Re⟳⥁m – This is a new concept in solid waste management and product design, variously called recomposition, recommission, recombination and more. Imagine a materials design and handling system that is very close to close-looped, distributed, with minimal energy use and very low toxicity to the environment. Explore with us this new way to talk about and do solid waste!
Astoria Path Wanderers Association – The path in front of my house has been partially rebuilt and upgraded as the first project of the Astoria Path Wanderers Association (APWA). Work on this project is on-going. We will be adding some retaining blocks this summer, and doing some cleanup and beautification of the area.
Portugal Travelogue – Another attempt to bypass Facebook, which I've been using for blogging and to post my travelogues after the fact for the past few years. My latest trip, to Portugal in September 2024 is the first attempt at this, and you can see it evolve on this page. Stay tuned for more travelogues after this one is completed!
Insumnia (electronic Krypto) – My friend Michael and I developed this on-line game a few years ago when we had a startup that produced educational games. It was only after the game was developed that we found out that there was a card game called Krypto that was very similar to our game. That was quite the bummer, but still, our game has some features that you can't do with the physical card game, so it's worthwhile to post it here for everyone's enjoyment.
Mischling Book – My friend Steve Berk wrote a book with a friend, Evi, who survived the Holocaust and ended up in the Los Angeles area after lots of tribulations. I converted the first version into HTML, and am actively editing it. The goal is to publish the book at some point, but I'm not sure Evi is still alive, and Steve has moved away and not sure about the status. I want to at least keep this manuscript alive, since it tells a fascinating story of a Jewish and Catholic woman in Nazi Germany and other places in Europe at that time. A mixed-religion person in Germany at that time was called a mischling – hence the name of the book.
Online Compendium of Crossnumber Clues (OC3) – Crossnumber puzzles are like crosswords, but the grid is composed completely of numbers. The clues can be completely mathematical, or something as mundane as area codes, or the year of a hit single. The purpose of this compendium is to gather clues for each of the whole numbers 1 and greater that can reasonably be put in a crossnumber puzzle. It's possible for a 13-digit or even higher number of digits number, but the typical number length is 1-6 digits. Though not many puzzles have 1-digit values in the grid, this compendium starts with 1. Eventually, people from the world over will be able to contribute to the compendium, but for now, clues will be added by the author.
Puzzles (including the North Coast Puzzle Club) – I taught a course at the local community college in their community education program about puzzles, mostly math puzzles that you could solve using brute force algorithms on a computer, and someone in the class suggested a local puzzle club, which we started soon after the course ended. This project involves giving resources for all kinds of puzzles you can find online and in stores, with a page for the club as well. I gave a workshop on puzzles to Astoria School District teachers a year later, and have been trying to get students to engage in puzzles when I substitute teach and outside school.
Bob, Nancy & Tevan's Really Good Missives on the Web
Blogging – I used to have a blog with a company that no longer hosts blogs, as well as with Google Blogger. This project will incorporate what I can find from these blogs into a simple blog of my daily life, to substitute for Facebook. I will try to incorporate blogging features in here, but it will most likely be a simple log of things I think others might like or enjoy, or things I really want to say without the fear of being de-platformed on regular social media sites.
Why We Moved to Astoria
One-Page Calendar – Ethan Siegal, who publishes articles on the Medium platform about science and philosophy, came up with a really cool one-page calendar idea that I adapted to the web and you can see on this page for 2024. I'll update it to 2025 soon...
Hipfishmonthly Web Version
Aid Gents & Ladies – This company or organization would act as a clearinghouse for matching agents with customers/users and companies/organizations that are unreachable directly and have used answering services previously.
Bob's Computer Consulting (bcc:)
Steve Berk's Hipfish Articles on the Web
Books I'm Reading
Recipes
Chemish – English has an alphabet of 26 letters. The Arabic numeral system we use in the U.S. and in most other countries has 10 digits, 0-9. Together, we use these building blocks to put together thousands of words and countless numbers. When you’re growing up, you learn to use a primary language to communicate concepts to others. In America, it’s usually English (American English). But if you make it to high school or above, you may learn another language – the language of chemical formulas and reactions. This language has about 100 “letters” (chemical element symbols), and also uses the Arabic numerals. If you know this language, you can read the chemical literature, but more importantly, maybe understand the world a little better, or at least what it’s made of.
Divisive Issues
Elemental Dictionary – Here's a dictionary with a twist – all the words in it are composed of concatenations of the chemical symbols of the periodic table!
Fonts For the Web
Summaries of Newspaper Articles
Webpage and Website Design and Implementation
Publishing on the Web – Turning PDFs and word processing documents into HTML files visible in a browser.
The Great Digitization Project (or GDP)
Politics (especially alternatives)
Photo Improvement
Using AI Bots
Writing for Substack, Medium and Other Social Media Platforms
A Bob's Life – Being a recounting of what this particular Bob remembers of his life up to now... Started this many years ago and got not very far...