These are the voyages of the hand truck, Shacktopus. Her continuing mission… to seek out new loads and strange environments… to boldly blink where no one has blinked before. On a voyaging sailboat, stable power goes with the territory: a huge battery bank charged by isolated shore cable and solar panels, diesel genset with a…

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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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This is one of my all-time favorite bits of media coverage, and not just because I love Make: magazine (both print and blog). The author of this piece, Howard Wen, really nailed the essence of my technomadic projects… including the wince-inducing irony of their tendency to explode fractally into a level of complexity greater than…

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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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