers Tow-it-ism, a modern approach to finding value in life by mastering simple, lasting skills. With a powerful user experience, the installer script adds a JupyterLab icon and Bash icon, with the War Games 'Would you like to play a game' typing effect.
Discovering MyKoz AReal/OS: A Journey to a Nomatic Digital Home
By Michael Levin
Saturday, August 5, 2023
Alright, that was pretty major. I have the WSL2 installer script working and a meme-friendly banging new identity for it. But wait, there’s more! I can just push out a video on using the script as-is on a freshly installed Windows 10 machine, and that will both test and go on the record with this remarkable new version of my work. I want to use the “Pipulate” identity for the SEO FOSS software that gets installed with it. But I want to built it up from scratch with a new audience on Twitch. Use this last bit of time before your daily duties shift. This is a hit the iron while it’s hot moment.
Wow, I’m doing some of the best coding and story-telling of my life. It was a fairly rigorous process to get my install script for a Linux version of JupyterLab on Windows working. But I did it, and I’m now in the process of making the installer totally memetic. I figured out how to do the War Games “Would you like to play a game” typing effect from the 80’s movie. It’s also what a lot of the AI interfaces are using these days to make them more personable, like Bing. It’s one of the things Bard and Google SGE conversations are missing. They just don’t feel like an AI responding.
Anyhow, I have that powerful user experience trick working in the first screen of the installer. I also made the installer add a JupyterLab icon along with the Bash icon that it was already doing. There are are 2 basic fronts on which this system is designed to be used: JupyterLab in a browser and vim in a Terminal. I already had the Linux Bash Terminal icon, but I had all this messaging everywhere about visiting localhost:8888 all over the installer. But that’s silly since it’s easy to drop a Windows shortcut on the desktop. I had the paths to the custom icons to deal with, but that wasn’t too hard.
A great thing about this project is that it is a front for continual improvement. If I were more technical, I could have run with the Levinux version of this project that used QEMU and is a truly portable virtual environment that travels between Macs, Windows and other Linux systems using a virtual machine image with the QEMU PC emulator for each platform. It’s still a server-build script in its essence (a principle I believe in) but the built image will travel from platform to platform, running equally well becoming a true sort of Noah’s Ark for your tech, fulfilling the promise of a platform independent nomadic digital home.
Levinux still exists and still has quite a fan base for the tiny miracle it’s pulling off, but unless I dedicate myself to it, it’s a dead end. Leveraging all the work Microsoft’s putting into their Windows subsystem for Linux (WSL) on the other hand is a bandwagon I can jump on and ride for a long time.
And so the server-build script is the big trick. They can build a system up from source, and tell you everything about the system that is important about the system and everything you need to know to modify or reproduce it in your own way. There’s strong visuals here that I should probably illustrate here, and probably in an animated fashion. I should use Occam’s Razor on the production techniques and just video myself drawing on a whiteboard or just a white piece of paper on a camera stand.
I need to rework the installer screens and messaging now that I have this wonderful typing effect. I am telling a story and designing an experience. Screen #1 is really strong and I’m happy with it: chasing the rabbit, and all. Screen #2 has to get more cerebral but not too much so. I have to hit the point home fast about the new name.
As we live, we are always getting closer to the end of our lives, and there is precious little time to get sidetracked by short-lived trends and superficial tools. Marcus Aurelius gave us Stoicism, a philosophy for finding meaning and resilience in a chaotic world. MyKoz AReal/OS offers us Tow-it-ism, a modern approach to finding value in life by focusing on mastering a few simple, lasting skills that can be carried with us from one context to the next.
Okay, I added the new page to the site and changed the text blurb in the global navigation template.