Devine Lu Linvega

Life aboard

The two left Montreal in January 2016 and began living on Pino, a 1982 Yamaha sailboat they bought in Victoria, British Columbia. From Canada's Pacific coast they sailed down the west coast of the United States to Mexico, then on through French Polynesia, the Cook Islands, Niue, Tonga, New Zealand, Fiji and the Marshall Islands to Japan, and later back to Canada.

On the boat, computers run on the small amount of power that solar panels provide, and there is often no internet connection. Modern software that assumes new hardware and an always-on connection either does not run in such an environment or soon becomes unusable. This experience became the starting point for their later work.

Works and tools

Before Hundred Rabbits, Devine made music and games under the name Aliceffekt. These include Hiversaires (2013), an exploration game without words, and Oquonie (2014), a labyrinth game with art by Rek Bell.

As Hundred Rabbits, they have released mainly the following. All are open source and work offline.

• Orca: a programming language for music, built on a grid-shaped screen, in which each letter of the alphabet is an instruction. It drives sound software such as Ableton and SuperCollider over MIDI and OSC
• Uxn / Varvara: Uxn is a virtual machine with only a handful of instructions. Varvara is a computer specification that adds input and output such as screen and sound on top of it; programs are written in the assembly language Uxntal. Once the virtual machine is ported, the same software runs on old or underpowered machines
• Left, Dotgrid and others: a set of small creative tools, such as a text editor and a drawing tool
• Donsol: a dungeon-crawling card game played with a deck of playing cards

Devine's personal site, XXIIVV, is run as a personal wiki that collects their works, reading and sailing logs.

Permacomputing

Hundred Rabbits are among the best-known proponents of "permacomputing", which applies the ideas of permaculture (a sustainable approach to agriculture) to computing. It is a way of thinking that takes limited resources and energy as a given and asks how far, and how, computers can keep being used; Uxn was made as a practice of it. In 2025 Devine gave a talk titled "Permacomputing 101" at the New Zealand event Critical Signals, streamed from the boat while at sea.