NOTE: One of the hardest parts of spending a lifetime getting to know amazing people is that inevitably… we lose some of them. I am very sad to report that David Warman, introduced in the story below, died on September 23, 2018 after a difficult battle with cancer. He was one of my favorite people…

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This snippet from the old Microship blog (in the Blogger platform) captures the approximate moment when I started working on the platform-independent toolset that came to be called Shacktopus… something that can best be visualized as the equivalent of a 2012-era smartphone but weighing about 15 pounds and looking like a very fat laptop. In…

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Funny, the way evolving technology changes our expectations and cultural norms. Back in the Olden Days <creak>, I recall sitting around with pals at UCSD, looking up domain names on whois, and snickering about reserving all the good ones that might someday be worth something. Books, multihulls, shopping, technology… all those and more dotcoms were…

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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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I was contacted in 2003 by Prestel, an “Art and Architecture Publishing House based in Munich,” asking if I would send some photos for use in a book by Sean Topham about portable architecture. Following their success with Xtreme Houses, this one would focus on a subject dear to my heart… highly mobile residences. I…

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When the Microship project ran out of steam in 2002 after a decade of work, I had the urge to get on the water without any more complexity than necessary. Of course, that is a highly subjective subject, and with my technomadic affliction it would not do to merely hop in a kayak and paddle around.…

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This short snippet appeared in the Gadgets book of the Ripley’s World’s Weirdest series (by Mary Packard, Scholastic Paperbacks, October 1, 2002). I am honored to share page 45 with Dean Kamen, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the ACM1 expo a few years ago. During BEHEMOTH development, we had a code term…

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This just turned up during a 2018 search, and I remember it now… an email interview back around the latter phase of the Microship project. This captures a moment that is not otherwise well-documented, so with thanks to Sean Healy I am reproducing it here. The original is in the nettime mailing list archives. By…

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By 2002, the Microship project was starting to feel like work… creeping featuritis, endless landing-gear refinement, and complex integration of electronics that we had developed so long before that the whole network side (originally done in FORTH on 68HC11 boards) was being re-designed with modern tools. I had started the Inside Microship book project, but there was…

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I wrote this piece after spending quite a bit of time designing an automated solution to a messy problem: distributing tonnage on a boat in such a way that she remains balanced in longitudinal, transverse, and vertical axes. Marine architects made this issue abundantly clear when I was first designing the Microship, so my geeky…

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