Now
A brief overview of my activities and focus of the past few months. You can also read more about the now page concept.
Last updated on December 5, 2024.
I don’t foresee any significant availability for new client projects in the near future, but don’t let that stop you from saying hello anyway.
Client work
I’ve still mostly been focused on client projects lately, including a lot of work on a very fun and challenging cross-platform RDP framework involving raw bytes over the wire, bitmap compression and rendering, session encryption, and the like. It’s been a completely greenfield project starting with me, a blank text editor, and a 450-page PDF protocol spec. It’s been incredibly rewarding and even has me using my HP-16C from 1982 on a daily basis — an elegant tool for a more civilized age.
One of my other projects has been working with Specialized, a major high-end bike company, on their bike fitting motion capture platform. At first this involved a lot of iPad application work, but I’ve slowly moved over into almost entirely firmware and embedded Linux development involving Bluetooth and over-the-air platform updates, with support for that on the iPad app as needed.
Long-term personal product/project
My hardware & software project continues to creep along. I’ve been spending a lot of time on the language side of things, especially with Lisp and Lisp-derived languages (tiny Lisps, Fennel, and Janet, the latter of which I’m once again doing Advent of Code in). On the hardware side, I’ve been prototyping and testing tiny keyboards and battery charging circuits. This is moving slowly, and it’s a project I’ve been working on in one way or another since 2020. Someday…
Travel & community
I recently attended Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, CA, as in 2023, and had a blast. I wrote up my badge hack and just generally enjoyed being invigorated by a variety of talks and people working on cool projects.
I’ve also been involved for about a year with a few community groups, including a retrocomputing meetup and a reading and discussion group focused on non-commercial computing research, experimentation, and sharing. In general, I’ve been spending a lot of time looking into alternative computing platforms, old ideas, and generally better ways that we could be making tools for thought, understanding, and creativity.
And we’re about to embark on an epic-scale camper van roadtrip down and back up the Pacific coast, maybe as far as Baja. In a 39 year-old vehicle, it’s sure to be an adventure regardless of what happens.