In insane times, we have to refine our tools. I've never thought of myself as a "prepper" per se, but building all my geek systems onto a hand truck feels like a really good idea. A distant descendant of BEHEMOTH now under construction in my lab... microship.com/meet-bionode/

Bionodal branding, using a beautiful artifact from about 30 years ago -- something that began life as quarter inch stainless steel plate and was cut with wire EDM at a friend's machine shop in Chicago, attached with 3M High Bond to the soundbar.

I know I haven't talked about the big picture of this project yet, but here's another close up... The PiKVM is great at some things but not so much at local console. Fixed this with series connected cheapie for "manual and auto" modes, selecting local console devices or complex network stuff.

More blinkies! Third Pi in the cluster now alive - installed to SD and then cloned image to 1 TB SSD and changed boot order. And the KVM is working after lots of hair pulling.

PiKVM headbutting this weekend, complex and counterintuitive. But it is well clamped to a rack shelf and now blinking.

Observing elevated plasma concentrations of Atrial Natriuretic Peptide after nocturnal AFib episodes, correlated with my cat's refusal to engage with adhesive CPAP-adjunct lip tape residue, I created a retrospective study on potential Jacobsonian diagnostic modality. 🧪 microship.com/feline-afib-...

A random moment from 40 years ago, east Texas, on the road with the Winnebiko

Current state of the Winnebiko 2 console, which I moved into the shop yesterday while clearing a workspace for the new project. I've always really liked this version, which covered about 6,000 mi on both coasts of the US.

Been swamped with a new project (still in stealth mode), digitizing, and reacting with dread to the goings on that dominate the news. Now and then, we just need a bit of sanity preserving humor. Isabelle, who is now 15, wrote a book. Lead photo AI, writing biological. microship.com/feline-exist...

Making things with 20/20 t-slot extrusion... Geek Tinker Toys!

I just parked my "prehistory of a technomad" on YouTube, a little under 7 minutes. Plan is to do additional videos spanning the whole adventure epoch (including Deep Geekery), with the main body of the story continuing in text. youtu.be/-RzBPcDYCF0 (And I'm back to work on Substack!)

Hacking calculus class a half century ago... And a few thoughts on the dreaded "permanent record" microship.com/hacking-calc...

1984. Cold, cold, snow on the banks, tires rushing, trucks changing lanes, ears popping. Deep chill, violent shivers, insane grins, teeth frozen, all lost in the blast of wind. Headlight off to save the battery. If I’m going to kill myself, it might as well be with dramatic intensity...

Fun digitizing some of my own photos for a change... old slide binders and carousels are turning up treasures from those halcyon days. This one is from sometime in 1987, during the Winnebiko 2 era.

A moment on the road in 1991 with Macintosh Portable in the BEHEMOTH bicycle console (controlled by ultrasonic head mouse and handlebar keyboard).

It was a treat getting off the rock for a day in America... I have gotten jaded about ferry trips over the past decade. I took a break from working on system design to play tourist. (In the looming darkness of the age in which we find ourselves, the little moments count... I must do more of them.)

This is Isabelle, who's now 15. She helps with everything, including lab overload, pain, the dread of imminent autocracy, existential angst, procrastination followed by despair, unkempt adulting, and the annoyance of being biological and finite.

I made the Sunday funnies on September 30th, 1984... With more details in their monthly Enter magazine. Good times.

Another shipment of home movies trundling up I-5 for digitizing...

Roberts Law of Non-Triviality: “There is an inverse relationship between the number of words required to describe a task and the amount of time required to complete it.” Something to do with the What-How spectrum…

The Roberts Law of Fractal To-Do List Complexity: “Each item on a list is merely the title of another list.”

The Apollo AIR-1 keeps an eye on air quality in the mobile lab, with the VOC level (SEN55) spiking from film cleaner when I scan old movies. I'm adding an automation to turn on the new ventilation fan whenever it decides things are getting unreasonable. this amazing ESP32 box is about 2.5" across.

I've been noticing how quickly CO2 levels build up in the lab, especially with more than one person in there... not uncommon to push 2000 ppm with visitors (450 is normal outdoor level). This fan retrofit replaces the original equipment piece of junk, and dropped 1700 to 700 in about 15 minutes.

Parts of this story are difficult, with relationships, life choices, and a cultural shift that demands surgical precision. I just posted chapter 6, in which our technomadling finds that the shakedown is more complex than expected. open.substack.com/pub/nomadicr...

Just hung this in the mobile lab window for times when I'm recording. This 48 ft trailer is basically a big metal box that would be a Faraday cage if it weren't for this tiny window... and it already has a Zigbee hub, cellular antenna, and security camera. Time for a roof platform!

I've been so busy with Nomadic Research Labs editing, digitizing, and election horror that I had not posted a digitizing report since April! Fixed that today, with a piece about the wire recorder including sample audio. Fun paleogeekery... microship.substack.com/p/the-wire-r...

From real estate to wheel estate, on a micro scale... The adventure begins, shakily in places, but moments on the road are already setting the tone. "Are yew with NASA?" 41 years ago... open.substack.com/pub/nomadicr...

Rebranded the publication project to Nomadic Research Labs, since that really was the focus through the '80s... and just posted the launch! Enough with the agonizing and planning, now on the road (September 1983), with a send-off in the CompuServe parking lot. open.substack.com/pub/nomadicr...

New chapter just posted... on the eve of departure. Raw emotion, sleeplessness, and the first loaded test ride at 3 a.m. A blend of excitement and WTF... open.substack.com/pub/nomadicr...

I have naturally avoided the color orange for the past year or so, but that's not the fault of this Dirona pellucida who was hanging out on a piling here at the port. #nudibranchs #gardenslugsindrag

I've been thinking in terms of running Computing Across America chapters on Substack weekly, but that would take 2 years! No reason to not let them run asynchronously... life is short. As a teaser, this photo is from 1987 -- a demo of the bike while visiting GEnie in Rockville, Maryland.

Bird TV with Isabelle

Photo processing across 50 years. Enlarger is from my apartment darkroom (with cheesy line printer art) in 1974-5; copy station with mirrorless Sony is in my current digitizing lab, capturing RAW for Lightroom. I remember dodging and burning in the olden days... versus AI and Photoshop magic now.

Sunbreak at the lab compound today. (Gratuitous filters, but Puppette was murky in all that backlight and the photographer was lazy.) The 48 ft "Delta" media digitizing lab is the one on the right.

Chapter 0 is posted... with notes about the primitive online communities that were coming into focus in the early '80s, as well as the technological context that made the idea compelling (hardwired to the wall, chained to desk, mountains of paper...) nomadicresearchlabs.substack.com/p/prehistory...

Next in the Computing Across America series on Substack, my six and a half minute video called "Prehistory of a Technomad." This was my DaVinci Resolve learning curve over the past few months, and I'm quite pleased with it, although I now know it's too much work to create video of the entire book.

Feels surreal to be posting stories about freedom and technomadic adventure from 40 years ago... hopefully an occasional antidote to the orange nightmare ahead. Brief intro posted today: nomadicresearchlabs.substack.com/p/the-first-...

The point of my Nomadness boat projects was open-ended global voyaging... but I didn't reach escape velocity (despite writing a book by that name). This dreamy photo taken while enroute to Princess Louisa Inlet in 2018 gives me a pang... especially the Canada part. Missed the launch window.

This is a peek into the passion that drives makers, hackers, and other victims of chronic gizmological obsession. If I could be said to have a “geek manifesto,” then I suppose it would be this. (From 2004, writing about the Microship project...) microship.com/gonzo-engine...

"The artist steps into the canvas of macro and micro to remind us of scale, giving a high-five to the hyphae while drawing attention to the vast gulf between the ambient humidity in which mildew thrives and the explosive intensity of the blast that sweeps it away." microship.com/artspeak/

40 years ago in Texas, pushin' west on mah trusty steed, Winnebiko. I was posting tales on CompuServe, writing on a Model 100 and hitching up to pay phones. And now it's time! I am bringing the adventure story back while I still can, with a newsletter from the time machine and video mini-features.

Lighting up visiting Aequorea Victoria jellyfish with ultraviolet, causing them to emit 509 nm around the skirt of the bell. Green Fluorescent Protein can be edited into all sorts of things as an indicator of cellular activity, and was first discovered in Friday Harbor.

Demonstrating Prestel at the National Online Meeting in 1981. At its peak, this videotex service had about 90,500 subscribers...

"Please no cases of mistaken identity," she says.

Because of the spherical wavefront and guaranteed Constant Gaussian Curvature, spectral purity is perfectly optimized for instrumental color, and the system adapts over time to your musical choices with a nominal 400-hour burn-in period synchronized to the warranty. microship.com/audio-bs/

Diver down, replacing zincs and scraping running gear. Isabelle is doing red-alert binaural localization using interleaved saccadic and pinna scans, complicated by the diver's movement. She keeps checking with me to be sure I know what's happening in her medial superior olive. "Steev... serious!"

I really should reissue these shirts designed back in 1994 by Faun while we were in the Microship Lab at UCSD... One of the first T-shirts ever made with a URL (on the back). Thanks @edlazowska.bsky.social for finding this and taking such a nice photo... great memories!

Spring of 1970 -- somehow induced my parents to drop me at the interstate to hitchhike into the unknown. My mother was not pleased about this, but tried to look good for the camera. I was 17, and after a few adventures landed in Joliet to get a job as a deckhand on barges. (Digitized 8mm film)

A random treasure from Deep Inventory... a couple of panel-mount telephone leaf switches, from back in the day when you could determine the state of a system by looking at it. I have too much stuff.

Getting to know the wire recorder in the lab... I love this little printed insert that shows how to do audio editing. It's a good metaphor to keep in mind when I'm layers deep in a DAW timeline.