I spoke at the MicroHAMS conference in Redmond this past weekend… my first “gig” in quite a while. It went well, I met lots of interesting and creative digital radio geeks, and even managed to catch up a bit with some tech that I’m going to be using Real Soon Now. Making a slide presentation…

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‘Tis a busy time, this January in the Nomadhouse: a wonderful visit from my daughter, Zen Cart learning curve, Satie’s Gnossiennes, stoking the home fires, magnetized boat curtains, lab entropy reduction, and plunging into ship network design… and that’s just the fun stuff, interrupted too often by the psychic energy sinks of daily life and…

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Wow, I haven’t been in this mode for years, and I feel rusty! Downloading libraries, reading documentation, defining data structures, parsing strings, and even sketching a retro flowchart or two… this is definitely Good Times, but man, am I ever out of shape. But still, hot on the heels of installing Zen Cart for local…

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Cold, dark winter days are demotivating and I didn’t get it together to go see how the boat handles a foot of snow loading, but I am happy to report progress on three simultaneous fronts: the ship’s Shacktopus network, the Boat Hacking book, and an online store to conjure a nickel generator from the first…

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This freezing week has been a time for system design work, the start of a new book, waterworks fabrication, and preparing my office for use as a ship simulator during the software-development phase. We did make one brief run to the boat last week, then got stuck in a nasty snowstorm enroute back… which turned…

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Note: this was written in 2008, while I was trying to make sense of the network architecture of the boat. Both Shacktopus and Datawake have since been re-used for other systems in my life. Sorry for the confusion! Real physical tasks are queuing up, but it’s a rainy holiday weekend and I find myself more…

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Note: My Shacktopus neologism has had three meanings. The first one was designed in 2005… a sort of paleo-smart phone of backpack scale, bringing lots of resources into a single system for substrate-independent technomadics… I called it a “communications laptop.” The second use of the term was never well-defined, and was a temporary name for…

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Nomadness has completed her shakedown cruise — covering 621 miles in 2.5 months. This is a languid pace, in geographical terms, but the experience gained was considerable… enough to induce a near-total inversion of the project priority list, satisfy a host of initial learning curves, smoke out the weaknesses of the ship, and advance to…

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