October 26, 2024

Things to do on an upcoming flight

I hate flying.

It's incredibly boring, the security circus is pointless and brings out the worst in co-passengers, more time is spent waiting for things to happen than actually being up in the air, and it's not great for the environment (though even if we were to stop taking flights, apparently just as many planes would take off).

I am also not used to being disconnected from the internet.

Here are some things I need to do, though, which can be easily accomplished during this great sinkhole of time.

• Writing bindings for MelonJS for use with Hoot, a Wasm compiler for Guile Scheme. To write bindings, you need the API reference, which is available at https://melonjs.github.io/melonJS/. They do not make it easy to find and download any offline documentation, which is baffling, surely the docs exist somewhere before you bundle it into a website, why not make it available as text? Anyway, I found a tool called archivebox, which downloads a website with all linked assets as a bundle, so that should be good enough.
  Sidebar: Installing it on a 2015 MacBook Pro via Homebrew turned it into a furnace, probably because it installs node from source.
  Update from the next day: You need to clone the repo, install pnpm, and run pnpm install and then pnpm doc to have the docs show up in the melonjs/docs folder. Their logo isn't even a melon!
• Continuing work on my C-based static-site generator. This is not time-sensitive at all, but I find it quite fun and all I need to work on it is gdb and gcc.
• Writing more of the Beginner Common Lisp book. I don't need to be connected to the internet for this, but Common List the Language, 2e by Guy Steele Jr. is a great reference for it so I have downloaded it.