116 commits. the week split between getting the os running on a new machine, writing papers, and building out spreadnob for tom.

nixos on the thinkpad 11e

this was the big push. earlier in the week i dropped cage and wayland entirely and switched ac-native to run DRM-direct on nixos. that meant switching from ISOs to raw USB images — a full rework of the boot pipeline with GPT partitioning, writable data partition, direct EFI boot, and a slimmed initrd for faster startup. along the way: silent boot, trackpad double-read fix, wifi regulatory db, and wifi + sound + kidlisp enabled on the nix image.

then the thinkpad 11e arrived. first problem: it exposes its GPU as card1 not card0, so i added detection for any DRM card. then logind started grabbing the keyboard evdev device out from under ac-native. that turned into a five-commit fight — disabling the input grab, nixos settings API, disabling logind entirely, masking the service, and finally restoring it for systemctl once i realized wifi iw scan was the real FPS killer. also bumped MAX_INPUT_DEVICES from 8 to 24 since the 11e enumerates a lot of input nodes.

performance tuning at the end of the week: removed double vsync (page flip already waits for vblank), disabled wifi background scanning, and added mitigations=off as a kernel param. there's a hardware fingerprint dump to /mnt/logs on boot now and a periodic perf summary log every 5 seconds so i can diagnose FPS issues after the fact.

papers and research

wrote two new papers and a full draft of a third. "the url tradition" started as 4 pages and expanded to 7 with 27 citations, plus a cards version with 37 index cards. "the potter and the prompt" connects holden's music theory to ac, also got a cards version. and "every sound is a painting" — a full latex draft on sampling in ac, with a plan for cross-platform sample storage. all 29 papers published to the index.

on the research side: ingested sosoft docs + 14 software art texts into the research platter, added a raz reading, a getty scores access report, and started a lacma 2026 grant.

spreadnob

spotlight clean for tom — stripped spreadnob down to its essentials with a native UI and M4L download rail. improved octave mapping and ableton downloads, fixed the M4L-to-UI bridge to use direct function calls, and landed a compact rack layout with ready/active UI sync.

everything else

audio decode + dj piece for ac-native. play.mjs rewritten as a simple audio player with a track selector. new samples.mjs piece for a sample library with save/load/browse. new os.mjs device manager for listing USBs and cloning. dumduel got smooth interpolation, camera panning and pixel-perfect figures, and stale guest purging.

tangled is now the canonical repo link and the version API points there. bare kidlisp codes route properly. lith got a webhook signature fix. the mug store has an unfulfilled orders report now. sosoft card design went through several rounds — pokémon layout, $roz score card, and a submission-ready export. blank.mjs got a widescreen layout for OG thumbnails.

— @jeffrey