I just finished up the first weekend of my vintage computer exhibit for Portland Design Month entitled When Having a Computer Was Weird: A showcase of early personal computers. I had two fun groups of visitors and I plan to run another date on October 18, plus others as time permits and interest demands.
I’ve been meaning for a while to write more about one of my recent projects, Catch the Wave!. Originally it was made for last year’s Oregon Science Festival and since I’m exhibiting again at the festival this year (this weekend, in fact!
I’ve been hacking on and off for a few years on a little open source side project, fari. It’s a terminal-based utility for the Mac for quickly zipping through the tabs that you’ve got open in Safari.
Took a ~4 mile walk in the newly-snowy neighborhood this afternoon. For the first time in years, I grabbed my camera to go along.
Despite not posting stuff as much as I’d like to get around to on this site, I do keep my link blog pretty active. It lets me share publicly some links to things on the web, sometimes with commentary. Here’s an overview of how I use it and how it works.
As part of a project that I’m working on, I decided to see if I could repurpose the excellent Hugo website framework (which also powers this very site) as a single-user wiki of sorts.
I just updated my now page. I like it because it’s something I can do three or four times a year, pretty casually, and feel like I’m not so behind in talking about WTF I’m actually doing with my time.
I successfully finished and “shipped” my booth, Catch the Wave!, at the inaugural OMSI Oregon Science Festival this past weekend.
Yes, another mere meta-post (my last was over a year ago), but this time to say that I’m going to start thinking about posts here as more of journal or lab notes than formal, fleshed-out writing.
So, it’s been a long time since I’ve blogged, apparently.
I’ll write more soon, but for those landing on my site now, I wanted to point folks at my project info page for my entry into the ReBuilding Center’s Salvage Showdown — the Gumballtron 3000!
I decided this year to make an ornament for our tree. The timing coincided with a creative itch and a business need to actually go through the process of printed circuit board (PCB) design and manufacturing, so I thought I’d make a little tree gadget.
As part of my deep dive into retro computing, I’ve recently had to figure out some SSH configuration in order for older DOS-based computers to be able to connect and authenticate. This is a summary of what I found out, since I had to puzzle my way through this and couldn’t find any info already online about it.
This is post is long overdue, since as I leaked a few weeks ago, I got the dang computer to work! I’m still completely amazed. I’m not totally out of the woods, as any other part of this could die on me at any moment, but things seem pretty solid for now. I wanted to write a bit about the technical side, but also to write more about what I’ve...
On Day 22, finally, I got a hint that I may be able to get this project running in its original incarnation. But first, I’ll take a step back as well as, at the end, address the all-important question of: why?
I’ve been using OmniFocus for years. It’s outstanding, but I had found in recent years that my projects and todo lists were becoming overwhelming and needed an overhaul. I was spending too much time trying to figure out what to tackle on my list, constantly feeling anxious about prioritization and about properly teeing myself up to be successful...
I’m still trying to get the 386 to boot or even show anything on the screen. All it does is beep loudly and continuously no matter what I do (save one thing, but that still doesn’t produce a picture and I doubt the CPU is even coming up in that instance—more below).
Last week, via my local Dorkbot mailing list, I acquired a pretty cool-looking late-80s portable computer.
No fooling! I’ve been working on my migration from centralized social media to stuff that I can build, manage, and own myself, and the next step in that process is Twitter-like microposts.
In large part to lay some foundation for more ownership of my own content in the style of IndieWeb and Micro.blog, I’ve moved my blog and site engine from Jekyll to Hugo. Jekyll has served me for a long time (since my days of using it at Development Seed and Mapbox) but wasn’t working out for me anymore for a few reasons.
These days, I’m building a lot of hardware projects based on the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi mini computer. Especially with the Raspberry Pi Zero W (an even tinier version, with the W denoting the wifi-capable version), you can have one anywhere and can power it from any USB power source.
tl;dr How I 3D printed a Volkswagen hand tool from a 1960 blueprint, realizing a half-century-old vision of locally-made equipment.
In the interest of blogging more often, I’m trying to reduce the barrier to entry for what I consider a blog post and just getting more stuff out there. So, less polish and more “here’s where my head is at” with this one.
I’m very pleased to make the somewhat overdue announcement that I have joined the Board of Directors of App Camp For Girls, a non-profit that I’ve been involved with since its inception in 2013. App Camp seeks to correct the gender imbalance in the tech industry through summer day camps for female, non-gender-conforming, and transgender youth.
This week marks six months since I ended my run at Mapbox. “What have I been up to?”, he asked rhetorically. Most notably, I’ve not been “working” in the traditional sense of the word. I’ve been taking this time to unplug a bit, at least from desk work after twenty years, and to think about what I want to be doing for the next little stretch.
Update: My band is doing a little fundraising debut show & open mic at my house the night before the run. Check out the show poster for more details. If you’re near Portland, I’d love to have you come by or even perform a little something! Get in touch and I can get you the details. Update 2: Thanks to your support, I was the third-highest...
Effective this week, I’m done with an over seven year run starting, building, and scaling mobile at the amazing Mapbox and I’m ready for some new adventures. I’m planning on a combination of relaxation, exploration, increased advocacy and time spent giving back, travel, rekindling old interests and hobbies, and baking pies, to name a few.
It is shocking to me how quickly a year has passed since I was on Capitol Hill, just seven weeks after my wife’s death from pancreatic cancer—itself the most shocking event of my life.
The following is a post that I drafted back in October, then let sit for months, planning to eventually get back to it. I decided to publish it mostly as-is in order to move on and to get to some other writing soon. As ever, things are moving fast and life is changing rapidly for me these days. Here’s a snapshot in time from a few months ago.
I haven’t felt moved to write in a little while, but I sat at the counter next to someone at brunch today, someone a fair bit younger than me (easier and easier these days), who was handwriting in a journal. I mentioned to her that it was nice to see someone writing, with a pen and paper, in this day and age. We chatted about the pace of writing,...
I’ve had some difficulty figuring out what to write next regarding this phase of my life, despite only a month passing since I laid out intentions to do just that. This is mostly because I feel like my healing has actually been going pretty well, or at least rapidly. Life is still very hard in some ways (keeping perspective relative to the rest...
My wife Michelle Petruzzi was diagnosed with, and died from, sporadic pancreatic cancer entirely within the past six months. She was thirty-six and probably the healthiest person I knew. She was active in many volunteer efforts in our community, she ran operations for a non-profit encouraging girls in tech, and she was a kind and generous soul.
This was going to be my programming and professional blog. A place to put technical thoughts, store my references to talks I’ve given and places I’ve traveled, and then pontificate on the tech landscape and the things that I keep learning along the way. A lot has changed since I last wrote here and I debated writing about it elsewhere, but in...
Michelle tasked me this year for our Halloween party to build a magic mirror. You know the type — looks like a normal mirror, but has a spooky face that talks to you out of it. Ok, easy enough. This ended up being a fun project, made more so by me leaving it until the last minute and essentially time-boxing myself to 48 hours to build it out.
I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed on the NSBrief podcast by Janie Clayton about what I’m up to at Mapbox, mostly from an iOS point of view. I did touch a bit on cross-platform development in OpenGL and C++, considering Metal instead of OpenGL, my recent forays into Android development, and we even got a little philosophical about...
Via my colleague Tom MacWright, I thought I’d give this little “ask me anything” template project a whirl, seeing how it’s so easily accomplished in something like GitHub: https://github.com/incanus/ama Feel free to post a question there and I’ll try to find time to answer. Seems like an interesting way to engage an audience outside of the...
Just a note that I’ve finally compiled a full list of talks and recorded appearances that I’ve done over the years. I’ll write more another time about the Jekyll templating that went into it (a positive way to spin it might be that I learned a lot), but for now, it’s up!
Owing to a recent corruption of my usual Time Capsule-based local network backup (which seems to be fairly common), a month or two ago I started backing things up to a local USB 3 drive attached to my Cinema Display. This is probably a stopgap until I decide to redo my Time Capsule backup, but I wanted to get a bit of backup history under my belt...
I ran into an interesting issue the other day with an Objective-C API that was bridged for use in Swift. For anyone who hasn’t used this functionality before, you can designate one or more Objective-C library header files to include in the workspace by way of a “bridging header”. All of those APIs will be made available to a Swift app. Not only...
Something I’ve wanted for a long time is a map showing places I’ve traveled, additionally with some (hopefully) interesting metadata visualized as well.
Like 2013, this one was, on the whole, solid. Lots of travel, a pivotal year for Mapbox, hobbies and free time receding, but still a good year for growth, harvest, and planting for the future.
This past year was pretty great, tinged with a couple of tough spots, so overall it gets a thumbs up from me. I saw Mapbox grow quite a bit, I amped up a hobby, I bonded with family, I traveled my furthest cumulative distance ever, and much more.