The OA Blog

I’ve experienced increasingly disturbed sleep for years now and at a certain point this tips into what we call Insomnia. I wouldn’t say this has bothered me terribly but as I’ve got older and the problem has worsened, I can clearly see the effects a lack of sleep has on various functions. One of the main issues is falling asleep in the evening earlier and earlier, either on the sofa or the desire to go to bed way before any normal adults bedtime. In retrospect, I can see this has a compounding effect on the Insomnia and reinforces unusual sleeping patterns. Plus I’ve found I need to take naps here and there in the last couple of years which I never used to require. ...

At Orbital Alchemists, we believe that simple tools built with intentional boundaries are often the most durable. Today we are sharing the first working version of Signalforge, a lightweight, focused project designed to solve a deceptively tricky problem: handling inbound communications (enquiries) cleanly across multiple independent websites. Signalforge is not a sprawling SaaS platform, and it is not trying to be an all-in-one marketing CRM. It is a small, modular inbound pipeline that gives us a unified way to collect contact form submissions, reject automated bot noise, maintain a private audit log, and deliver messages directly to where they belong. Instead of scattering form handlers or relying on opaque third-party form widgets across our ecosystem, every site now routes into a single, predictable channel that we control. ...

I talk a lot about the sovereign web — the idea that the tools running our digital presence should be ones we understand, control, and can move away from if we ever need to. So it’s worth being upfront about a small contradiction I’ve just built into my own stack. Signalforge is my new inbound communication system: a single channel that all of the sites now use for contact forms, spam filtering, and getting messages into my inbox reliably. Before Signalforge, contact forms across the OA websites were scattered, inconsistent, and dependent on whatever third-party form service happened to be bolted on at the time. Signalforge replaces all of that with one purpose-built pipeline that I designed and can own end to end. ...

Management Committee Status: June 2026 June was the month where the architectural theories of the previous quarter were tested against the reality of the live application. The primary focus was the “reintegration” phase: plugging the newly modular Xylem libraries back into the main TextRoots application shell. This was a rigorous process of discovery, as we identified bespoke logic within the app and systematically migrated it into the appropriate Xylem subsystems—Flow, Surface, and Buffer. ...

Management Committee Status: May 2026 May was the month when Xylem moved from being an emerging core idea into the clear centre of gravity for TextRoots. In April, the main shift was the recognition that the deeper content and storage logic needed to be separated from the app itself. In May, that separation started to become much more concrete. The project’s energy was focused less on outward-facing features and more on building the underlying library structure that can eventually support many different interfaces, runtimes, and workflows. ...