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…

Read More

I was invited to speak at the conference of the MicroHAMS Amateur Radio Club, and am grateful to Kenny Richards for filming my talk on the Microsoft campus in Redmond. This took place about a year after I acquired the Amazon 44 named Nomadness, and gives the history of my technomadic adventures along with a…

Read More

This update is a bit of a divergence from my usual breed of randomness, which typically has something to do with S/V Nomadness, development facilities, technomadic gizmology, or random noodlings triggered by any of the foregoing. I’d like to dedicate this posting to my father, Ed Roberts, who passed away in 2005. The trip to…

Read More

Note: There is a page on this site with the complete schematics and other details of my 8008 system from 1974. This one is merely a musing from a night in the harbor back in 2009. It’s freezing in the harbor, and I’m on one of my too-infrequent work trips… mapping my normal project-management context-switching…

Read More

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…

Read More

I’ve often moaned in these electronic pages about the inefficiency of my current facilities; despite seeming, on the surface, to be a sort of geek paradise (3000 square-foot lab in the woods), the reality borders on absurdity. With the boat a 3-hour round-trip drive away, the rhythm of the project is the precise antithesis of…

Read More

It’s a humble little thing, this microprocessor that will spend its days tucked away under the forward berth, tirelessly keeping an eye on such mundane matters as the amount of sewage in the holding tank and the status of associated valves… and it probably doesn’t deserve all this bloggage. But the Sewage node has some…

Read More

‘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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More