Dispatch · Tomato OS
Wallpaper, Polish, and the Rest of the Computer
Fall semester, five-and-a-half hard classes, and still polishing TomatoOS—wallpaper, apps, and a website that finally feels balanced.
The fall semester started with a hard slate: ESE 5700, CIS 5710, ESE 5800, CIS 1912, EAS 2030—mostly master’s-level technical courses—plus campus work and early midterms. Working on Tomato beside that means cutting into sleep. I choose it anyway. Passion and obsession keep clearing the hurdles.
Since the last pushes I have worked on making the website smoother and less overwhelming for a first visit. I have gone so deep—from transistor-level thinking up to writing raw hex by hand—that it would be stranger if I got lost in my own copy. The site now sits somewhere between the skeptical engineer and the curious non-engineer.
What fascinates me more: the hardware was only a fragment. Change the architecture and you reinvent the ISA, the assembler, the software, the OS, and the apps on top. That toolchain is what I have been optimizing. TomatoOS now has applications, lists, graphics, input, and a wallpaper. It is becoming what I imagined when I first learned people build computers from scratch.
I will lock in the now ~2,987 lines of TomatoOS as a stable cut, push it, and keep building on top.