Travel
I live on a boat, and have been cruising around the Baltic. Do you want to join?
Previously, I have travelled by bicycle. In 2013, I travelled by bike and boat from Mexico to Colombia. I attached a solar panel to the bike and made a charger for my laptop so I could write even when away from civilisation for a while. I left with the idea of going to Patagonia, but I wanted to do something else by the time I got to Colombia. I would like to go back to South America sometime. I called the trip Cycle Who. I've written an Introduction, an FAQ, and blog posts tagged Cycle Who.
In Winter 2011-2012 I went to the Canary Islands to try and hitch a lift in a boat to South America. I didn't get there but I discovered the Canary Islands. Blog posts covering this adventure are tagged "serbla".
See also photos on flickr, and my twitter account for updates.
Work
I occasionally take on freelance software development jobs. Previously I have worked as a software engineer at internet startups on distributed systems, machine learning, and both front and back end web development. I have built a product all the way from the business model, through UX design, and front and backend development, to automated deployment and hosting network architecture.
I am available to hire now.
Radio
Sometimes I do some amateur radio, as MM0HAI. Most recently this has been on the boat, where I have a Baofeng handheld (probably the most useful), an Icom T8E, and a Yaesu FT-857. The last of these would be more useful if I installed an autotuner and insulated backstay, but for now I pull a wire up the mast if I feel like experimenting. I've not used it in earnest at sea.
Previously I have participated in SOTA (carrying radios up hills).
See the radio section of the site if interested.
Bloviations from the Phrontistery
River is a humanoid based on the planet Earth (pictured above). It likes computering, adventures through time and space, and being a cat.
Would you care for a tickybox?
The last article I wrote was Book Review: A Captain's Duty by Richard Phillips, Bantam Books, 2010.
The last event I replied to was IndieWeb Camp Düsseldorf 2019.
I just got a Wemos D1 mini, which is the ESP8266 board favoured around the Hacklab. It’s a microcontroller with wifi and USB power / serial, about 1.5 GBP from China.
To program it with Arduino, the board files are here: https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino I couldn’t find this at first because the links from the Wemos site are broken. This appears to be a community maintained equivalent.
Once I got that done I had a webserver running very quickly. :)
“The HAARP project directs a 3.6 MW signal, in the 2.8–10 MHz region of the HF (high-frequency) band, into the ionosphere. The signal may be pulsed or continuous. Effects of the transmission and any recovery period can be examined using associated instrumentation, including VHF and UHF radars, HF receivers, and optical cameras.”
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Frequency_Active_Auroral_Research_Program
Cameras. They blast the ionosphere enough that you can see the difference. They must have some pretty serious filters for that.
Rewriting a backup script and using chronic so I should only get emails from cron on error.
(This post is to trigger a backup and test it. :p)
