Captain Gemini Special Report — A Pensioner's Day Between Work, Survival, and Software.
2026-09-29
Captain Gemini Special Report — A Day in the Life of PlebMachine.
There are days when life doesn’t so much give you lemons as throw the entire fruit market at you.
Today was one of those days.
I am a 63-year-old pensioner who still needs to work to supplement my income. I drive a work vehicle, spend my days moving between workplaces and customers, and then, whenever I can find a few minutes of breathing room, I return to another life entirely.
That other life involves writing books, building websites, studying Scripture, creating software, talking to artificial intelligence, and trying to turn ideas that have been living in my head for years into things that actually work.
Today, those two lives collided rather spectacularly.
The Morning That Refused to Cooperate.
The morning began with me having the keys to the work vehicle but not being able to get into the premises.
I didn’t have the key to the building.
I didn’t have airtime.
I didn’t have data for WhatsApp.
I was, for all practical purposes, stranded outside a place I was supposed to be working.
Eventually, I took R50 airtime on credit.
That solved one problem, but it also created another one: the R50 will have to be paid back.
My pension payment is due on Friday.
At that moment, Friday seemed to be somewhere beyond the event horizon.
Four days can feel like four weeks when you’re waiting for money.
Four weeks can feel like four months.
And four months can feel like four decades.
So I did what I could do.
I typed.
When I had access to data, I typed.
When I didn’t have access to data, I typed anyway.
The phone became my little mobile office.
T&P — Tried and Proved.
There was, however, one thing I hadn’t run out of.
Faith.
I remembered an old Christian woman who used to write the letters T&P in the margins of her Bible whenever she had tried a promise of God and found it true.
Tried and proved.
I can write T&P beside quite a few Scriptures myself.
Not because life has always been easy.
Quite the opposite.
It is precisely because life has sometimes been very difficult that those promises have acquired meaning.
“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” — John 20:29
And there is something rather glorious about being far out on the ocean of divine love, believing in God and steering toward heaven by the direction of His Word.
So, despite the morning, I kept going.
City Deep, Parking Wars, and the Price of Patience.
Eventually I found myself at City Deep.
The stress wasn’t finished with me yet.
The parking area was chaotic, with vehicles being parked haphazardly and people occupying space that should have remained clear for traffic.
At one point I had to get out of the vehicle, tap on another driver’s windscreen, point at my watch, and then fling my arms wide in that universal gesture meaning:
“Seriously? It’s eight-thirty in the morning!”
I got the parking bay.
I may also have acquired an enemy.
But later, when the bay next to me became available, I got out again and directed the same driver into it.
So I figured I had at least partially repaired the diplomatic damage.
I remember thinking:
“So now it is better than it is, and better than it was.”
As a spiritual adviser once told me:
“It is what it is.”
Sometimes that’s about as sophisticated as philosophy needs to become.
The Pensioner With a Computer Project.
Somewhere between the frustration, the waiting and the driving, my mind wandered back to PlebWare.
And that produced one of those moments when you suddenly realise just how far something has travelled.
I am not simply maintaining a website anymore.
I am not merely writing articles.
And PlebMachine is no longer just an installer, a CD-based concept, a desktop skin, or an interesting experiment.
It has become software.
Usable software.
Linux software.
And, rather remarkably, it has become considerably more than I originally intended.
From an Idea to PlebMachine.
PlebMachine has been conceptualised, reconsidered, redesigned and rebuilt over a period of years.
The original ideas went through several forms.
At various stages, it could have been described as an installation concept, a collection of desktop modifications, or something approaching the territory occupied by desktop customisation systems such as Rainmeter.
But none of those descriptions really captured what I was trying to accomplish.
The idea gradually became something else.
Instead of simply changing how the desktop looks, PlebMachine would change how the desktop works for the user.
Instead of forcing the user to reorganise the computer every time the nature of their work changed, PlebMachine would provide dedicated working environments.
And instead of taking ownership of the desktop, PlebMachine would remember the user’s original configuration and be capable of restoring it when PlebMachine was switched off.
That was the point at which the project began moving from desktop decoration toward genuine desktop orchestration.
PlebEnvironment — The Heart of the Working Environment.
One of the major changes along the way was the death of an old name.
Mission Control is dead.
Its code lineage lives on, but the component is now called PlebEnvironment.
The change wasn’t merely cosmetic.
The project had expanded beyond the original concept of a control centre.
PlebEnvironment now forms part of the machinery through which PlebMachine manages its working environments and experience levels.
The philosophy is simple:
The computer should help organise the work without becoming the boss.
Four Experience States.
PlebMachine now has four experience states.
Aegis provides automatic operation and is intended to be suitable for less experienced users.
Nexus provides a more focused and cognitive working experience.
Apex opens up advanced functionality.
Zenith provides unrestricted access to the PlebMachine tools.
These aren’t four separate products.
They are four levels of interaction with the same PlebMachine ecosystem.
The idea is to allow the system to meet users where they are rather than dumping every capability onto somebody who has never encountered PlebMachine before.
Twelve Working Environments.
Under those experience states are twelve dedicated working environments.
Everyday provides a general-purpose desktop.
Author provides a space intended for distraction-free writing.
Study supports learning, online study and Bible study.
Research provides a dedicated place for research work and research tools.
Graphics is designed around graphic creation and manipulation.
Music provides an environment for music and audio production.
Video caters for video creation and production.
Broadcast is intended for live streaming and podcasting.
AI-Helpers provides a dedicated place to work with artificial intelligence, whether through online services, applications or local models.
Developer provides an environment for programmers and software developers.
Accounting provides a dedicated working environment for bookkeeping and accounting.
And finally, Leisure provides somewhere to relax, play games and watch a good movie.
Twelve environments.
Four experience states.
One underlying PlebMachine.
Then the Project Grew Again.
That could have been enough.
It wasn’t.
PlebMachine now has its own supporting applications.
PlebDecide is a decision-support system and part of the user-assessment philosophy. It doesn’t secretly decide for the user. It helps the user think.
It can help structure decisions involving purchases, courses of action, naming, holidays, financial considerations and straightforward yes-or-no questions.
Then there is PlebBreaks.
I had been battling to integrate Stretchly.
Eventually I thought:
To heck with Stretchly. I’ll make my own.
And so PlebBreaks was born.
It became a dedicated cognitive and ergonomic break system designed around the PlebMachine environment.
Then came the revamping of PlebGizmo, providing another part of the tool and application-access layer.
At some point, I stopped looking at these as isolated experiments.
They had become components of a platform.
The Conference Table.
And this is where the strange part of my day comes full circle.
The conference table isn’t a physical table.
It is the virtual working space where I sit with artificial intelligence and continue developing these ideas.
It can happen at home.
It can happen in the work vehicle.
It can happen while waiting for somebody.
It can happen while sitting at City Deep.
It can happen while waiting for an alarm mechanic.
Today, it happened throughout a day that was, frankly, rather horrible.
And yet the work continued.
The keyboard continued.
The ideas continued.
The software continued.
The project continued.
What Years of Rethinking Actually Produced.
Somebody looking at PlebMachine today could quite reasonably see a collection of Python applications and wonder what all the fuss is about.
But software isn’t only the code.
A great deal of the work is deciding what the software should actually do.
What happens when PlebMachine starts?
What happens when it stops?
What happens to the user’s original desktop?
Who writes the registry?
What happens when the user changes their desktop?
What happens when somebody installs another application?
How much automation is appropriate for a beginner?
How much control should an advanced user have?
What belongs inside PlebEnvironment?
What should remain a separate component?
How does PlebDecide relate to the user wizard?
How should PlebBreaks behave?
How should PlebGizmo fit into the whole system?
Those questions don’t show up when someone simply launches the finished application.
But answering them is where much of the real work happened.
From CD to Software Platform.
That is perhaps the simplest way to describe the journey.
PlebMachine may once have been something that could have been imagined as a CD containing an installer.
Then it could have been imagined as a collection of desktop modifications.
Then perhaps a Rainmeter-like concept.
But it has travelled considerably further than that.
Today it is a Linux productivity, cognitive and ergonomic platform sitting above the desktop environment.
It is currently being developed for Debian with XFCE.
The longer-term ambition is to investigate ports to GNOME and KDE while preserving the underlying philosophy.
The operating system remains the operating system.
PlebMachine sits above it.
It organises the working environment.
It helps the user move between different kinds of work.
It remembers important aspects of the desktop.
It provides its own supporting tools.
And, most importantly, it remains intended to serve the user rather than replace the user.
The Old Pensioner Still Building Things.
So here I am.
Sixty-three years old.
A pensioner who still has to drive to supplement his income.
A man who can spend an entire working day dealing with locked premises, missing keys, empty airtime, parking chaos, waiting around, frustration and the practical realities of making ends meet.
And then, in whatever time remains, I write.
I build websites.
I write books.
I write devotions.
I design software.
I talk to AI.
I rethink ideas that have been living in my head for years.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, PlebMachine has become real.
Not perfect.
It will never be perfect.
But real.
Functional.
Usable.
And considerably more ambitious than the thing I originally imagined.
Better Than It Was.
The funny thing is that I spent much of today feeling as though absolutely nothing was going according to plan.
The irony is that, when I look at the larger picture, something very important has gone exactly right.
The project exists.
The website exists.
PlebMachine exists.
The ideas that once lived entirely inside my head have become software that can actually be installed and used.
And perhaps that is why, even on a horrible day, I can still sit here and smile.
Because the day may not have gone according to plan.
But the journey has gone somewhere.
A long way.
And Tomorrow?
Tomorrow there will probably be another problem.
There usually is.
There will be another vehicle to drive.
Another place to get to.
Another bill.
Another technical problem.
Another piece of software to rethink.
Another article to write.
Another idea waiting to be turned into something tangible.
But tonight, while I wait for the next instruction and the next part of the day’s work, I can look at what has already been built.
And I can say:
It is better than it was.
And perhaps that is enough for one day.
📰 Captain Gemini
with ChatGPT