I was most delighted to find my little Reaching Escape Velocity book mentioned in the pages of my favorite magazine — creative makers were exactly the readers I had in mind when writing it. The book covers the art of working with sponsors, volunteers, and media in order to launch audacious gonzo engineering projects… and is…

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Port Hadlock sunset

I miss the mental simplicity and steady progress of only working on one thing. I reminisce about Epic Projects of yesteryear, and they all seem to share the single characteristic of being grand obsessions so all-consuming that the rest of my life was relegated to meatspace maintenance and the bare-minimum business of hustling for cash…

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Why does it take the stirrings of springtime to accelerate the indoor jobs, all those geeky things that should be done by the time it’s warm enough to embed them in a boat? I sit at my desk, unencumbered by the customary layers of insulation, doing everything that I could have finished over the winter:…

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Hoo-boy, this is a crazy time. Whether on the cusp of TEOTWAWKI, the transition to an initial cap in the word depression, or just a bloody dust-up in the sleight-of-handoff of dictatorial powers, there is a sense of contextual discontinuity that makes it hard to maintain steady project focus. Of course, I’m perfectly capable of…

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BEHEMOTH computerized recumbent bicycle console with Macintosh

This is a peek into the passion that drives makers, hackers, and other victims of gizmological obsession. Versions of this have been widely quoted over the years and it becomes cyclically relevant as I dive into new projects, so I decided to add it to my archives. It is available in hardcopy as part of my Reaching Escape…

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