Microship

The More Things Change...

2009-04-04T20:05:00.000-07:00

The current quest for workspace to build the latest gizmological extravaganza triggered a stray engram in my creaky wetware, and googling my archives I find this from 1990:

But have you ever explored an unfamiliar, overpopulated town with the intent of finding a few hundred square feet of free workspace? Even with a famous bike, it’s not easy. I called here and there, growing dispirited, watching the inexorable passage of time with something akin to rage. I had grim thoughts of the whole shtick falling apart—of losing momentum, running out of options, and joining the considerable homeless population of Santa Cruz... still hustling for bike parts and dreaming of a return to the Road, pulling out my faded photos to show anyone who would buy me a cup of coffee, hoarding once-glittering gewgaws in mildewed boxes stashed in sympathetic crawl spaces around town. Shivering, I’d wirewrap on a heating vent, reduced to using small-scale integration for lack of a development system to support my precious but useless stash of programmable gate arrays. I would huddle in the Mission, coding FORTH on the backs of old religious tracts, eyes taking on that crazed gleam that keeps the others away. Technology would pass me by, but sometimes, driven by a confused tangle of memories and dreams, I would take to the streets, showing my tattered bike to likely looking passers-by and hitting them up for bits of stainless hardware or maybe a quarter for a 74HC04.

19 years later, and this still feels ominously familiar.

Lab and House on Camano Island

2009-02-27T15:36:00.001-08:00

I arrived on Camano Island in 1998, with the intent of quickly finishing the Microship project and taking off on the expedition. But boat projects have a way of taking their own sweet time (especially übergeeky ones like this), and the years kept passing... while I grew ever more comfortable in this wooded paradise at the northern edge of Puget Sound.

Things have changed now, and my partner and I are preparing to make the transition to a full-time life aboard Nomadness, a 44-foot steel pilothouse monohull (about as different from the tiny Microship trimaran as can be imagined!). In the process of doing this, we need to move to waterfront facilities to complete the geeky boat projects... and that leads me to the subject of this blog posting.

photo of our forest by Chuck Willyard

The Microship Lab is For Rent

There is a photo album over here, and what I'd like to do now is provide a bit more information about the facilities than is allowed in the limited caption format. The primary property is a 6-acre parcel that includes a 1150 square-foot passive-solar house and a 3000 square-foot shop building... as well as a stream, an acre of open meadow, and a garden shed. In addition, I have an adjacent 5 acres of forest that might be available, and a good friend owns an additional 10 that abuts the other two. So depending on your needs, you could have 6, 11, or 21 acres to play on.

The house itself is an unusual one, and was featured in Fine Homebuilding back in 1995 (the four pages are visible at the photo album linked above). A "sunspace" with translucent fiberglass roof and roll-up glass door exhibits the greenouse effect when it's sunny-but-cold, prompting thermostatically controlled fans to pull air from high in that region and distribute it low in the house. With R-40 structural foam panels making up the roof, this is quite effective... and when it's not sunny, the efficient little RAIS woodstove does the job beautifully.

Of course, my primary geek playground has been the lab, a monitor-style pole building erected in 1998 (with numerous upgrades since then). It's on a 40x56 slab, giving a ground floor (concrete pad) of 2,240 square feet, and there is a suite of offices upstairs that add about 750 more square feet for a total of approximately 3,000.

The upper floor is split into four zones: my master office, very well finished and super-insulated with built-in desk and lab benches, a rougher central area used for shipping and inventory, another well-finished office with pass-through doors, and a little storage area at the head of the stairs. Both "nice" offices have drop ceilings with electronic fluorescent troffers, quality carpets, and well-finished walls.

Directly below all this in the main lab, a roll-up door opens into an almost full-length area (large enough for a couple of cars... or Microships). This is flanked by shop zones... to the west, with the main entrance, there are professionally finished built-in workbenches and huge inventory shelves, a woodstove, and a propane unit heater. To the east is an open area currently used for machine shop and general heavy work, and one end of that is covered by a large storage mezzanine. To the south is a "hall of inventory" that wraps around the central open bays and leads to the stairs. A small bathroom is roughed-in with all plumbing, and the central regions have internal walls added to help with dust control when doing dirty work.

The 3,000 square-foot lab building

Interfaces

A lot went into the "infrastructure" of the building, which is 750 feet back in the woods relative to the house. A 3-foot-wide, 3-foot-deep trench was excavated down the middle of the road, and we laid in 1.5" waterline terminating at the yard hydrant, 4-0/4-0/2-0 electrical cable for 100-amp service split at the shed (separate from the house), and 30 conductors of copper in three direct-bury silicone-filled cables. The latter take care of an Inter-Tel GLX phone system, a Napco Gemini monitored security system with separate house and lab zones, and the broadband net connection.

The network is worth some elaboration. For a while I wanted to use a couple of yagi antennas to do a WiFi link between the 1.5 Megabit/sec cable modem in the house and the lab, but punching a fresnel-sized hole through the forest and keeping it open is a lot of work. By the time I was looking at this problem, it was too late to bury Cat-5 cable (and it would have been very expensive), yet we needed a fast connection in the lab (even more than in the house, which is as far as the cable company would bring their line). What to do?

The trick was to use a back-to-back pair of SpeedStream 5851 SDSL routers to bridge the two LANs. The wiring itself is just a randomly-chosen pair in one of the three 10-conductor direct-bury cables, and phone-grade wiring was used to connect from those to convenient SpeedStream mounting locations in the buildings. We're seeing a steady 1.5 megabit/sec symmetrical link over vanilla copper (which amazes me, having grown up in an era where "3 kilocycle bandwidth" was taken as gospel). There is more detail here if you Googled your way to this page and want to know how we did it.

Needless to say, all this will stay with the facilities... it is an essential part of the building wiring.

The plumbing is partly done; all the bathroom stuff was cast into the concrete foundation, so it's ready for sink, toilet, shower, and extra wash-up sink. There is no septic system, but it percs just fine (2007 test) and will take a conventional gravity-fed drainfield.

Thermally, the building has been fully re-insulated with R-19, then sheathed internally with OSB and painted. It's quite cozy now, and the huge woodstove keeps up just fine. There are also a pair of propane tanks (rented), a giant unit heater for thermostatically controlled heat, and the main office upstairs has an electric unit built into the wall.

Not a bad work environment... the bench structure has since been painted black

Looking for Geeky Digs?

If you're one of the unusual folks who salivates at the notion of a shop that is 3 times the size of your house, would love to have your own forest with year-round stream, and can function effectively in a rural setting about an hour from Seattle, then perhaps this is for you. The rent is $2400/month, with a potential allowance of $400/month off that in exchange for agreed improvements to facilities or land if there is mutual interest.

Cheers!
Steve

A Little Comment on Serendipity

2006-10-04T11:05:00.000-07:00

My active bloggage these days is over on Nomadness, as that's the new boat project; this one is becoming a catch-all for random commentary that might be a bit more enduring than those ephemeral snippets on my live page that, after a few days online, are whisked off to the bit bucket the moment new ones arrive.

A friend was remarking recently about the increasing number of "small world" moments in her life as she pursues ever more interesting projects -- wondering aloud if this is merely random chance or if there are larger forces at work. I had so much fun responding that I thought I'd share the essence of it here:

I've seen this phenomenon in the hard-core geek culture (or "hackers," in the classic sense of folks who get pleasure from circumventing limitations, not in the bad-guy sense of destroying things). There is a relatively small percentage of the population that is out there on the creative asymptote, pushing envelopes and inventing things, and once you start to mingle with any part of it, you quickly make connections across what may seem to be an insanely diverse range of specialties. If you are yourself a specialist, you may never notice the "small world" phenomenon in this context, but if you are working on complex systems like geeky boats... where one high profile project includes embedded microprocessors, advanced ultra-light composites, satellite communication, solar power, navigation, sealed low-friction mechanical linkages, tricky problems involving wheels, and countless other interesting things... then your movement within creative circles and the fallout of friends-of-friends will inevitably trigger a variety of startling full-circle moments. It's not really about probability in the context of billions of people on the planet; it's about the rarefied world of people who are actively being creative instead of toiling away (however competently) at a defined task... or just crank-turning and consuming.

There's another delightful effect, and this is my answer to people who observe, in a sort of breathless New-Age way, that we were meant to meet. I see no reason to believe that there's a "universe" watching out for us and setting up connections, although when you look back at your life in retrospect it often seems a bit too perfect that you met so-and-so at such-and-such a time, without which some major life-defining event would have never occurred. But we should give ourselves more credit. As we wander through the years making choices and dealing with the results, we presumably amass some useful level of wisdom which will help us refine those choices in the future: wasting less time, optimizing return on investment, recognizing love, and maximizing the probability of growth. Every day there are countless little choices... Do I smile back at this stranger? Do I take a moment to write a more thoughtful email than I would normally compose in response to this question? Do I spend a bit more time researching this puzzle to which I haven't yet found a satisfying answer?

Over time, we learn the little behavioral cues -- the signs that someone has skills and insights of value, the "spark" of consciousness in the eyes of a potential friend, the twinkle of humor that reveals a deep shared context without which context-switches would make no sense, the subtle glow between the lines of email that reveals much more than the bare lexical content. If we pay attention to these things, even subconsciously, they pay off thus: we end up spending time with brilliant and wonderful people whom we were meant to meet!

-Steve

A Flurry of Updates

2006-05-11T12:41:00.000-07:00

There's quite a bit of news since my last posting, long ago and far away in Kentucky. The old homestead has been shut down, and I hauled a Wells-Cargo trailer full of eBayables back home to Camano Island. (Photos and details of the truck/trailer rig are over here).

The main thrust at the moment is acquiring and outfitting a ship of live-aboard scale, and the quest has had some bizarre twists... so many that the ship to be named Nomadness now has its own blog. At this writing, that is all about Gypsy Spirit, a 53' steel pilothouse cutter that I now think of as a very close call. The other blog tracks the strange tale, but basically it was an object lesson in how easily one can fall in love with a boat, only to realize with reluctance, after over $3K in surveys and expert opinions, that regardless of a sexy workboat patina it would involve an epic project and a scary amount of money to be truly ready for offshore voyaging. I'm now back on the quest, somewhat poorer, but considerably wiser regarding the wiles of brokers, the seductive allure of a geeky ship, and the hidden dangers of Very Old Steel.

During all this, I haven't been entirely idle here in the Microship/Shacktopus lab. One of the recurring irritants that is doubtless familiar to anyone who hauls around a bag of indispensable gadgets is the sloppy layer of related power supplies and interface widgets that ends up cluttering the space around your computer. I finally got so tired of this (especially after taking a trip with bags of tangled wall-warts and USB docking ports) that I built a docking pack. That link gives the how-to details; here's the end result:

It works beautifully, although it is by no means optimized (switching all chargers together can be thought of as Phantom Loads Writ Large; that will change as soon as a I take the time to make a proper switch-box). Still, it has gone a long way toward decluttering my desk and streamlining a quick departure.

In other news, I've been going through the audio-recording learning curve and tool-acquisition, and am about to podcast (for free) the full text of Computing Across America, chronicling the first 10,000 miles of my adventures as a "high-tech nomad" back in the '80s. This will not only help unshackle the book from its long imprisonment as an obscure and out-of-print dead-tree edition, but also get me comfortable with the audio publishing process without having to go through the painful and self-referential phase of podcasting about podcasting that seems so common these days. ("OK, I am now switching over to the condenser mic, and turning on the compressor VST plug in... this should give us a cleaner sound...").

Speaking of which, I'm using the excellent MXL 990 Condenser Microphone with Shockmountalong with the M-Audio MobilePre USB Mobile Preamp and Audio Interfaceto make the connection to the Mac. I seem to have the best luck recording in Audacity; for some reason it's noisy in Garage Band. I am really enjoying Podcasting Hacksby Jack Herrington, one of the great "Hacks" series from O'Reilly. It's current enough that all the links still work, and is really helping with the initial podcasting learning curve. Should have a first book chapter to announce Real Soon Now.

Finally, I'm ramping up the tonnage-reduction, since dormant possessions around here are like a million tiny anchors that, like that image in Gulliver's Travels, collectively keep me rooted to this spot (not to mention the considerable brain-clutter of knowing where all this stuff is). The latest tool for this is the new Microship General Store on eBay, which seems to be working much better than the old electronic garage sale on this website. Lots of stuff there. Want some?

Cheers!
Steve

Cybertronics and Other Antiquities

2005-09-23T15:17:00.000-07:00

I'm trying desperately to get out of this old house in Kentucky and back to the Pacific Northwest, where, in addition to Shacktopus, there's a boat in my immediate future. I'm stuck in a time warp here...

A relic from the past just turned up in family archives: I published this catalog 30 years ago, during the heyday of my fledgling company called Cybertronics (I should have hung onto that trademark and grabbed the domain name when I had the chance!). The origins of my "Wordy" moniker are clear here; one of my customers sent me an 11x17 piece of paper with that monster sentence fully diagrammed, along with the scrawled note: "By God, it actually works!"

<creak> Yes, those were the days. On page 14, you could buy an Intel 8080 for only $50, and 2102 1Kx1 static RAMs were only $2.50 each! Let's see... if I have my math right, that means the 1 Gig of 32-bit RAM in this iMac G5 would cost just under $84 million if implemented in 2102 chips, not including packaging hardware. It would be slower too. And really hot.

Ode to New Orleans

2005-08-28T20:07:00.000-07:00

I have a backlog of material that needs to go here, snippets of things posted on the Microship Live Page during this time I have spent in Kentucky, dealing with the death of my father. An aggregate posting of this 2-month era will appear here soon.

But at the moment, on the eve of the landfall of Katrina, my thoughts are in N'Awlins. It seems fitting to repost something I wrote ages ago, back during the dreamlike Miles with Maggie epoch... I offer it here to help those who only know New Orleans from the current Terror of Nature! coverage on CNN to understand something of the magic of this city, unlike any other in the United States.

Born Toulouse
New Orleans, Louisiana
Steven K. Roberts - July 14, 1988

There’s a sort of melancholy about this city, you know, a strange melancholy that excites the lusts and touches the soul... and every descent from our balconied French Quarter suite into street-level turmoil makes the keyboard fingers itch. Stories lurk in the dark eyes that glower from shadows, in the antics of children marked by street life, in the crenelated faces of those who were here to watch the first electric streetlights sharpen their familiar shadows. This is a rare thing in post-video America: a city’s identity proclaimed by every street, every guitar lick, every face, every shot of Jagermeister swilled before breakfast in Molly’s Irish Pub.

And in the deep sultry night the rhythms of cultures mingle. Stand at Toulouse and Bourbon and let them shake you - a thrumming confusion of blues, rock, jazz, Dixie, and a passing nuclear-powered automotive rap machine with enough oomph to perform CPR on the driver. Swirling through the violent acoustic crossfire is a motley fluid of drunken humanity, and if my metaphors seem mixed... it’s no accident. So is the reality.

People! Blacks from the projects, street-wise and native, white eyes darting between the blues man’s golden sax and the tan legs that lure imaginations past the hem of a passing red miniskirt. Tourists of all flavors, ambling with too-deliberate ease along a path that avoids the ruffians - eyes alert to the approach of hustlers, drunks, or the titillating shopfronts of commercial naughtiness. Sixties carryovers, ponytailed, attitudes revealed less by hard-rock style than by a sort of Rockwell hardness index of the eyes. Hawkers, luring people into doorways to glimpse nude women writhing on smoky stages. Cops, jaded and confident, frisking passers-by with a glance and arresting the city’s descent into behavioral entropy by their very presence. The rich, too well dressed, slumming. The bottom out-of-sight poor, eyes pleading, slumped against dirty walls in visible dejection. Con artists, accosting the naive. Musicians, easy in their element but disturbingly ordinary-looking off stage, commuting the side streets with battered instrument cases. Mimes, eloquent and graceful, filling cash boxes with the wordless poetry of dance. Hookers swaying practiced hips under the lacy incongruities of Frederick’s. Librarians on furlough from the conference, walking in close wide-eyed groups in this place far from Kansas. Ordinaries, who could be up to the most heinous of evils and never show it. Gays, simpering down the street with hands on each other’s bottoms. Cabbies lending a touch of hard-edged New York raucousness with ready honks and impatient driving styles. Whooping college students, hell-bent on having a good time, clutching their paper-cupped Hurricanes while getting down in coarse parody of the bloods who lend authenticity to what might otherwise degenerate into a Daytona Beach. Old coots, young nimble black break-dancers, lost drunk white high-school kids, businessmen recovering from business, toughs on missions of darkness and terror, brain-damaged druggies slurring curses, and the gaudy human echoes of Mardi Gras. And above all, such a variety of bodies and faces that no stroll through the maelstrom can fail to yield arousal, disgust, longing, fear, awe, nostalgia, and laughter (sometimes... all by the same person.)

* * *
Jackson Square. Jax Brewery. Cafe du Monde. The shops and museums of Royal Street. The city by day is awash in tourism, an economy based on T-shirts, biegnets, ceramic masks, artwork, and endless variations on the almighty souvenir. For 75 cents, you can knock back an oyster shooter - a raw gob of glistening gray flesh swimming in a dollop of Bloody Mary mix. At Mr. B’s Bistro, the bartender muddles an Old Fashioned while keeping up a running commentary on local food, music, and shops. At Molly’s breakfast, fogged penitent eyes and tortured foreheads mark the hung-over. It’s all here: portrait artists competing for sittings, joggers in the park, calliope toots under rising columns of riverboat smoke, sunsets over the cathedral, fleshy old women in ghastly pastels clutching beaded handbags, a pricey gallery of Lennon and Erte, bored horses with flowered hardhats standing before idle buggies, coarse propositions muttered to any female on the street, a cappella falsetto soul scatting, mingled languages, heart-pounding glimpses of flesh and ecstasy, ripoffs, good deals, brutal humidity, and interludes of iced cappuccino to cool the sweat.

And what delights me most in all this is that it knows itself, celebrates itself, procreates itself like a giant mutant amoeba. New Orleans is its own species, not a homogenized amalgam of malls, billboards, and suburban conformity; this city rejects the ordinary by seducing it, assimilating it, and changing it forever.

* * *
It’s hard to leave this place. I write now at a worn table in Molly’s, dark walls around me plastered with yellowed business cards dating back to the 60’s. The clientele is varied: hungover Smiley asleep against the pay phone, a woman in too-tight leather, a street-scarred longhaired Asian, a scattering of tattooed regulars. Another perfect omelette just met its match, and I alternate between coffee, water, and Jagermeister while trying to capture something of this town. And oddly, I find I don’t want to go.

Cities usually chase me away with noise and danger. This place has both in abundance, but I think there’s no hurry... and I certainly don’t miss the hot smelly bus and its load of clutter. I know this little place down on Decatur where the jambalaya can make you crazy...

Shacktopus Debut

2005-06-27T19:06:00.000-07:00

Well, the first waypoint has been reached... a public showing of the Shacktopus system. It was certainly not finished (no RigNexus and no cabling), but the gross packaging was completed in time for the Sea-Pac amateur radio convention in Seaside, Oregon.

That's Budd, W3FF, of Buddipole fame examining the box; Jeannie and I are working the booth. She's now a ham, by the way, and had a ball with her first glimpse of the radio-geek culture... preparing her somewhat for Field Day, a week later, when she discovered the double-X advantage of having a YL voice during a contest on HF.

Anyway, the Sea-pac show was very useful, even though we have nothing to sell just yet. Seeing peoples' reactions and listening to their questions helped refine the message; I had been so immersed in the design that I had not yet polished anything even approaching the requisite "30,000-foot view" or "elevator pitch" that summarizes a project in a manageable number of words.

Field day was fun, although we didn't really take advantage of any of the Shacktopus functionality beyond the radio, antenna-related hardware, and external solar/battery power. We participated with the K7IP group in Skagit county, and I made 16 contacts on 5 watts (well, OK, 15 of them were helped a bit by a tri-bander beam on a tower). But still, the cost-per-QSO on the FT-817 is now down to $40 or so. Can't wait to actually play with this instead of looking at it as a complex engineering project.

Here's what the box looks like at the moment. The big green block in the middle is actually made out of Divinycell foam... for the convention, I needed something to fill the big empty space and show what's coming up. The board that we are designing to live in that spot is the RigNexus, based on an Atmel ATmega128 CPU. It runs the audio mixing matrix, a big SPI chain that handles lots of I/O, communication with the SMBUS battery charging system, analog data collection with on-board flash storage, a universal active filter, bluetooth to the PDA, DTMF decoder for remote control via UHF, a speech synthesizer, audio recorder, local UI with an LCD, and general housekeeping... including powering up the Linux board when the system needs to become net-enabled. More on all this both here and on the Shacktopus site as it develops; I'm diving into a huge learning curve that includes Eagle CAD, the Atmel architecture, and active-object state-machine architecture.

Cheers and 73,
Steve N4RVE

Shacktopus Taking Shape

2005-05-27T22:27:00.000-07:00

This is an intense time... driven by my old nemesis, the trade-show deadline. Actually, it's just a hamfest, but the pressure is every bit as intense as a COMDEX of the Olden Days: this is my first public appearance in years. I certainly don't expect to be done, of course, but the looming mid-June date is effectively keeping me from sinking into the sloth that characterized much of the past 3 or 4 years.

But it's not just that. Today I had a bit of an epiphany, discovering (thanks to Ned Konz) the joys of AVRStudio, a JTAG interface, and an ATmega128 development board. Damn, this stuff is cool! My last embedded environment was a serial port on a FORTH board, and while I love FORTH, it certainly didn't offer the intimacy with running code that we find in modern (and almost free) tools. And, of course, there is some serious horsepower in little $10 chips these days... along with all the things that can be hung on their ports with hardly any interface circuitry.

The architecture of Shacktopus has evolved considerably. The always-on processor is the ATmega128 (in the form of an Olimex AVR-MT-128), aided considerably by a collection of wondrous Maxim SPI devices: programmable attenuators for the matrix mixer, UARTs to generate a half-dozen extra serial ports, and I/O expanders to handle the largish collection of status and control bits (as well as a programmable active filter network to give me software-controlled high-pass, low-pass, band-bass, or notch). State machines manage a UI that spans a local LCD/keypad, remote access via DTMF tones and synthesized speech, and a remote telnet interface that arrives via the Linux board...

And that's the other system, the "Big Iron" in my backpack: a Technologic TS-7200 embedded ARM Linux system running at 200 MHz. This uses hamlib to deal with rig interface (initially the Yaesu FT-817), and also provides the full range of services one expects from a robust OS: Internet access, LAN presence, data logging, and an on-board web server that can be reached via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi from the Tapwave Zodiac that rides on my belt. That lovely PDA, and the Yaesu VX-6R that talks to the embedded VX-2R, comprises the wireless human-interface... no laptop necessary.

Connected to all this are quite a variety of interesting devices... as much as I can fit into the 12x16x3 inch polycarbonate enclosure:

More on all this in a future posting, or a proper web page for this thing that needs to be done Real Soon Now.

After the Sea-Pac show (and Field Day the next weekend), my plan is to put this new human-scale technomadic system to the test with two solo adventures: an Amtrak jaunt across the US, and a kayak jaunt of a week or so in local waters. At the same time, we'll be marketing the key components: the RigNexus board that runs all the I/O, the Li-Ion power system with SMBUS interface, and a few turn-key packaged versions for different applications. If you are interested in being an "early adopter," please let me know.

Technomadic Goodies and High-tech Wire

2005-05-12T14:18:00.000-07:00

First, a correction: in my last update, I indulged in a rantlet (since deleted) that complained about a lack of response from RadioLabs over a month of attempting to ask some tech questions before ordering. It turned out that a link to this blog in my email sig file was getting snagged by their spam filter, and they never knew I was attempting to get in touch. This is a good reminder that email is considerably more open-loop than it used to be (for entirely technical reasons), and that jumping to conclusions about a lack of response to messages is not always justified. Correspondence since has suggested that they are very cool folks, every bit as responsive as their website suggests.

Speaking of great companies, I want to thank Technologic Systems, Wireless Cables, Buddipole, and PAR Electronics for their excellent support of this project. A full list of all system components will be on the new Shacktopus web page... Real Soon Now.

I know I've been a bit of a tease in these postings about what, exactly, this thing is. Mostly it's because I haven't had time to write about it properly... which is another one of those things that needs to happen between now and Sea-Pac in mid-June. Basically, I've decided to build my essential technomadic toolset into a convenient pack so the hard-core geeky bits are always available and not tightly integrated with a micro-trimaran. The result is a polycarbonate box designed to mate with a laptop pack, forming a "Shack To Go" that integrates lots of interesting gear into a single user interface: a Yaesu FT-817 with Elecraft T1 tuner, dedicated micro dual-bander for the DTMF remote control link, embedded ARM Linux system, TNC, GPS, speech synthesizer, Bluetooth link to my PDA, Wi-Fi board with local whip, console LCD/keypad, computer controlled audio mixing matrix and flash audio recorder, amp and preamp for local mic/phones/speakers, Li-Ion smart battery system, cell-phone interface, and suite of sensors. The case that holds this also has room for a thin laptop and various accessories, and a companion pack carries the complete Buddipole antenna package, dual-band yagi for the LEO birds, Wi-Fi yagi for those distant hotspots, and a solar panel.

I have a pathological inability to keep things simple, but this thing really is going to be fun... providing a robust set of technomadic tools that will work on ANY substrate: Microships, OPBs (Other Peoples' Boats), Amtrak, or my own two feet.

Also, I'm trying something new this time around: productizing. In the past, my survival hinged on the almost accidental spin-offs of speaking and writing gigs, keeping me afloat while I devoted my energy to building and traveling aboard gizmologically intensive machines. It took many years to build up a self-sustaining level of buzz, then I coasted on that through the mid-'90s... enough to get Microship fabrication well underway. Then a lot of time passed, the economy changed, and the project evolved a few times.

So now, instead of waiting for a yet-undefined Microship expedition to ramp up PR to the point where I can make a living at it, I'm positioning this new project as a prototype and demo platform for a product line. My own Shacktopus is a low-power backpack system, but we are also making sure that every step in the hardware and software development process accommodates future marine and automotive versions. The initial spin-offs include the enclosure mated to a high-quality commercial pack, the software package, the power-management system, the "RigNexus" board that handles all the audio routing, and any random bits of custom electronics that have to be conjured to make this latest technomadic dream come true.

In other news...

After a recent posting about house-lab networking, two readers have asked me to provide more detail about the back-to-back pair of SpeedStream 5851 SDSL routers that are set up to bridge the two LANs, about 1/8 mile apart through the forest. The wiring itself is just a randomly-chosen pair in one of the three 10-conductor direct-bury phone cables that we trenched 7 years ago, and phone-grade wiring was used to connect from those to convenient SpeedStream mounting locations in the buildings. We're seeing a steady 1.5 megabit/sec link over vanilla copper (which amazes me, having grown up in an era where "3 kilocycle bandwidth" was taken as gospel where phone stuff was involved).

Here are the scripts to setup the two units, using the standard telecom terminology of CO (Central Office) and CPE (Customer Provided Equipment), even though those terms are somewhat meaningless here. The one called CO is adjacent to the Router between us and the Internet:

login admin
sys name cpe
eth ip addr 192.168.0.254 255.255.255.0
eth ip enable
rem add co
# rem setproto ppp co
rem setproto rfc1483mer co
rem setpvc 0*38 co
rem disauthen co
rem addiproute 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 1 co
rem setsrcipaddr 10.0.0.1 255.255.255.0 co
sd term cpe
# turn on bridging
sd speed 1536
save
reboot

login admin
sys name co
eth ip addr 10.0.1.254 255.255.255.0
eth ip enable
eth ip defgateway 10.0.1.1
dhcp disable all
rem add cpe
# rem setproto ppp cpe
rem setproto rfc1483mer cpe
rem setpvc 0*38 cpe
rem disauthen cpe
rem addiproute 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 1 cpe
rem setsrcipaddr 10.0.0.2 255.255.255.0 cpe
# turn on bridging
sd term co
sd speed 1536
save
reboot

They are basically being simple bridges, not routing, not providing DHCP service... just a high-tech piece of wire. So far, the only glitches have been very minor, generally in response to doing something rude like unplugging one of them abruptly (whereupon the other seems to like to be power-cycled). Note that not all flavors of the 5851 like to do this; the -001 and -005 work, and some other versions can be re-flashed to fit, but some are incompatible. We bought 4 of them on eBay, plus the first that was a gift, before we had two that both worked and were compatible (I still have one that seems fine but for the fact that we can't seem to get it into password-recovery mode... the first $25 takes it.)

Cheers from the nomadhouse!

Corporate Personalities

2005-05-06T13:27:00.000-07:00

For over 20 years, I have been mining industry for the components needed to construct technomadic adventure tools: Winnebiko, Winnebiko II, BEHEMOTH, Microship in its various incarnations, and now Shacktopus. I have been very fortunate to be able to conjure a sort of 3-way symbiosis of project, media, and sponsorship that has allowed me to build a career out of this without having to simultaneously "get a real job."

Along the way, I've dealt with a lot of companies... and a lot of people who represent them. I remember once, in the BEHEMOTH era, contacting an east coast vendor of panel-mount strip printers. The guy was abusive and openly hostile, basically laughing at me for having the gall to propose that they donate one and snidely suggesting that I'd be too stupid to use it anyway. I then called a direct competitor that had apparently spun off of the first company, just down the road in the next town over, and he was delighted... Fedexing one out the same afternoon. I learned from this not to take rejection too seriously, and that it all boils down to personalities.

Now, over a decade later, I'm at it again, assembling the components to build this tiny go-anywhere platform-independent technomadic toolset. And as before, I'm finding that the range of available products and the range of corporate cultures are utterly uncorrelated, and things that seem as if they should be available, in many cases, aren't.

Take development systems for embedded Linux products. I don't know how many times in the past month I've gotten excited about some nifty PXA255/270-based product or other sparkling little board that offers tons of I/O yet still understands power management, only to discover that the manufacturer wants $3-5K for a development system (or worse, openly refuses to talk to anyone who wants less than 10,000 or so units). I know hobbyists can be a nuisance, but where do they think most "outta the blue" ideas come from?

Of course, there's a counter-argument... support calls are expensive, and vendors of complex systems could easily spend all their time hand-holding if they didn't institute some effective up-front filters to make sure they only end up dealing with real engineers. That's why Ned and I haven't gone any further with the Bionode; we just don't have the manpower to handle tech support.

Most of the time, however, I've been pleased and sometimes even surprised by the friendliness of the folks behind the websites. In the past few weeks, I've received excellent support from quite a few companies, some of which have become sponsors (to be featured, of course, in the new Shacktopus pages once they go online). Technologic has taken the time to answer my newbie questions about their ARM-based embedded Linux products, a far cry from those that didn't even acknowledge my request for a quote (since I'm obviously not a manufacturer and only want one unit... for now).

My point here is that this is what tends to shape the technological future... for a huge amount of innovation emerges from the cluttered basement workbenches of mad, driven tinkerers chasing their dreams (passion being a much stronger motivation, usually, than management-decreed development deadlines). The companies that are patient with these random renegades and don't mind selling "onesies" or development tools at sane prices are the ones that end up getting their products featured in Make, Slashdot, BoingBoing, and thousands of individual project websites like this one.

That's a cheap way to build buzz, and without buzz, making it in this industry is a lot more expensive.

Playing Radio for a Living

2005-04-30T16:13:00.000-07:00

Since I'm working full-time on the new Shacktopus system, a sort of Microship-in-a-pack also known as Shack To Go, I'm going to start keeping a running commentary here. Eventually, when this all stabilizes, it will have a proper set of static html pages.

The past few weeks have seen the acquisition of a lot of new communications gear. Over the last 3 days, I've assembled the exquisite miniature Elecraft T1 antenna tuner kit, and just gave it a test today between the Yaesu FT-817 and the Cushcraft R-8 (still clamped to a cart at ground level). I didn't make any contacts during the awful geomagnetic conditions, but the tuner did its thing quite smartly... latching relays configuring an L-C filter network in response to band changes (via a direct interface to the radio) or in response to a pushbutton request. This thing is tiny, and also manages to tune during SSB voice peaks instead of requiring the traditional steady carrier.

When I first went outside to test today, I was horrified at the hash and birdies all across the spectrum... then remembered that I hadn't turned off the worst broadband noise generator I have seen since the days of diathermy machines: the Sony DRN-XM01 receiver for XM satellite radio. The music service I like, but that particular unit is loud in all respects: a fan that's worse than a typical tower PC, and RFI that completely trashes the HF spectrum anywhere within a hundred feet or so. But it was a gift that got me into XM out here in the RF hole of Camano Island, and is thus appreciated... though of course I'm now lusting after the little My-Fi even with all its strange modalities and UI quirks!

Speaking of cute bits of radio gizmology, another component in the new pack system is the Tenna Dipper. They're not currently shipping, but watch for the next round of kits if you're looking for a very cheap and effective little antenna analyzer. It's only $25, and reports the frequency via Morse code after you tune a bridge to null (as indicated by an LED going dark).

More soon; I'm going to crank this blog back up again, now that I'm actually working on the project and have things to say other than vague reports on what I'm thinking about. At the moment, we're trying to choose the embedded Linux platform, juggling trade-offs of power management, size, I/O, and cost. And in my next installment, I'll report on the suite of antennas...

The Shacktopus

2005-04-21T18:01:00.000-07:00

Yikes, it's been a while since I've posted here, though I've been doing "daily updates" with fresh photos 2-3 times a week. That's the place to look when you find yourself gripped with the urge to find out what I'm up to; I'm reserving this blog for project reports and maunderings that justify a bit more persistence than the fleeting updates over in the other venue (they are not archived).

So, after all that build-up, what justifies this update? A couple of things.

First, we've solved half of the networking problem here... a decent LAN connecting house and lab (the other half of the problem, getting a connection to the world that's a bit less leisurely than the half-speed dialup that has been hobbling my online life for years, seems about to be solved with a rumored cable connection). To link the buildings, about an eighth of a mile apart with Wi-Fi attenuating forest in between, we connected a pair of Efficient Networks (Speedstream) 5851 SDSL routers back-to-back via an extra "dry pair" in the telephone cable I buried 7 years ago. After much fiddling around with router configurations, we settled on bridging instead... quite adequate, as the LANs don't have enough separate traffic to bog each other down. The net effect, so to speak, is a single LAN that incorporates the two buildings, with a dedicated Linux box in the lab acting as server/firewall and the original Airport Base in the house acting as a local AP.

Works beautifully.

The other news, which is substantial enough that it's about to get its own web site, is Shacktopus. I'm not quite ready to do a full brain-dump about this (mostly because parts of the design are still a moving target), but basically it is the "ultimate" philosophical manifestation of the technomadness that has driven my projects for 22 years. The idea is simple in principle, but challenging in practice: incorporate ALL communication, sensing, telemetry, and communication tools into something that stays with the human... instead of requiring said human to be aboard a complex substrate to use the geek goodies (and at all other times suffering without them, unless connected via a remote UI whose bandwidth is stepped inverse function of distance).

With this simple re-mapping, the relationship between human and technomadic substrate fundamentally shifts: Microships, yachts, kayaks, bicycles, labs, and houses merely represent additional resources... ranging from the trivial (a source of shore power) to the elegant (navigation and environmental sensor suite). But what's important is that the "system" is something that can stay with me, instead of only being available when I'm in the midst of an expedition. And we know how often THAT is.

Also... I'm trying something different this time. My "business model" for the past two decades (if I can be said to have had one at all) has been to do fun things, generate media coverage, attract sponsors, and extract cash from related writing and speaking projects. It's been a rather ad hoc approach as careers go, but I've survived... though never really far from the hand-to-mouth level.

This time around, I'm going to try productizing. The intent is to eventually market the full system, but in the near term there are some very interesting components (all the custom stuff) that will be of use to other technomads, mobile hams, and road warriors in general. I'm exhibiting and speaking at the SeaPac Convention (Seaside, Oregon) in June, so this is on a fast track... and I'll tell you more than these lofty abstractions Real Soon Now.

In the meantime, it feels good to get my hands on some new gizmology, dust off my creaky embedded system design skills, and take on a high-density packaging project!

A Zulu Rhapsody

2005-02-18T16:20:00.000-08:00

In addition to its role in the project, Zulu the Zodiac is quickly becoming a convergence tool... reducing the number of separate objects I need to carry around while generally improving the efficiency of my life. I have attempted this with PDAs in the past without much success, and as much as I trust and adore my iBook, it's simply too large and IMPORTANT to subject to all the rigors of being constantly at my side. I took it on a 5-day kayak trip a year or so ago, needing it for fireside packet radio and writing, and even though it was well-packaged in multiple waterproof layers I was acutely aware of the potential loss of my inadequately backed-up life archives if something catastrophic were to happen. As it was, the cold night by the campfire on Strawberry Island reduced battery life to about 30 minutes, and I had to run the laptop, moist with condensation, off the inverter in Bubba's power/tracker system.

But with the Zode, I find the depth of resources to at last be sufficiently satisfying that it goes beyond PDA/organizer and becomes a life tool, as essential as Leatherman and wallet. I have about a dozen eBooks tucked into a tiny corner of the 1-Gigabyte SD card now, including medical and field survival reference material as well as plain old good reading, and just acquired the tools to publish my own. The built-in MP3 player allows audio books as well, so I'm about to give those a try... and were I so inclined, I suppose I could rip a whole DVD movie into some arcane format, stuff it onto a card, and watch it while otherwise confined to a seat. The combination of the teensy Wi-Fi card and my Airport Base Station means I can go online in bed or wherever; I've already used this for quick Googlage and the curiously pathological checking of eBay auctions (not to mention surfing when trapped in the reading room with nothing but yesteryear's much-thumbed Cruising World and Mac Addict). All the sync'd organizer functions are a given, of course... as are the entertaining diversions for those times when the brain isn't feeling particularly productive, yet finds solace in the manipulation of flying or rolling virtual objects around a colorful bitmap. And, as a writer, it remains only for me to choose one of the folding keyboards to solve the perennial "curl up anywhere and be productive" problem.

The difference between this and its predecessors must be related to a fast enough CPU to allow interesting apps, coupled with enough fixed and removable memory to allow installation of useful things without simultaneously having to decide what to nuke. There's also an ineffable feeling of quality that makes me enjoy interacting with the Zodiac... and that matters.

All this will be elevated to High Geek Theater with our new "universe interface" application. For me, this has been the Holy Grail for over a decade: a rugged and boatable little wireless front-end graphic console for everything in my life. Imagine the home control suite of tools Writ Large, with the ability to recognize and interact with multiple boats and fixed facilities, graphically present historical data, launch autonomous security or nav processes in embedded systems, act as a live control and instrument panel for any networked substrate, serve up documentation, and offer the usual suite of communication and productivity tools... all without getting in the way or becoming an end unto itself as do so many interesting geek toys. And, since it's off-the-shelf hardware, it's not the end of the world if it slips out of my hand and bubbles its way forever into the murky depths. Just curse fluently, then get another one and re-install the code from network-resident backups.

So that's what I'm working on, driven by an exotic vision of nautical substrates whilst cobbling together an initial test suite here in the lab. (Catherwood welcome screen shot)

Zodiac on the Microship

2005-02-08T13:30:00.000-08:00

I gave an introduction to the new Microship system architecture in couple of recent (relatively speaking) postings: VNOS in Blue Jeans, introducing the server-side tool that will be discovered by wireless Tapwave Zodiacs, and Canoe and Kayak Interfacing, which briefly addresses the the notion of a wandering user interface device interacting with "substrate interfaces" on each boatlet. There is now progress to report.

The Zodiac is here, and I'm maintaining a page about the machine to capture the learning curves and provide links to related material and products. I must say, I'm impressed... not only is the hardware deliciously well-engineered and solid, but the classic Palm platform has certainly adapted smoothly to the roomy environment of a 200 MHz processor, fast color graphics, wireless networking, and multiple gigabytes in your pocket. The Zode is stunning in its elegance, and I'm looking forward to total immersion in this project.

My experience of getting familiar with the unit (named Zulu) was so inspiring to Jeannie that she went online Friday night and ordered one for herself (to be named Zephyr). For her, it will be a way to reclaim some of the lost time in her 6-hour daily round-trip bus commute, as well as participate from Day 1 in the use and testing of our new Microship front end design.

We will be developing on two simultaneous fronts, both dependent on a variety of communication modes (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and packet) that allow bandwidth-scaling as a function of distance from the boatlets or other "substrate-enhanced" environments like the development systems in house and office:

The first is HTML, with a vanilla browser seeing the "content" generated by the on-board servers. If this were only static web pages, the problem would be completely solved by off-the-shelf code; for initial testing, I'm sure this is what we'll do, with VNOS and PHP working behind the scenes of Apache. The complexity arises when we want to see a dynamic instrument display or receive streaming audio/video content... in the desktop browser environment, these tasks are handled by "helper apps," but in the Palm OS they call for moving to a different application. I am not yet sure if this transition in both directions can be seamless enough to allow popping in and out of a browser at will without loss of context.

The second is VNC, which we've always rejected for bandwidth reasons. But it might actually end up simplifying the whole problem if the pipe is fast enough and the view can be restricted to a corresponding 320x480 window on the server. This may also introduce some interesting challenges when context-switching between the supervisory "browserish" tools and the more dynamic objects like live graphs and instruments associated with telemetry channels. Over local 802.11, we could get away with being sloppy, but when we fall back to packet radio it's a whole different problem... sending an object becomes more sensible than trying to keep up with a dynamic bitmap.

What's wonderful about all this, despite the current unknowns, is that we finally have the technology to allow development at this level without taking on a massive starting-from-scratch software project. This is the same general kind of stuff I wanted to do a decade ago, but back then it involved inventing network protocols and writing low-level tools, locking us into an all-custom solution that would never scale gracefully into new hardware.

My SanDisk Wi-Fi SDIO card should arrive this week, and we'll immediately begin testing the above approaches via the Apache and VNC servers in the iBook. The second test will involve Bluetooth between the Zodiac and a packet radio link to see what happens when things slow waaaay down, and then it will be time to dedicate one of our stray computers to server development based on VNOS and a hierarchy of USB I/O.

I'll continue blogging the project here, and will also add to the Microship Zodiac page for more static content. For now, the ephemeral daily updates (including "current items on eBay" and "recent sales") have been moved back to the Live Page due to their real-time nature and the incredible ease of dealing with photos.

Publishing Venues

2005-01-15T21:14:00.000-08:00

Thanks to a comment from Eric Remy as well as much noodling on the topic, I've decided that my "publishing needs" require three mutually exclusive venues...

This blog, which, with its hip style and automatic archiving, seems to impose a writing style that verges on the article. It's also a nuisance to deal with images beyond inline wee ones... Flickr has lately become too slow and cumbersome to use, but hosting the piccys myself requires thumbnail creation, FTP, and fiddly tags.

Static and cross-linked web content like most of the Microship site, all HTML-tweaked and purty (not to mention monetized to attract a few nickels)...and rarely if ever expected to change.

The old Live Page that is optimized for quickie off-the-cuff updates, destined to disappear in a day or so without a trace (as some things should).

Much news is fleeting by nature, and one of the failings of many blogs is that they get clogged up with material that is only of real-time interest to a few close friends, yet ends up being Googlable for All Time. Who will really care, in the year 2012, that this week I installed new insulation in my building and ranted about a neighbor whose maltreated dog is trapped yelping in a cage outside in freezing weather? To keep the Microship blog from drifting in that direction during the inevitable gaposis 'twixt sublime insights and gizmological delights, I will reserve this venue for reasonably substantial material (like last week's post about VNOS), and revert to my legacy Live Page for ephemera (sorta daily, usually short, and not guaranteeed to be polished or profound... but almost always including fresh new photos, which are easy to post there by simply attaching them to an email). They will not be archived.

Since my last update here I have been working steadily on bringing the lab back to life... the final phases of the post-rodent insulation retrofit as well as the new office space. The office is now warm and painted; all that's left is to tack on some baseboard above the new carpet and then start installing furniture. In the rest of the building, the roof is now fully re-insulated with R-19, thanks to a delightful crew from AGI in Arlington. It now remains for me to install rigid foam board on the walls, but the difference is already substantial... it's starting to actually retain heat generated by the woodstove and the occasional extravagance of that huge propane unit heater.

In nomadic news, last year I had the bittersweet pleasure of watching a friend on the island launch his beautiful homebuilt catamaran Freebird, and sail off for parts unknown (beginning with the venerable Baja Ha-Ha). He and his winsome mate now have a regularly updated log, which is a real nudge to get moving more quickly on the project for which the above-mentioned building was initially created. They are currently in the South Pacific. <tremulous sigh>

Um, I have to go now. There are ~~escape pods~~ boats to finish.

Random Notes:

Another chapter has been added to the Miles with Maggie series: "Technology Update" from Richmond, Virginia. Hard to believe it's been 18 years... in this tale, I rhapsodize about packet radio, cusps joining layers of dataspace, solar power, and the rigors of the highway. The piece also includes one of my favorite bike photos.

Goodies from Steve on eBay:

473 CTS 68 ohm; 16-pin SMD Resistor Networks
Three 132-pin QFP to PGA Adapter PC Boards
Two 128-megabit Intel Flash: 28F128, BGA package

Goodies from Jeannie on eBay:

(nil)

Items sold since last update

Itzhak Perlman - Sarasate CD - $17.50 to Gastonia, NC
The Stories of John Cheever - $3.72 to Bartlett, IL
Technomadic Designs paddle bag to San Jose, CA

VNOS in Blue Jeans

2005-01-05T18:19:00.000-08:00

Throughout the course of the Microship project, one of the recurring themes has been the choice of a software platform that would allow integration of widely scattered, non-homogenous resources into a comfortable user interface that can manifest itself wherever I happen to be. Over the past decade, this has included a custom multidrop network of 68HC11 boards running multitasking FORTH under a HyperCard front end, NewtonScript talking to Macs via Digital Ocean wireless tools, Perl on a Linux board atop distributed PIC chips, an all-Squeak system with a distributed object model spanning Big Iron and handhelds, and even the dangerously alluring SBNC approach (Simple Boat, No Computers!). All have presented one problem of another, ranging from imminent obsolescence to daunting learning curves.

I know better than to call anything in the software realm a panacea, but I am getting more and more intrigued by VNOS from Singlestep Technologies. From what I'm seeing, it excels at doing what we need to do most often: string disparate resources together, bringing them all into some kind of cohesive front panel (presumably, one that may be echoed on a network-connected device). Of course, any programmer will tell you that you can do anything you need in his or her language of choice, and this is probably true... but I have found that some of the more provocative or popular tools would require me to drop everything and invest the time to become an expert, just to do something simple like inhale a serial port, parse it, and present the results on a meter. Complicating matters, I have good friends who are guru-level practitioners of Smalltalk, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, C, C++, and FORTH... so most discussions about how to solve Microship design problems end up on religious turf.

What's cool about VNOS is that it seems to have been intended right from the beginning as a very playful yet powerful form of glue. It comes with "widgets" that know how to do lots of useful things, and you drag them into a window, string them together, and tweak a few options... all while watching the results live. On those occasions when prefab widgets won't quite do the trick, you can customize your own with regular expressions, math functions, and blocks of Perl or FORTH. What's really magical is that it's also very TCP-aware, so it really doesn't matter if something you're playing with is elsewhere in the LAN. The whole environment feels like making an animated block diagram of your problem.

Dave Warman, one of the architects of all this, dropped by Sunday night for dinner, homemade wine, and a bit of frolic with an unreleased alpha of the new VNOS version. We decided to solve a typical toy problem in the Microship domain... extracting compass heading from a continuous NMEA stream and turning it into a graphic. The compass is a gimballed flux-gate donated about 10 years ago by Ritchie, and here's what we wanted to do:

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I gave the dusty sensor 12 volts and cobbled together some ancient RS-232 adapters to make it fit a USB-Serial interface, whereupon it immediately appeared as a live serial port on the iBook. I had a moment of deja vu, recalling what it took to take it from there back when I was using the FORTH boards: an extra serial channel with all its configuration and handshaking, interrupt-driven capture into a circular buffer, pointer manipulation, and logic to extract the appropriate stuff between comma (n) and comma (n+1)... with another task grabbing the resulting global variable and handing it off as a string to the console port whenever polled by the hub in response to some distant HyperTalk XFCN. Dave chuckled at this, dragged a few little widgets into a window, and had it working with a live digital readout in about 10 minutes...

You can see the serial port at the left in the screen capture, with an LED to indicate whether or not it is connected in response to the buttons below. That's piped to a widget that turns the stream of characters into a series of "events."

NMEA stuff (like what comes out of a GPS) is a succession of sentences at 4800 baud, each beginning with a $ and device identifier, continuing with some variable data according to the sentence type, and ending with a return. In this simple case, all we want is to extract the compass heading, so when it sees a typical incoming sentence like $HCHDM,147.6,M*2F it needs to pull out the 147 (integral degrees are adequate for now). The trick is a regular expression in the next widget: \,([0-9]*)\., which returns the numeric value between the comma and the period.

If all we want is a digital readout, then we're already done. But Dave, with an impish grin, went off to the website of my ex-pal Julie, where he remembered seeing a cute animated GIF of a compass (the one that's spinning away merrily up there next to the photo of the heading sensor).

While I conjured a pork curry, he deconstructed the GIF with Graphic Converter, named the component images, and whipped up a quick f_x that passes a number from 0 to 31 into a neighboring "LED" widget that's set to display whichever one of 32 images corresponds to the received value. Voila! Instant animated compass... I wiped the garlic off my hands, walked over, and twisted the sensor around on the table while watching the needle track in real time. Net time investment from soldering on the connector: about an hour.

After dinner, we played a bit with the next level... using a few lines of Perl and the web server built into VNOS to allow a visiting browser to see the current snapshot of the compass heading. That part was easy, although for it to become an animated display without resorting to crude page reloads, there would have to be some browser extension (a Java sandbox, flash player, or separate media stream to a helper app). Still, it only took a few minutes to stitch this into a webbish interface that could be viewed by any computer on the network.

Extrapolating to the full set of Microship interface projects, this is very encouraging... I'm not yet sure that HTML is the ideal UI framework, but it's certainly a well-understood and standardized set of tools. There is something alluring about the idea of using an off-the-shelf component like a PDA to perform the entire suite of monitoring, control, and communication tasks... I don't have to build any custom hardware anywhere except at the I/O level!

Stay tuned...

A Willing Disbelief of Suspension

2005-01-01T14:26:00.000-08:00

Ah, learning curves. The last week of 2004 saw good progress on the new office in the lab... most notably the suspended ceiling project. This should be trivial, but as with most things, it's not quite as straightforward as it seems.

The issue at the moment goes back to a comment I made here 2 months ago, when I was trying to find out if one can lay insulation directly atop those fluorescent troffers that take the place of a ceiling tile. Unable to find the answer on the box they come in, from talking to clerks at the store, or even on the Lithonia website, I wrote to the company and soon received the answer:

"All 1-foot by 4-foot fluorescent troffers with two, three, or four T8 lamps with maximum wattage of 32 and electronic ballast only manufactured by Lithonia Lighting are listed for type IC applications in the UL file E77234 Volume 1, Section 4. " (The term "IC" means "Insulation Contact.")

Based on this, I went ahead with the project... buying lights, suspended ceiling parts, and pricey batts of R-38 fiberglass. Since all the old stuff had been ripped out to deal with the mouse problem, the key assumption—that insulation can lie on the new ceiling rather than be stapled into the rafters—was critically important.

So imagine my surprise when, well into the project, I installed one of the new Lithonia GT8 electronic-ballast troffers, discovered that one of the pre-installed fluoresent tubes was faulty, removed it, and found a little sticker underneath: DO NOT INSTALL INSULATION WITHIN 76mm (3in) OF ANY PART OF THIS LUMINAIRE. Great place to put such a warning... not on the cardboard box or near the wiring junction panel on the back, but under a tube where it won't be discovered until (presumably) a few years after installation!

It's impossible at this point to tell who's right, Lithonia or Lithonia. But it's New Year's weekend, and there's nobody there to ask. After I'm done fumbling with construction projects, I think I'll stick with designing gizmologically intensive technomadic adventure platforms, punctuated by occasional breaks to string a few words together. That stuff I can do without constantly encountering the kind of non-entertaining learning curves that have characterized this time-consuming pole building retrofit project.

Work in progress on the new office:

In utterly unrelated news (well, not exactly, since I've been sitting here for the past 5 minutes waiting for the Mozilla-crashing Flickr uploading tool to move a 100K image over the border via Firefox), has anybody found a quick way to get images into a Blogger posting? This is the one thing that has gotten worse since my migration from the old "Live Page": that was done by simply emailing an update with optional image attachment to a Perl script by Ned Konz... whereupon it was dropped into a template and pasted over the previous day's version. There was no automatic archiving and the page had a retro feel like the rest of the Microship website, but hey, it was easy.

Now, we have powerful new publishing tools, but images are a nuisance. I can take a photo, manually make a thumbnail, and host both on my own server... or I can use Flickr in a painfully slow interactive process (partly due to this evil dialup connection) and paste in the IMG tag. Either method takes 10-15 minutes, just to tuck a linkable piccy into a column of text. I'm open to suggestions.

Random Notes

I'm looking for anyone who has successfully "fought City Hall" and managed to bring about redistricting; we have a huge problem here on Camano Island wherein we are becoming the development and tax-revenue generation back yard of Whidbey Island... a land mass that happens to be home to the county seat and all three commissioners. I know even less about this stuff than I do about troffers and insulation, but I'm agitatin' for change anyway. Wasn't there an issue a while back about "taxation without representation"?

Goodies from Steve on eBay:

Swagelok & Cajon Stainless Fittings + extras (21 units)
473 CTS 68 ohm SMD Resistor Networks, 767163680G
2 Intel 28F128J3 (128 megabit Flash memory chips)

Goodies from Jeannie on eBay:

Spiegel Black Twill Trench Coat
Black faux-fur stadium jacket

Items sold since last update

(nil)

Usurped Winter Solstice Celebration

2004-12-26T21:34:00.000-08:00

We survived another one. In what has become something of a tradition, we participated in a delightful OPC (Other Peoples' Christmas), replete with food, drink, and a white-elephant gift game. It hit the spot perfectly, and we otherwise barely noticed the passage of another holiday (I gave Jeannie-the-Leo a Honeywell Animal poster that I got from my cousin back in 1967 or so, and she gave me yummy edibles).

I'm stunned today by the news of the tsunami that ravaged coastal areas all across the Bay of Bengal. I have never been there, but heard many tales of this nautical paradise from my ex-girlfriend Julie... and having lived through the Quake of '89 in Santa Cruz I am at least somewhat familiar with the feeling that comes from a power of staggering scale that suddenly manifests itself on an otherwise idyllic day. My heart goes out to those whose lives have been devastated.

Jeannie has taken a week off work, and our goal between now and the Resumption of Routine is to get my new office done out in the lab... suspended ceiling, insulation, paint, flooring, heat, and desk relocation. I suddenly have one book project likely and a second percolating in the back of my mind, a whole new technomadic toolset to design along with accompanying productization, and a rekindling of my motivation to get the Microships launched this coming year and go play. I'm genuinely turned on by the new system discussed in recent bloggage, and besides, the self-indulgent torpor that characterized 2002-3 no longer has much justification for lingering in my psyche... so it's time.

Speaking of all that, one of the hot projects this week is to do the first posting in over three years (!) to the nomadness mailing list, my core readership since 1990. This lovingly maintained list of thousands includes sponsors, volunteers, media, old friends, brilliant geeks, and doubtless a few people who thought they were signing up for news about PIC processors and development systems from Microchip Technology. Nomadness was my primary publishing venue for about a decade, but when a marriage and project fell apart more or less simultaneously three years ago this week... well, I kinda stopped posting, as I didn't know what to say beyond the ephemeral daily news updates. As time passed, it became harder and harder to construct the long-awaited "catch-up" piece, so I just sort of forgot about it... until now. The details are no longer relevant; my life suffered a glitch and then moved on, better than ever. It happens to all of us at one time or another.

So, in that happy vein, I propose a toast! Let me just break out a bottle of my yummy new homebrew blackberry wine: "Here's to Jeannie... who is making it all fun again!"

Random Notes

Here is a provocative view of the near-term technoid future.

Goodies from Steve on eBay:

2 Intel 28F128J3 (128 megabit Flash memory chips)
5 old QSL cards from Egypt, S. Africa, Ghana, & Israel

Goodies from Jeannie on eBay:

Black faux-fur jacket

Items sold since last update

Photos of Victorian architecture - $8.50 to Bartlett, TN
Battenburg cutwork lace duvet cover & shams - $11.70 to Miami, FL
Outdoor Research Seattle Sombrero - $27.00 to St. Louis, MO
J. Crew taupe linen casual suit - $9.00 to Harker Heights, TX
Franklin Covey & At-a-Glance Planner pages - $5.00 to Las Vegas, NV
Korg X5DR MIDI Synthesizer - $225.00 to Stanwood, WA

Hacking Camano Island

2004-12-19T21:51:00.000-08:00

I spent a good part of today on Camano Island publishing projects. The first was inspired by yesterday's posting on Jay Rosen's PressThink blog, in which he discussed open-source journalism in Greensboro, North Carolina. It occurred to me that here on Camano, we have a very limited, top-down news distribution system, with only one small weekly paper that also serves a town in the next county. Not only is the news filtered by, shall we say, a modest budget for writers, but the only forum for community participation is a letters column dominated (at least where interesting topics are involved) by the rantings of the usual characters decrying the "bleeding heart environmentalists" and "liberal whackos" in our midst. Not exactly a medium of participatory journalism and free exchange.

In most communities, there are things like towns, businessess, coffee shops, hangouts, and other places where the general buzz percolates and finds its way from person to person. Not here. Camano Island has 12-15 thousand people but no town, and is a strange mix of commuters, artists, freelancers, retirees, and even a few normal folk. Great place, actually, but it lacks the cultural cohesion necessary to respond with any kind of unified voice to the dangers currently threatening us: a couple of particularly rapacious developers who think only of profit, slash 'n burn loggers who rape the land and leave stump farms, projects that fail to recognize the fragility of our sole-source aquifer, the opening of our public forests to hunting, and a trio of county commissioners who don't live here but nevertheless purport to speak for us on such matters as long-term planning and the value assigned to critical areas.

So being an outspoken and contrary cuss, I set up a new Camano Island blog as well as a set of discussion forums. Hopefully, this will help get people fired up enough to start thinking more like a community, though the reality may be somewhere in between ennui and a contentious can o' worms. We'll see.

None of this has much to do with Microship development, but this is my home base and I am constantly frustrated by the fact that I end up caring about things I can't control... ranging from Casa de Eyesore under construction next door to the guy trying to erect an unwanted business center and hotel on an inappropriately zoned parcel, pumping thousands of gallons of sewage a day 5 miles to a lot he purchased in a neighborhood just for that purpose. Inaction is tantamount to signing away our own heritage, even if I did come here to build boats.

More technomadic topics next time...

Goodies from Steve on eBay:

Way-cool Houston geek shirt with mouse thumb-hole (L)
A trio of 132-pin QFP to PGA Adapter PC boards
"Carpenter Gothic" photos of Victorian architecture
Trimble TANS GPS Manual & 2 old GPS World issues
Chateau C-870 circular stainless padlock

Goodies from Jeannie on eBay:

Rare purple Outdoor Research Seattle Sombrero hat, new (M)
2" of Franklin Covey & At-a-Glance Planner pages
Battenburg cutwork lace duvet cover & shams
J. Crew taupe linen casual suit

Canoe and Kayak Interfacing

2004-12-16T18:56:00.000-08:00

Been getting busy lately, which I suspect is a good thing... although the number of interesting projects is a reminder about how annoying it is to be finite. I remember when I wasn't (or at least didn't realize that I was); ever since those halcyon days, there has been an alarming increase in the number of things that never get done.

Speaking of which, I've spoken recently of the change in the topology of my technomadic toolset, and a couple more pieces have just fallen into place. As you may recall from a few days ago, the notion is simply that the "User Interface" should remain attached to the user... and each machine or environment similarly owns a "Substrate Interface." The UI is a sleek pocket-sized computer: the Tapwave Zodiac 2, with the SanDisk Wi-Fi SDIO card to provide connectivity. The SI is an ultra low power fanless PC like the SolarPC Mini-ITX system that's sitting here running Linux and Squeak in a CF card... basically, any little box of silicon that has Wi-Fi on one side and a USB host port on the other.

The software is where it really gets fun. I've just rediscovered the joys of VNOS, which is particularly adept at stitching together a wide range of resources using a visual programming environment that actually makes it fun to parse incoming strings from serial ports and build control panels. "Writing code" in this world is a matter of dragging lines between widgets, some of which can be user defined with Perl, FORTH, or regular expressions to handle oddball problems (in other words, it's easy to use, but not constraining). Loosely coupled to this is a web server (Apache), with standard PHP and CGI tools to interface with SQL telemetry and configuration databases, stored variables, and whatever code is dealing with a pile of utterly non-homogenous I/O.

The rest is essentially website design... when the human is within range of a substrate, tools suddenly exist to control things, examine sensors, browse historical data, invoke utility scripts, open multimedia streams, or whatever. The first installation will be in my office, of course, and the "affordances" (to steal a term from the usability folks) will involve music, audio crossbar channels, video cameras, environmental sensors, and anything else lying around the lab that would be fun to dust off and put to work. Once this is online, doing similar things for the boatlets should be not much more daunting than the packaging projects associated with stuffing hardware into a micro-trimaran.

In other news...

Random Notes

The homebrew blackberry wine is done! It was 4 months from a tub of must to the corking of 22 recycled Three Buck Chuck bottles, and, um, yes, looking at those numbers, apparently a little got lost along the way in, um, testing, yes, that's it, testing. (Yummy.)

The office project is moving along, now that some of the other non-maskable interrupts have been serviced. I'm choosing flooring, a friend's oops-paint is ready to go, and all the drop-ceiling and insulation parts are laying around the lab depreciating (or whatever it is that things do when we're not watching). I'm getting very itchy to move my theatre of operations out of the house and back to a place where 3000 square feet of geek toys are within reach instead of at the end of a long cold dark walk through the forest.

Also, it's starting to look as if I may be starting a new book project in January... stay tuned.

Items sold since last entry:

Technomadic Designs Paddle Bags to Seattle, WA & Green Valley, AZ
Swept CD by Julia Fordham - $7.50 to Miami, FL

New goodies from me on eBay:

Chateau stainless steel disc padlock, C-870
Trimble TANS GPS Manual & 2 old GPS World issues

New goodies from Jeannie on eBay:

Rare purple Outdoor Research Seattle Sombrero hat, size M, new

Vanishing Gizmology

2004-12-11T20:59:00.000-08:00

You know, I've been making a career of nomadness for over 21 years now... I'm starting to feel like a technomad emeritus, sitting back and taking long philosophical views while excessively complex machines languish in the cold lab. But I did a posting to the Forums today, discussing motherships, and that got me thinking about the various ways to do this (whatever this is; that is itself not clearly defined, although I must say, it sure feels wonderful when you do it).

When I took off in 1983, you see, it was aboard the Winnebiko... a sleek and minimalist expression of the essential technomadic ethic, a suite of tools that rendered physical location irrelevant. This morphed a few years later into the imaginatively named and much more capable Winnebiko II, and eventually into the monstrous BEHEMOTH... 580 pounds of hard-core gizmology valued, according to some estimates, at $130/ounce. (There are articles in the "resources" section with feature lists of each version as well as a spirited retrospective of the entire era, all 9 years and 17,000 miles of it.)

In 1992, burned out on the road and lusting for water, I launched the Microship project, a variety of nautical pedal/paddle/solar/sail substrates that have occupied me for over a decade... proving the old adage that the average completion time of a homebuilt boat is 137 years. Overlapping all that, I wandered the US in three different motherships: a converted school bus, a 20-foot mobile lab, and a huge 44-footer that, like BEHEMOTH, helped me map the point at which a good idea ventures into the realm of excess and madness.

But you know what's turning me on most right now? Not Bubba, the geeked-out kayak that keeps me sane here on the island; not even Wordplay, the amphibian micro-trimaran that has gobbled all available resources for longer than I care to remember. No, it's the manpack-scale, exquisitely personal, almost stealthy toolset that allows a nomad to survive and stay in communication in any context whatsoever... whether aboard a custom substrate like mine, hitchhiking on OPBs (Other Peoples' Boats), riding public transport, or sojourning on one's own feet. I started thinking about this when looking at a photo of BEHEMOTH recently and wondering how much it would weigh if I were to rebuild it today with equivalent functionality. I realized with a shock that I could probably fit everything into a backpack and still have room for my toothbrush and a set of high-tech foulies.

Of course, none of this is to suggest that I'm willing to eschew our graceful fleet of ships that, Real Soon Now, will again dance across the watertop in a pas de deux of sun and spray, bones in their teeth, sails taut and solar panels a-sparkle. No, I've gone too far on this project to be stymied by the lifestyle gotchas of recent years, nor even by the still-daunting to-do list. There's an enticing and realistically scaled expedition on the horizon, not to mention an almost visceral desire to reclaim from these vessels a level of pleasure consistent with the staggering amount of time and money that has gone into them.

There's something else afoot... and I think it has to do with technology that has at last reached a level whereon I can realistically cram all my geek passions (and tools, and archives) into a backpack. Only a decade ago, I was designing massive pressurized rackmount enclosures to support a suite of perverse gizmological desires, and this shaped the substrate to the point that I lost sight of its essential human scale and bought the 30-foot folding trimaran that distracted me for 2 years. Now, I think I can take the whole system for a walk, and watch it incorporate additional communication, control, and data-collection resources when I'm sailing or kayaking... or lying in bed.

Since we find ourselves at a moment in human history when we honestly don't know whether to maximize or minimize mobility, this comes not a moment too soon.

In other news...

Items sold since last entry:

Autek Manuals for QF-1A Filter & WM1 SWR Meter - $13.00 to Berwyn, Illinois
Beatles White Album - $15.50 to Ft. Huachuca, Arizona

New goodies on eBay:

(nil)

Nomad is on Island

2004-12-08T11:16:00.000-08:00

(written Dec 7)

I’m composing this in an office in Bellevue, which is an odd experience... it's disconcerting to see someone you know in a languorous island context appear all perky and corporate, moving briskly among cubicles with sheafs of laser-printed arcana, interacting in a loosely suited hierarchy, and otherwise doing things that seem utterly foreign. Jeannie dropped into my life via Friendster a little over a year ago, and since moving to my enclave in the woods has mysteriously disappeared before dawn five out of every seven days, only to return exhausted, 14 hours later, in dire need of drink and dinner (in that order). Of course I have always believed her, in an abstract sort of way, when she has related harrowing tales of employment travails; but now I see where she actually goes.

It's another world out there.

For me, venturing off island has become a big deal (unless it’s for an expedition, in which case it’s an energizing inhalation... funny bit of psychology, that). Today the motivation was to appear before the Island County Board of Equalization, hat in hand, petitioning for a reduction in the assessed value of a 5-acre piece of forest that has increased over 50% in the past year with corresponding impact on my property tax bill. I made my case, pointing out an adjacent “comp” that just sold for just over half that on a per-acre basis, then moved on... meandering down Whidbey Island and doing a recon mission to confirm the feasibility of incorporating a 2-mile kayak portage on an upcoming mini-expedition. Should be fine... there’s a “neck” on that huge island in the vicinity of Penn Cove and Coupeville, allowing us to haul out Bubba and sistership at a public tideland, convert to road mode with the Paddleboy "Heavy Lifter" cart, do an hour or so of hearty schleppage across Libby Road and into Fort Ebey to camp at the marine trail site, then re-launch on the western shore and paddle over to Port Townsend. There's something alluring about amphibian nomadness...

All that off-island running-about happened to coincide with the annual holiday dinner shindig where Jeannie works; hence the odd context switch into a corporate environment. Perversely, while she does adminish things and development-biz buzzwords muffle their way through padded partitions, I’m sitting here noting the flaws and details of their drop ceiling. That’s my next job at Nomadic Research Labs, now that the Wall o' Laurel is installed, so troffers and tees are very much on my mind.

Ah... time to head to Spazzo's for treats.

In other news...

Items sold since last entry:

49 Windowed DIP EPROMS - $17.00 to Barrington, Illinois
Mountain Biking in West Virginia - $5.00 to Wheeling, West Virginia

New goodies on eBay:

(nil)

Microship System Architecture

2004-12-03T13:22:00.000-08:00

One of the things I've learned from the Microship project is that one should never start with the electronics when building something that will take over a decade to finish. I have some exquisitely engineered FORTH nodes that need to go on eBay, and let's not even talk about the video turret that represents over a man-year of work. While we were up to our elbows in epoxy, swinging sanders, and discovering first-hand why boats don't have wheels, all that high-tech gizmology just sat there and became less and less interesting. The original concept of a pressurized enclosure with a custom front-end system providing a hand-coded GUI to a multidrop network of a dozen or more nodes is no longer quite the envelope-pushing notion it once was... and the 3-4 new concepts that emerged over the years have all grown as dusty as the dotcom era from which they sprang.

No, things have changed. If I'm to complete the Microships in my lifetime and extract from them an amount of pleasure that comes close to justifying the massive dedication of time and money that went into them, then the key words wil become simplification and off the shelf. Fortunately, that doesn't imply boring, since the new design scales to kayaks, motherships, home control, and even technomadic backpacks.

The key realization is simply this: the user interface belongs with the user, not permanently wedded to a complex little trimaran that only marginally allows sleeping on board and thus enforces a protocol of syncing, mode changing, and remote linking everytime the pilot wanders ashore. There should be no need to do anything differently when moving from boat to tent to hostel to home base; the UI should simply adapt as it discovers resources in its immediate environment. If it is close to a Microship, then marine data collection and comm/nav/security tools should appear; if it's in my house, then it should offer the option to observe external cameras or talk to the heating system controls. Any one of those environments may also include communication links to the others, so in a flotilla, to use a favorite example, each pilot sees not only the on-board resources but also a subset of everyone else's (with command permissions suitably limited, of course, lest we start hacking each other's autopilots to carve our initials on the GPS track).

Fortunately, we don't really have to invent the core technology for this... for the simple control panels, a wireless browser will do just fine, talking with HTTP servers attached to any environment in which we might find ourselves. Those may be mini-ITX form factor boards, like the Squeak system from SolarPC, interface-rich and presenting "affordances" in a webbish framework to whatever client wanders within 802.11 or Bluetooth range.

The hardware implementation at the human end of all this will be a Tapwave Zodiac2 with the SanDisk Wi-Fi SDIO card. This dovetails nicely with my current developement of the "Technomadic Go Bag" that contains the stuff that's really, really essential... what you would want with you if for some reason you had to grab one thing and skedadle NOW. Function-to-weight ratio is critical, as are multiple communication modes, power system integration, survival basics, and a good suite of tools.

This design approach reduces Microship physical system integration to a single low-power processor atop a hierarchy of USB I/O, with a console presenting off-the-shelf comm/nav tools as well as a place to hang the Zode in its sealed Otterbox. That leaves only the new demountable crankset, solar array thermal retrofit, and hatch-cover hinge system in the critical to-do list for Wordplay, with a somewhat longer but somehow less daunting list for Art Throb. But the neat thing about this design is that it scales well... to a yacht, to going underground with only a backpack, or to hunkering down and living off-grid whilst coaxing edibles from the soil and making occasional stealthy kayak forays in the dead of night. The Microship project seems to be taking a pragmatic turn...

In other news...

Random bits

My printer problems are sidelined for now... the Epson Stylus C64 I bought from Dave Robb is working fine. Once I get the office insulated well enough to justify leaving one of those cheap oil-filled heaters on all the time, I'll move my theatre of desk operations back to the building (from the temporary house installation that has hopelessly cluttered a whole room), and presumably the next laser printer won't get killed off by a hard freeze.

Jeannie has also started working on the elimination of superfluities... she has a few things on eBay.

I am working up a sweat planting a closely spaced row of 20 embarrassingly non-native Russian Laurels, in order to build a visual wall between my once-private enclave and the house that's being erected in my face... despite the fact that the neighbor had 5 whole acres to play in <exasperated sigh>. At least he's a decent guy, and is not harvesting his forest for quick cash as so many people do around here (often claiming that it's for the "view" or to eliminate "danger trees")

Speaking of Camano Island, the current battle is to prevent trails in our wild areas from being closed to allow hunters free rein. It's absurd... we have dense population, beautiful forests that have been saved by the money and volunteer efforts of community groups, and a trio of county commissioners who don't even live here.

Items sold since last entry:

The Primitive Truth by Brent Lewis - $5.00 to Chicago, Illinois
Bach: Great Organ Works, Virgil Fox - $4.00 to S. Jordan, Utah

New goodies on eBay:

(nil)

Printer Karma

2004-11-30T19:37:00.000-08:00

I'm in love with my Leatherman New Wave multi-tool! (affiliate REI link). I traded away my original Leatherman last week and almost immediately started missing it; I had seen and admired the Wave, then was pleased to discover that they just released a new version in the last couple of months. Everything locks back, the blades support comfortable one-handed operation, and there is an integral tool-holder that accomodates a set of 20 additional bits (hex drivers and the like, not included with the basic unit). The thing is exquisitely engineered, and just feels good to use... definitely a permanent part of the technomadic pack.

Nice mechanical things like that are a special comfort sometimes. At the other end of the spectrum, I wasted more than half of yesterday dealing with printers. First, my trusty SparcPrinter E (made by Lexmark and donated 7-8 years ago by Halted Specialties) died from the cold in the lab (now that there's no insulation, thanks to the “Pioneer mouse problem,” it's very hard to keep the office at even a low-level maintenance warmth). So I wrestled with that for a while, needing to print a label for shipping... then decided to try Jeannie's HP officejet 5110xi all-in-one printer/fax/copier/scanner thingie that has been in the cozy house since she moved from Seattle.

But after discovering that none of the generic HP printer drivers had any idea there was now something plugged to the Mac's USB port (CUPS was no help), I went hunting on the web and discovered that the "driver" for this is a 53-megabyte download! That's rather impractical in my broadband-free zone, so Ned snagged it via DSL and handed a CD to Jeannie on her way home. Then the real fun started.

First, the installation. This is bloatware on an almost Microsoftian scale... 1,314 items were installed on my hard drive (requiring that all other applications first be quit), then I was launched on a browser-based "tour" that covered all the features of the machine and oh, by the way, requested my personal info. Where was the clickable option for "Damn it, I'm just using this stupid thing temporarily because my laser printer died from the cold, so no, I don't need fax cover pages, product registration, and rollover eye candy describing machine features"? But I pressed on, since the 1-page document I wanted to print all day was still on the desktop, needing to become hardcopy.

But now that I could actually see the machine, thanks to the 53 meg of mystery code, it turned out that the printer itself is exhibiting a chronic, apparently unfixable carriage jam... or at least it thinks it is. Various online help sites (including one from HP that's locked to prevent new posts, yet still presents a cute little floating javascript widget that prompts me to tell them how helpful it was), offered ideas about what to do when confronted with this problem... generally consisting of various forms of resetting and re-initializing, culminating in the advice to contact tech support.

I hate printers, and it’s ironic that in my last post I reminisced fondly about the Model 28 teletype. Now that was a thing of beauty, ayup.

Anyway, I managed to uninstall most of the bloatware from the Mac after digging around and finding an uninstaller tucked away deep in some directory... but even that turned out to be a sloppy process with a half-dozen items declared "in use" and thus undeletable. (Perhaps a clue lies in the fact that in the trash they were called "HP Registry Items," a distinctly Windozian term.. suggesting that this might have been a crude port intead of real Mac OS X software.) But what’s even more obnoxious is that even after uninstalling, something mysterious called “HP Communications” was gobbling over 50-70% of my CPU at any given moment, dramatically slowing all other applications. Restarting the system today finally got rid of it.

My advice to fellow Mac-heads is to avoid this installer (5100_634_EN.smi.hqx) at all costs; it is ugly and ill-behaved! I’m sure it works fine under Windows; Jeannie used it on her Compaq before moving to the island, and loved it. I have always been fond of HP engineering across all their product lines, so I suspect this is an anomaly... or just bad printer karma. (LATER NOTE, ADDED Feb 12, 2005: I'm not alone. Into the dumpster it goes.)

The fallout of all that is that I’ll buy a throw-away inkjet from a friend to print shipping documents until I can either fix the stalwart Lexmark or afford to replace it with something else of the workgroup (networked) class. Or, as was suggested today, I could learn to use one of those manual text-recording devices. Ah, here’s one from Silicon Valley (it says “Santa Clara Marriott” on the side). That should work.

In other news...

Items sold since last entry:

Japanese-English Dictionary - $9.75 to Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Winnebiko II Poster - $20.00 to London, England

New goodies on eBay:

(nil)

Site updates:

Just a few fixes in the Gear Shop.

Ancient Behemoths

2004-11-27T18:35:00.000-08:00

The two recent pointers to ancient Winnebiko and BEHEMOTH media coverage finally motivated me to find a decent photo-album tool, so a quick visit to the Mac OS X side of Versiontracker yielded the Java-based JAlbum, and the result is that about 50 scans from my media coverage over the years are now online here. It was pretty painless, since I didn't have to manually crunch all the thumbnails and IMG tags. The worst part, of course, was this pathetic half-speed dialup connection... I just launched an SCP of the whole mess with Fugu and had dinner while 6 megabytes oozed recursively off the island. Ain't technology wonderful?

And speaking of golden oldies... here is a very early personal computer:

This is the front panel of the system I designed and built in 1974, based on an Intel 8008 CPU with a 600 kHz clock and 4Kx8 Static RAM made of 2102s. I was reminiscing about this earlier today while, cleaning my office, I stumbled across the original file of 30-year-old schematics. It was all wire-wrapped (on 60-socket Augat panels plugged into a Scanbe "Rapid Rack" card cage), and the design included a number of enhancements that overcame the 8008's intrinsic shortcomings... in particular, a hardware hack that added a data stack in RAM in addition to the 7-level return stack. There were also 8 interrupt channels, 64 bits each of input and output, a graphics subsystem using a pair of 8-bit multiplying DACs outputting X-Y to an oscilloscope from a DMA display list, and a painfully slow math co-processor made from a Taylor-Series calculator chip with kluged BCD and 7-segment interface. I remember the night it drew a lovely (sin X)/X curve... took HOURS and I had consumed half a bottle of Jack Daniels by the time it was done, but it was a thing of beauty, I tellya what.

This machine also implemented Walsh-function waveform synthesis and a top-octave synthesizer for music projects, a hardware polyphonic music keyboard interface that I published in Byte, a one-shot Hollerith card reader that allowed me to boot-load with a multi-punched image instead of wearing my fingers out with deposit-next, Friden paper tape reader and punch, 1200 baud cassette interface, and a hardware driver for the marvelous Model 28 Baudot teletype that I still recall with fondness. (This latter circuit was my first published magazine article... in the July 25, 1974 issue of Electronics magazine.)

I sure do miss front panels. This one got a lot of use, and my early "screen saver" was a 555 (associated with the black knob) that allowed variable-speed single-stepping and a corresponding hypnotic blinking of the address and data bus LEDs.

Damn. 30 years. I started my beard the day this machine first worked, which was October 31, 1974. It was, like my bike, named BEHEMOTH (for "Badly Engineered Heap of Electrical, Mechanical, Optical, & Thermal Hardware"), and it's on display at the Computer History Museum, which is also where BEHEMOTH-the-bicycle lives. The photo above is courtesy of Jason Scott, who recently visited the museum and posted a page of photos.

In other news...

Items sold since last entry:

Palm Cradle - $3.50 to Redmond, Washington
Linux Journal back issues - $12.23 to Purcellville, Virginia
Arctic Odyssey by Len Sherman - $10.50 to Wewoka, Oklahoma

New goodies on eBay:

Modern Sex Techniques, published in 1959
49 Quartz-window DIP EPROMS (27C64, -128, -1024, & -2048)

Site updates:

Media album discussed above