It looks like I’ve been remiss in blogging about Zavala’s releases. The last blog post was about Zavala 4.1, the Markdown Import release. Now we’re up to release 4.4. There’s a fair amount to talk about. Let’s get to it. Zavala 4.2 Released April 1, 2026 Outline Locking Being able to encrypt and prevent others from accessing an Outline is a feature I’ve long wanted and have gotten requests for.

Zavala 4.2 is out. The big feature in this release is Outline Locking (like in Apple’s Notes). You can read more about it in the Zavala Help. zavala.vincode.io/help/Lock…

Another Zavala release is here. This time there is a lot going on with Markdown capabilities. Markdown Import You can now directly import Markdown documents into Zavala. Markdown documents are very unstructured and Zavala is a very structured outliner, so this was something of a challenge. In the end it worked out rather well. Markdown headings become Zavala rows. Markdown paragraphs became Zavala notes paragraphs. I’ve done a fair amount of testing this using open source project documents and Zavala has been able to parse them all.

Notemap Notemap is a newer mind mapping application that I was recently made aware of. It looks pretty cool. Mind mapping tools always struck me as very close to an outliner in functionality. They both use hierarchical relationships (and links) to relate information with each other. Outliners are more text based and mind mappers are more graphical. What really fascinated me was how hard the maker of Notemap had leaned into integrating AI into the application.

Anthology So… I wrote an RSS Reader. Why not? Everyone else seems to be doing it lately. I actually did it for the same reasons that I see other’s had written theirs. There wasn’t an RSS Reader out there that fit me perfectly. In my case I wanted something like Tapestry with its plugin connectors. What I didn’t want was the almost infinite timeline. I wanted a traditional 3 column RSS Reader like the OG of the group NetNewsWire.

I’ve been working on Zavala 4.0 off and on for the last 6 months. It isn’t a huge release or change in Zavala’s features. I think that is a good thing. I think Zavala is fairly mature as an outliner application. While there are things I would like to add in the future, there aren’t any really big outliner features that I think are currently missing and need to be added ASAP.

Zavala 4.0 is now in Beta Testing. You can find out more about it in this post.

My promise to you. I have every intention of maintaining and updating Zavala for as long as I am able. I’m also committed to keeping it free. I have no intention of getting you hooked on using it and then starting to charge a subscription. To show I am serious about this, Zavala is Open Source software released under the MIT license. This means that any other developer can take the years of work that I have in Zavala and make a competing outliner from it should I start charging for it.

It’s Live! Zavala 3.0 is now live in the App Stores. There are only a couple of new major features in Zavala 3.0, but I put a lot of under the hood for this release. Lots of code was changed to modernize the code base and support new operating system features. For example, Zavala will support the Apple Intelligence Writing Tools when they become available in macOS 15.1 and iOS/iPadOS 18.

I updated a couple of my minor apps today so that they look correct on the latest macOS releases. The first, Feed Compass which is an app to help you find, preview, and subscribe to blogs. I also updated Feed Curator which is an OPML feed list editor. I also added multiple select for a Reddit user who was needing it. It felt good to help someone out and to finally update the appearance of these apps.

About a month ago Nic and I went to drag boat races in Parker, AZ. The start of them is right outside the bar at Pirates Den. It was pretty fun. We got to drink beer all day and watch the races, then crawl to van at the end of the night to sleep it off. Mike Finnegan from Roadkill was there to race his new boat. That was pretty great for me.

If someone has to tell you how good they are at something, their work doesn’t stand on its own. If someone won’t explain why they made a decision, it is because they know that it was a bad one. If someone tells you that you aren’t worth listening to, its because they are afraid of what you will say.

The main project I work on, @NetNewsWire got a shout out in the Atlantic today. How to Take Back Control of What You Read on the Internet

I messed up a @NetNewsWire merge recently. I left some Git merge conflict markers in a couple files. @danielpunkass suggested that a pre-commit Git Hook could prevent this in the future. So I made one.. Daniel has added this to his global Git templates. You should too.

Just another day at the office.

I got new wheels and tires on the van. They look great, but the larger size puts more strain on my little 4.6 V8. I completely blew a spark plug out of the engine from pushing it to hard coming up a mountain pass. Life on the road…

Christmas dinner this year is Ramen on Sunset Blvd.

I really like Dan Rather’s Substack newsletter, Steady. It has some great social commentary on it. Dan Rather is a journalist from a time when news wasn’t entertainment. steady.substack.com

It would be great if Substack had RSS feeds for its Inbox and Discover timelines. I understand why they don’t. They really need to get users into paid subscriptions to keep the site going. I guess we should be glad that they at least have RSS feeds for individual newsletters.

Yeah. It’s one of those days.

I’d love to have Universal Links on the Micro.blog Apple apps. Since they are Open Source, I’d implement myself. I can’t see how it can be done. @manton rightly encourages everyone have a domain. That makes it impossible to do consistently.

I have to admit, when I saw screenshots of Ventura’s new System Settings stuff, I was very unimpressed. It looked too much like you would see on Windows or Linux for me.  Now that I’ve actually used it, I appreciate the design decision that was made. I know a lot of people were critical, myself included, about basing the design of the System Settings on the iOS ones. But making it like the iOS ones reduces cognitive load when switching back and forth a lot more than I thought it would.

I wrote a blog post about how I blog to Micro.blog using Zavala and Humboldt. Blogging this way probably isn’t for you unless you are big into outliners. Still it is neat to see how these two computer systems that weren’t designed to work together could be made to.

Part of the year I live out of my self-converted E-250 Campervan. My wife and our 2 cats are also traveling with me. That doesn’t leave a lot of space for an office to do software development. This is how I do it. My Portable Office Wouldn’t it be great if you had a full office with full-size keyboard, monitor, printer, and the works while living in a van? No chance.

Zavala is a modern outliner for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Version 2.0 has just been release with a refined user interface and support for Shortcuts. Read all about the 2.0 release.

This is awesome: blog.iconfactory.com/2021/12/n…

Cars I’ve always loved fast cars. Most of my adult life has been focused on being the best software developer that I can be, so my other hobbies, like cars, suffered. Now that I am retired, I did some life reassessing. One of the things that I feel like I missed out on was enjoying cars more. I decided that I wanted to do more than just zip around on the street.

2020 Sucked (For Everyone) We got back to Centerville, IA just as the world was entering lockdown in March of 2020. We were pretty strick with out protocols, so we didn’t even much leave the house until vaccines became widely available. Needless to say, there wasn’t any van adventuring happening, but Nic got really good at making sourdough bread and I wrote an outliner application. I’ve got no regrets about how we spent 2020 and most of 2021.

Announcing Humboldt Humboldt is a new Open Source project I put together so that I could use Shortcuts to post to Micro.blog. Humboldt is built on top of Snippets from Micro.blog, which does the heavy lifting. Humboldt only exposes a small portion of Snippets, so there is room for Humboldt to grow in the future if there is demand for more functionality. Humboldt is available for both macOS and iOS in the App Store.

The Oldest and Newest Thing in Blogging Dave Winer just release a new project called Drummer. Drummer is an outliner that has been especially adapted to doing blogging. If you are into either outliners or blogs, this is an interesting development. Dave is probably the oldest name in outline, blogging, and podcasting applications. You can check out his Wikipedia page for a full history. I’m not very familiar with the history of outliners and blogging, but I do know in certain circles, especially the Mac community, early blogs were based on outlines.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately working with Shortcuts. I have some thoughts about them. Adding Shortcut support to Zavala One of the early requirements for Zavala was that it should be able to be automated or scripted. Since Zavala works on both iOS and macOS, these scripts should be able to be shared. Prior to WWDC21 there wasn’t a shared scripting environment common between iOS and macOS.

Some cool stuff is coming in Zavala 2.0. zavala.vincode.io/2021/10/0…

My outliner, Zavala, has a new release in beta testing. There are lots of new features and I sure could use some help testing it. zavala.vincode.io/2021/09/2…

Here’s a great article about @NetNewsWire with some excellent quotes from @brentsimmons. It really gets into how Brent and the team think about NetNewsWire’s place in the world. www.lifewire.com/how-netne…

For the past 8 months or os, I’ve been working on a new app called Zavala. It’s a modern take on a traditional outliner app. I think it is a pretty decent app, considering it was developed by a single person over 8 months. It isn’t easy making an app that runs on 3 different platforms and does syncing and collaboration across those platforms. To give credit where due, it wouldn’t have been possible without some recent enhancements to Apple’s API’s.

A lot of people have taken up sourdough bread making during the pandemic. My wife is one of those. She’s gotten pretty good at it. Behold her latest creation.

The open source outliner, Zavala, that I have been building now has a website and is available for beta testing. Check it out. zavala.vincode.io

Update I thought I’d let people know what I’ve been working on lately. I’ve been keeping busy! NetNewsWire 6.0 My main project that I’ve been working on for the last couple years is NetNewsWire. This project is amazing to work on. The community that Brent Simmons has created is great. The popularity of NetNewsWire is great too. It really helps get you motivated when so many people benefit from and appreciate your work.

My wife’s best friend is #1 & #2 in Amazon’s Women in Politics category! She’s beating out many political big names. https://www.amazon.com/gp/new-releases/books/5571264011/ref=zg_b_hnr_5571264011_1

Last February, Nicole and I were wintering in Arizona. We were down there living out of the van, like we normally try to do in the winter. We were fairly close to my Uncle Terry had a winter home in Yuma, AZ, so we went to visit him and stayed just across the border in California on some BLM land. It was pretty much just desert there, but that didn’t matter.

I was reading a blog post about firetrucks and it reminded me of a #vanlife post I never got around to writing. In late January, 2019 we were traveling around the U.S. and ended up on Padre Island. Padre Island is just off the coast of Texas. You can drive to the island over a bridge and can camp for free most anywhere you want to along the beach. Even in the winter it is warm there and quite beautiful if you like the ocean.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and a lot of soul searching lately. Having to dig deep into Machine Learning wasn’t on my 2020 list of things to do. I’d really planned to spend this year improving my Apple platforms developer skills. Learning Python and a bunch of new concepts is a real detour for me. To better understand if the Machine Learning was something I wanted go ahead with, I did some research on how much education you needed to get into it.

I made two changes in my latest run. I probably should only make one change at a time to be able to narrow down what is helping and what is setting me back. Still, I went ahead and moved down one more level for the targeted categories. This gave me a lot more categories that would come up. My second change was that I only selected the categories that were closest in relationship to the article category.

It took around 40 hours to expand and extract all of Wikipedia using WikiExtractor. In the end, I ended up with 5.6 million articles extracted. Wikipedia has 6 million articles, so WikiExtractor tossed out 400k of those. Possibly due to template recursion errors. That was something that WikiExtractor would occasionally complain about as it was working. My next step was to fix that slow query that is used to roll up categories.

I’ve got something strange that happens with NetNewsWire’s Cloudkit integration. I consider the code stable at this point. I’ve been running it for weeks across 3 different devices and they never go out of sync. My problem is that the CloudKit operations seem to pause for extended periods of time. This could be an hour, but then it will just break loose and start working again. Restarting the app also clears the problem up.

My first run at classifying blogs ended predictably bad. Not horribly bad, I guess. If you squint really hard, you could see that some of the categories kind of make some sense. They just were generally not useful due to category vagueness. The categories that were found were things like “culture” or “humanities” which could be almost anything. Things are going to have to get more specific and more accurate.

I put a test harness around the prediction engine for fastText. The test harness downloads and cleans an RSS feed and asks for the most likely classification. Here are some results from One Foot Tsunami: Each row is an article title from the feed followed by the classification derived from the article content. I’m both encouraged and strangely disappointed at the same time. Things seem to be working, but clearly I need to do some work on what my categories are.

Yesterday, I had just gotten the categories and category relationships loaded into the relational database and identified the categories I want to use for blogs. The next step was rolling up all the hundreds of thousands of categories into those roughly 1300 categories. I came up with a query that I thought would work. This isn’t easy because Wikipedia’s categories aren’t strictly hierarchal. They kind of are, but it is really more of a graph than a hierarchy.

Wow, the Wikipedia category data I loaded was bad. Really bad. I guess that should be expected considering that was the first run of the Category Extractor. Still, I expected better. I’ve decided to use the same category classifications as Wikipedia does for determining the main topics. The “Main topic classifications” page lists out the top level categories. From there on down, there are subcategory after subcategory of classifications. For example, if you drill down into “Academic disciplines”, you get a listing if its categories.

I’ve been analyzing the database I created for Feed Spider that models the Wikipedia categories in a relational database. I’m using PostgreSQL for the database and wanted something nicer than the command line to execute my queries. I searched around for a bit and settled on Postico. It’s a PostgreSQL front end written by some indie devs. It’s what Brent Simmons would call a Mac-assed Mac app. I’ve only been using it a couple days, but it has made my life much nicer while working with both DDL (data definition language) and DML (data manipulation language).

I’ve been working to get Feed Spider development started and it has started. One of the challenging things about starting a new project is getting the development environment set up. More than once, I’ve seen this lead to analysis-paralysis on projects. There is a strong urge to get things planned and set up correctly to get the project off to a good start. I’m not completely immune to this, even if I know it is a danger.

In the first post about Feed Spider we discussed the motivation behind creating a feed directory. We also discussed some software components that can be used to create Feed Spider. Now we’re going to try to tie that all together. The architecture and design of Feed Spider is at the inception phase. Writing this blog post is an exercise in helping me better understand the problem space as much as it is for communicating what I am trying to do.

I’d like to make a directory of blogs that users can search or browse to find blogs that they are interested in. I don’t think there really is such a thing right now that works well at least. The only ones I know about are part of a subscription service, like Feedly. It’s understandable why there really isn’t such a thing. There isn’t a lot of money in blogs these days.

I found an old photo from a couple years ago. It’s of my wife, Nicole, sitting along the bank of a river in Northern California. Just sitting along the river, listening to music, and having a few beers. It will be a long time before we’re able to do camping like this again.

I was interviewed about @NetNewsWire and accessibility yesterday. You can check it out on AppleVis here: www.applevis.com/podcast/a…

I just got done implementing iCloud support in NetNewsWire. We are still doing preliminary testing on it and aren’t ready for public testing. I don’t know which release it will be in unfortunately. That depends on how initial testing does and then public testing. I thought I’d write up some my initial impressions of CloudKit. This isn’t a tutorial although you might find some of the information useful if you are looking to develop with CloudKit.

The new iPadOS cursor is amazing. I’m so impressed by Apple on this one. They successfully reinvented a concept none of us thought even needed updating. I hope they bring some of these ideas to the macOS cursor.

If you have any problems or questions about the code, be sure to jump into the NetNewsWire Slack. We’ll help you out. Building NetNewsWire

Looks like a good day to stay inside and code.

I think this is the first time that @NetNewswire for iOS has been featured by a publication. youtu.be/UPVDyWYvF…

This is what it typically looks like while I work on @netnewswire. #vanlife

I’m trying to get some @NetNewsWire coding done today and my “E” key on my keyboard is sticking. I have to keep prying it back up. This Macbook Pro is going into the shop tomorrow for repairs.

Since we wanted to stay close to Phoenix while we waited for our heater parts to come in, we went to the closest free campsite. Since is was close to the Phoenix suburbs, I expected the campsite to be crowded and it was. The campsite in total was less than the size of a football field and everyone was right on top of each other. The ground was uneven and in the center was pool of rancid water.

It is 50 degrees here in Kearny, AZ. It is also 50 at my home back in Iowa. I’m beginning to wonder why I came here. Hiding from winter isn’t working for me thus far.

This is how I spent my summer. NetNewsWire for iOS testing

It was cold. Colder then it was supposed to be and Nicole was shaking me awake. I looked at my phone and it was 4 in the morning. The auxiliary heater had stopped working. I had been concerned about my battery bank even before we had left Iowa. The capacity of the batteries had been declining last year when we came home and I didn’t check the capacity again before we left.

I just migrated my personal website to micro.blog and shut down my old AWS/Wordpress site. Now I don’t have to worry about the security concerns that come with hosting your own site. A big bonus is that I now get all micro.blog’s social features.

After leaving Centerville, we mostly drove straight through to Arizona. We weren’t in a hurry though, so it took us 3 days to get to Flagstaff, AZ. Flagstaff is a beautiful city and we have camped in the mountains around it before. This wasn’t going to be our stop this time. There was already snow on the ground and the high altitude would have damaged our auxiliary heater in the van.

Wow. It’s been over 10 months since I’ve done a van life post. I’ll have to get people caught up and post some stories that I have been meaning to get to. My last post was about our trip to Padre Island. We lived in Padre for about 3 weeks. We then went to Big Bend National Park in Texas and then on home to Iowa. Nic and I spent Spring, Summer, and Fall at home in Centerville, IA.

Branching Strategies are controversial. Why is that? Why can’t we just pick a strategy like Git Flow and call it the one true way to do branching? The answer is that software development is too complicated for a one size fits all approach. Factors that can impact how you do branching: Is your team remote? Do all contributors have the same level of repository access? Is the project an open source project?

I’ve put the finishing touches on Feed Compass 1.0 and uploaded it to the App Store. Feed Compass makes it easy to find and preview blogs. If you like the blog you previewed, it makes it simple to subscribe to it in your favorite RSS Reader. I find it a really useful app, especially if you are an Apple Developer since it has theiOS Dev Directory OPML files in it.

In my previous post, I talked about curated listings of blogs. This time I want to talk a little bit about computer generated lists. Following A following list is a staple in social media. Who you are following and who is following you are very useful pieces of information. You can tell a lot about a person from who their friends are or who they are interested in. If we knew what blogs a person was reading on a regular basis, would could do the same kind of following recommendations that social media platforms do.

The Problem I recently wrote app for the Mac called Feed Compass. It is an app that displays lists of blog feeds, allows you to preview them, and then subscribe to them in your RSS reader. It is designed to solve the problem of not having enough content in your RSS reader. The problem I’ve run into is that Feed Compass also has the same problem of not having enough content.

One of the things I wanted to do on this trip was figure out where good places for Nic and I to stay weeks on end were. If you’ve read some of my earlier posts, you would know that I am primarily looking for free camping next to a city with a Planet Fitness in it. Padre Island and Corpus Christi fit that description perfectly so we had that as a destination, but we wanted to find more spots on the way.

Our next stop after the Everglades was Bradenton, FL. I wanted to stop and visit with some friends that had a winter home there. Friends is probably not a strong enough word. Second set of parents would be closer to my relation ship with Chuck and Barb Willkomm. Throughout High School and College, Chris (their son) and I were pretty much inseparable. We lived together, partied together, and hung out at each others parents houses.

We left Key West after only a couple days. Looking back, there was more we would had liked to done there and probably should have stayed for another couple days. But, we prefer to camp in the wilderness and so we got back on the road and headed to the Everglades. When we entered Everglades National Park there was no one at the entrance or the campsite checkin. It looked to us like it was unmanned because of the government shutdown.

Parking in Key West was very challenging. We got there late and there were few parking lots that didn’t have no overnight parking signs. We did finally find a place close to the beach that had an awesome view of the ocean and settled in for the night. The next morning Nicole and I got up and Nicole asked me if I’d heard that bird that sounded just like a rooster this morning?

Universal Studios was directly on our way to Key West. Since Nic is a huge Harry Potter fan, we thought that we would stop there so that she could see the new Harry Potter World that they put up there. They divided the Harry Potter World across two different theme parks, Universal Florida and Islands of Adventure, so that you would have to pay for both worlds to get the full Harry Potter experience.

We’re still in the Osceola National Forest at the West Tower Campground. This is the same campsite that we have been at for over a month now. Like I mentioned before, this place has basically all you could want in a free campsite. Our time here is coming to a close however. General gun season runs out on Jan. 6th. During general gun you can stay as long as you want (there usually is a 14 day limit), so it is almost time for us to move on.

I was working on a program at the picnic table today when the rain kicked up again. It’s been raining here for about a day and a half and is expected continue for a few more. We had a break in the rain and I figured that I would get out of the van for a bit, but got caught outside. We recently bought a tarp and some poles for our camping gear.

We visited Charleston on our way south into Florida. It was a beautiful city. We parked the van in an overnight public parking spot and walked around the downtown area. It was pricy parking spot at $30, but it is still cheaper than most camping sites, hotel rooms, and police station visits. Most of you know that Nic and I like to go out and have a good time. With trying to get into shape we came up with a new regimen that cut beer out of our diet.

Nic and I are still in the Francis Marion National Forest. We’ve been camping at different campsite than I told you about in my last blog post. This campsite is closer to town (and Planet Fitness). It has a through hiking trail that runs along it. I’ve been told that it goes for 450 miles. I’ve hiked the trail for a few miles while listening to podcasts and it is very beautiful.

We left Croatan National Forest a couple days ago. We enjoyed our time there, almost 2 weeks, but it was time to move on. We set our sites on South Carolina and hit the road. Conway, SC looked good on paper. It had some free camping sites near by and Planet Fitness in town. Planet Fitness has become something of a requirement for Nicole. She’s pretty serious about getting in shape and we work our at PF exactly 3 times a week.

We’ve been in the Croatan National Forest for a couple of days now. Nicole has been doing a bunch of reading and I have been teaching myself the macOS graphical API’s for an open source project I have been contributing to. We are moving between a series of campsites along the White Oak river trying to see which we like best. There are 5 of these total, but only 3 are in the national forest.

Nic and I considered our time with Lisa and Flash to be a vacation. We spent more than we usually do on dining, drinks, and gas. It was time to get back to just living life as simply and as cheaply as possible. Some of the best places to do that are National Forests. In this case we went to the George Washington National Forest and a place called Wolf Gap.

We had a couple of big items that we wanted to accomplish while being in New England. We wanted to see the fall colors, lighthouses, eat lobster rolls, and go to Salem, MA. We got plenty of views of the foliage in Maine and Vermont. The lighthouses were kind of a bust. The really nice one we went to, you couldn’t get close to and it was covered in scaffolding.

Everyone told us that all the tourist go to Bar Harbor. So we went. We just visited the town and missed things like Thunder Hole because we were a bit fatigued from driving that day.After that we headed to Glen Ellis, Maine. We got some gloom and rain or this would have been one of our favorite camping sites. About 20 minutes away was Glen Ellis Falls where we hiked in to view one of the largest waterfalls locally.

We spent 10 days with our good friends Flash and Lisa. Nic and I had a great time with them and it was lots of fun sharing the van lifestyle with them. They had an RV, but it was a Class B and not much bigger than a converted van. We did stay primarily in campgrounds. I think they got the good parts of van life and missed out on the scrambling to fill your water tanks and taking daily sponge baths.

On our way to meet up with Lisa and Flash we stopped at Niagara FallsYeah, some people are so stupid that we do need signs like these. After we left Niagara Falls, we went looking for some free backwoods camping. We ended up sleeping on a pullout just south of Syracuse, NY.

I wanted to stop at the Volo Auto Museum after I saw it on Roadkill. If you haven’t watched Roadkill, I highly recommend it. It is car guy reality TV without any faked up drama. One of the first things you see when entering the museum is their Dusseldorf collection. Nicole and I both agree that these cars have to be the height of automotive manufacturing and design ever. We also learned a fun fact.

Nicole and I left Centerville on Monday, Oct1, 2018 to travel around New England with our friends Flash and Lisa. Our plan is to pick up Flash and Lisa at the airport in Boston, MA on Friday. We’ll be taking them to an RV rental place where they are getting a Class B RV to convoy with us for 10 days. We don’t know what we are going to do for 10 days, but I’m sure we won’t run out of things to see.

Here I am hanging out with my little buddy.

I just ordered a new iPhone. I’ve been using the same iPhone 6 Plus for 4 years now and am tired of it not fitting in my jeans pocket when riding a motorcycle. If I didn’t want a smaller phone, I probably wouldn’t have upgraded. More on that later... I ordered a silver iPhone Xs and a green leather case for it. I think it looks pretty sharp. With the camera bump on the back, I think that the case is required equipment.

Apple has a winner with Xcode 10. With macOS Majave it gained Dark Mode which many of you have seen in other IDE’s and pro level tools. Not only does it make it look futuristic and cool, it is actually reduces eye strain by reducing how much brightness is pushed at you. Beyond that, I’m having trouble putting my finger on what is so much better about Xcode 10. It feels like I am fighting it less often.

I started the blog and a couple others in early 2017. My thought was that I would write posts about IT and Vanlife and keep them separate. That was way too ambitious for me. At the time I wasn’t very interested in the IT world and the Vanlife posts seemed to take too much effort. I ended up settling on using Instagram to post Vanlife pictures. It had a simple interface and made it easy to crosspost to Facebook.

We lived just outside Yellowstone and The Grand Teton parks for over a week. The West Yellowstone campsite was our favorite. It was right next to a babbling brook where I could set up my hammock and read all day. There was also plenty of fallen deadwood to use for the fire. It was pretty much everything you wanted in an off-the-grid campsite.

This is shot I took while trying to cook foil dinners in the rain. Nic is hiding inside and all the furniture is stuffed under the front of the van to keep it dry. I was determined to keep the fire going for the 40 or so minutes it took to cook dinner. It was close, but we campfire dinner that night.

Napa Valley, The Lost Coast, and Wolf Creek.

Big Sur and Yosemite we some highlights from when we left LA this spring (2018). We stayed at some pretty amazing spots, but they rarely had cell service. To get cell service, we stealth camped in Woodland, CA. After that we head to Napa Valley to check out the wineries.

Here is one advantage to having a low top van. I was able to park it in a friends parking garage in LA when we were visiting California this spring (2018). Unfortunately, most parking garages are still too short especially now that the van has been lifted and has solar on the roof. There is a saying in the #vanlife world. “You can live in your van or out of your van.

Lake Havasu was too hot for us, so we went to the Mojave Desert. Really. It was much cooler in the Mojave due to being farther north and, I think, a higher elevation. This spot was one of my favorites. We were by ourselves a good distance from the highway. There was a town 30 minutes away and we had excellent cell phone data reception. I think that this might be a place to spend an extended amount of time in the winter.

Here we are camping near Lake Havasu, AZ. On top of the roof rack, you can see our 400 watts of solar panels. This powers all our accessories in the van including our halogen hot plate for cooking.  This is another shot of the solar panels at our home in Iowa. Next to the solar panels are the sand ladders. If I get stuck in sand, mud, or snow, I can place those under the rear wheels to (hopefully) drive myself out of any holes I’m in.

Here’s is the family enjoying the Grand Canyon. We didn’t spend much time there. We basically looked at it, found a campsite for the night and took off the next morning. Maybe next time we will take a hike down into the canyon, but this time we didn’t feel much like fighting the crowds.

Here are a couple of pictures of the van with the new suspension from Weldtech Designs. I had it installed in San Diego, CA when we were out there this spring (2018). They lifted the front 3” and the rear 1.5”. Previously the back sat higher than the front, so the van is pretty much perfectly level now. It is amazing how the van rides and handles. Better in every way, both on the highway and off the beaten path.

Here are a couple shots I took while driving to the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous in 2017.

Introduction Bind It is an iPhone and iPad app that converts webpages into eBooks that can be stored and read from within the iBooks app from Apple. It is coming soon to the Mac and maybe someday to Android as well. Right now, you can find it here for $0.99 in the Apple App Store. Making a successful app takes a lot more than just writing good code. Here I write about what I did outside of Xcode to make Bind It.

There is now a soft launch of Bind It in the App Store. Version 1.0 is up now and version 1.0.1 with a couple UI tweaks and bug fixes is in app review and coming soon. Only $.99 to save that story or article you don’t want to loose.

As a child of the 70’s, Elvis was everywhere. He was on the movies that Channel 13 played in the afternoons on summer vacation. His music was all over the radio. His cool blue vinyl record was spinning on my grandmother’s record player when she would baby sit my brother and I. When I woke up cold in Wisconsin and saw that directly south of me was Memphis, TN, I knew where I was going next.

Bind It is an new iOS and macOS application from Vincode. See the About sidebar to see what it does. This will a $.99 application in the Apple App Store when released. The app is currently in Beta testing. Email mo@vincode.io if you are interested in becoming a tester.

The Beginning and Facebook Drama With all the drama from this car getting stolen, I thought I would let everyone know why I bought a 1974 VW Beetle when I am downsizing and planning on living in a van. For those who missed it or aren’t Facebook friends with me, about a week ago I bought a classic VW Bug. The doors didn’t have any keys, but I only paid $3,700 for the car so I didn’t expect anyone to risk going to jail to steal it.

Dad and I had had just about enough of trying make this 2014 Ford E-250 into the perfect cross between a stealth camper and a Sportsmobile. My struggles with depression had already delayed this project months beyond where it should have taken. It was already the beginning of November 2015 without having my vision of what the van should be fulfilled. My mom has an eloquent way with words. As she would say, “It’s time to shit or get off the pot”.

For those who don’t know, I lost my mind in the summer of 2015. As I told a friend who asked if this came suddenly, “No, this was a long time coming.” I had been trying to fight off anxiety and depression using alcohol and willpower for quite a while, but that only works for so long. At the time, I didn’t know that I had limits to the amount of stress that I could handle and I piled it on recklessly.

Hi. My name is Maurice C. Parker and I am the sole founder, President, and head janitor of Vincode. Vincode is the new trade name for Vineyard Enterprise Software, Inc. Welcome to my company rebranding and rebooting. I started Vineyard as a company for me to develop that did staff augmentation for Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies. Since that time, my career has had many twists and turns. In short, I never did grow the company into a staff augmentation company and used it over the years for mostly tax purposes.

I'm at the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous or RTR for short. For those not familiar with the term rubber tramp, a rubber tramp is basically a hobo on wheels. The wheels can be anything from the largest RV or bus to a motorcycle. All types of person are rubber tramps from all different socio-economic classes. On one side of me is a retired circuit board designer from Intel. Across from me are hippies selling barley and beet juice shots.