(2025-11-20) Obenauer Things I'm Working On Lately

Alexander Obenauer: Things I'm working on lately. Earlier this year, I recreated the user environment found on the Canon Cat, a 1987 follow-up to the Macintosh by Jef Raskin. This was a really wild idea of personal computing: the entire OS’ user environment was, essentially, one long document.

I explored its implications after living in the environment for about a week

There’s another member essay I made publicly available observing the process by which my work happens.

Most recently, I’ve been working on an itemized user environment to live in full-time — the kind I’d want to see on a full implementation of an OS with the kinds of ideas envisioned in my lab notes and experiments over the last few years

This has been the fullest implementation I’ve approached yet. It has taken years of experiments to fully understand a lot of the little details that would snag attempts in the past. I’m cautiously optimistic about this build.

currently in the middle of On the Origin of Time, which is turning out to be my favorite new read of the year. It does an excellent job of describing both how certain ideas work, as well as how their fomenters meandered into them. And when those ideas are the time dimension and a spatial dimension kind of switch roles inside of black holes, things get interesting fast.

This was also done quite well by the book on Bell Labs, The Idea Factory. (My only complaint with that book — and it’s a big one — is that, of all the ideas it helps you understand the formation of, Unix is given only a passing mention in a fraction of a sentence

Tim Berners-Lee’s Weaving The Web also does a great job of this, helping you get into his headspace when he dreamt up all of the necessary peculiarities that became the Web.

I love this kind of book: help me to understand a wild idea, and how people thought such a thing up. My hope was to do just this with my book

Dealers of Lightning, on Xerox PARC, is a good counter-example: it does neither, instead mostly flogging middle management’s various politics for missing out on some of the biggest inventions of our age — not terribly interesting reading, unless you’re a manager in need of yet another cautionary tale.

This year has brought lots of change. Sarah and I started Buddy Bindery & Press — I wrote some on our first year in business here — and we moved to New Hampshire

The publishing company and bindery has been a wonderful source of surprises and problems to solve

I thought we’d get 20 orders. I would have been stoked with that! Sarah thought it’d be more like 50. We were both wrong. We eventually sold 350 before we had to turn the thing off so I could catch up.

at some point in the process, the paper we were using was discontinued by the manufacturer. So we spent some weeks hunting down the last remaining reams at paper suppliers around the country.

Making so many books by hand has been therapeutic. It’s even helped me enjoy my computer work more. I think there’s some forced balance there that I need.

Back when we lived in an RV, I had this in spades: every day required some various tasks on the rig, and a couple drives a week through evolving North American landscapes helped keep my head in the right place