Living Together at a Distance
HearthStones harkens back to the time when families gathered together to keep warm and work in the ambient light of a hearth's fire. Meals were cooked and eaten here. In some cultures, the bones of ancestors were buried beneath the hearthstones. The old Latin word for hearth was focus. The hearth was the focus, the centre, of family life. Today many of us are separated from our families by the journey of hours, days and, even, weeks or months. This site explores ways and means of maintaining a focus on family life lived at a distance.
One of the primier ways of maintaining this focus is through devices with "viewports" such as browsers possess. The Chrome V8 rendering engine will be an important tool whether it is deployed in a browser or a standalone application created through a framework such as Electron. But, to avoid the perils of the "device paradigm", this site will not only create ways of staying connected through video and audio, it will explore how these tools actually work.
The hearth was a place of light and warmth where everyday life was shared among kith and kinship networks. Adults and children plied their various skills to produce goods to support their lives and to share with others. A computer's monitor doesn't have to be merely the means of consuming without creating in turn. It can be a means of envisioning ways of staying connected at a remove.
Let's see how that might work out through time. Check in to view the posts and projects at your leisure.
6 August 2026
Respecting and Rejoicing
We pay our respects to the Elders and people of the Nations upon whose land we have lived, learned and worked. We are grateful to have had the chance to raise our immediate family on these lands. We rejoice in the rising generations.