Articles by SKR Archives - Page 2 of 13

During my 13 years living in the woods of Camano Island, Washington (house shown above), I became very protective of our forests and other natural resources… and found myself butting heads occasionally with developers and “cash for timber” logging businesses. Much of this was casual participation in the local environmental group (CARE – Camano Action…

This was the most substantial published Microship system architecture discussion, and still, decades later, reflects the basic design concepts underlying my machines. Although the hardware implementation is completely different, the model is the same: distribute low-power networked nodes throughout the environment and provide a means for anything to talk to anything (even cases not anticipated…

There was a point in the 10-year Microship project that I think of as the peak of system design, and only two articles really capture it… the one below, and another in the venerable Dr. Dobbs Journal. I wrote both during a 2-month layover in a rented house in Bellingham where we stayed after first…

Technomadics at Sea - Multihulls Magazine - page 1

An essential part of the armchair sailing library during the Microship project was Multihulls Magazine, and on rare occasions I found my way into its pages. This article was from my brief (2-year) tenure as the land-based “skipper” of Hogfish, a Farrier-folding tri built by John Walton and Mike Michie before they founded Corsair Marine. …

Way back in the early days of my adventuring, I came across a provocative book by Marcus Endicott entitled Vagabond Globetrotting. At some point, he and I connected as fellow paleo-technomads, and a decade later, when he published a book on information sources for wanderers, he invited me to write the foreword. This is that…

This article was the first substantial published description of Microship design, kicking off a decade of development. The wide-ranging text describes the trimaran hull and mechanical structures, operating modes, embedded controls, data collection, productivity systems, audio/video tools including crosspoint switching, radio communications, networking, power generation and management, harsh-environment packaging, and life support. This was the…

I am very fond of this article, which was written in 1993 during the heady days of the Internet’s “takeover” from the mess of competing centralized services. Inspired by my own experiences with technomadics, it anticipates the emergence of online-centered lifestyles… with physical location less and less relevant. The editor of this magazine was Daniel…

I fell in love with the Ultratorch butane soldering irons from Master Appliance after visiting them in Racine during the BEHEMOTH adventure, then incorporating two of them into my mobile lab. This article describes these lovely little tools… written for 73 Amateur Radio Today magazine. The Ultratorch — a Tool for Liberation by Steven K.…

BEHEMOTH near Sun Microsystems in Mountain View

An inevitable side-effect of having the Bikelab at Sun Microsystems was my exposure to a whole new computing culture… I was a Unix and SPARC noob when I landed there, and the learning curves were steep and plentiful. This article, which also kicked off an ongoing series in SunWorld Japan, reflected some of the ways…

This article is a bit of a treasure in the timeline of BEHEMOTH. Published in the premier issue of Marlow RFD (subtitled “Motherboards and Apple Pie”), this was a 2-page spread that captured the insane, driven passion behind the extravaganza of geek obsession that was this final version of the bike. For three years I…

Articles by SKR

Aesthetics versus tree economics

Designing Technomadic Systems – Dr Dobb’s Journal

Ship of Dreams: New Adventures of a Technomad – CQ VHF

Technomadics at Sea – Multihulls

Electronic Traveler – Foreword

Sea Moss Microship – IEEE Potentials

Technomadness and the Internet – Internet World

Ultratorch Review

Anatomy of a Unixcycle – SunWorld

On the Loose in Dataspace