tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918Tue, 23 Mar 2010 20:53:53 +0000Tales of the new direction at Nomadic Research Labs... the move to a ship named <i>Nomadness</i>http://nomadness.com/blog/noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)Blogger74125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-6002716194978980470Sat, 06 Mar 2010 06:37:00 +00002010-03-06T22:57:39.953-08:00I'm aboard Nomadness at the moment, here to do the water-heater installation, but in classic fashion got drawn into the "opportunities" presented by this infernally glowing laptop. There seem to be two big changes afoot that will require difficult decisions and learning curves: the radical change in eBay's fee structure that will induce me to build up my store, and Google throwing us faithful FTPhttp://nomadness.com/blog/2010/03/tools-of-extraction.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-8513203723203051339Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:34:00 +00002010-01-31T13:44:38.382-08:00This post is a sort of interlude; Dervish is now rigged and is about to join Nomadness in the marina, and Polaris is complete enough to begin accepting a distillation of lab inventory. Lot of progress, in other words, but no compelling central story.Instead, I thought it would be fun to present a couple of historical articles that have been in my media binders for ages, but just came across my http://nomadness.com/blog/2010/01/behemoth-memories.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-5095482279994042094Thu, 21 Jan 2010 04:09:00 +00002010-01-21T13:50:46.600-08:00The trickiest part of an insanely complex and steadily morphing project is the way it warps the lives of all involved. I have a long history of watching relationships flounder while I devote all available time and energy to technomadic dreams, obsessed with gizmological overlays on boats and bikes, revising designs to keep pace with technology, sometimes hitting RESET and reverting to square onehttp://nomadness.com/blog/2010/01/dervish-of-salish-sea.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-8301553389165553461Mon, 28 Dec 2009 06:11:00 +00002010-01-20T20:08:46.182-08:00Oh good grief... has it really been 5 months since the post about clawing our way off a lee shore with a failed anchor windlass? It seems ages ago, back when leaves were on trees, the sun shone late into the evening, and I was lulled once again into the complacent fiction that sweet summer would last forever. Time slipped away with too little sailing, too many lists, and not enough of the fun http://nomadness.com/blog/2009/11/adventures-in-geek-playpen.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-1669759965060017908Fri, 24 Jul 2009 02:20:00 +00002009-07-26T19:10:13.853-07:00As in life, disaster at sea sneaks up fast. Conditions deteriorate in a downward spiral, quietly closing off options while you fiddle with trivialities, driving you inexorably toward a dead end long before you realize it. At some point, the vague dread you've been feeling all day snaps into sharp focus; it's no longer a colorful NOAA movie of well-fletched wind arrows against a colorized map ofhttp://nomadness.com/blog/2009/07/imperiled-on-lee-shore.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-2366131417709921485Sun, 12 Jul 2009 06:30:00 +00002009-07-16T12:38:56.110-07:00I'd like to welcome new visitors from Cruising Compass! Other nautical folk, if you haven't seen this, it's well worth a look - a great cruising-oriented weekly news source presented by Blue Water Sailing magazine.I'm anchored north of Hope Island at the moment, the boat feeling much lighter off the dock, the rhythm of life distinctly more relaxed than the task-oriented staccato that has http://nomadness.com/blog/2009/07/zen-of-geeky-boat-projects.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-2177802297980817211Mon, 01 Jun 2009 02:40:00 +00002009-06-04T22:46:39.742-07:00I miss the mental simplicity and steady progress of only working on one thing. I reminisce about Epic Projects of yesteryear, and they all seem to share the single characteristic of being grand obsessions so all-consuming that the rest of my life was relegated to meatspace maintenance and the bare-minimum business of hustling for cash to stay marginally afloat. Clear. Focused. Irresponsible, http://nomadness.com/blog/2009/05/straining-toward-nomadness.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-1746739601794140953Sat, 16 May 2009 15:32:00 +00002009-05-29T08:48:38.862-07:00Why does it take the stirrings of springtime to accelerate the indoor jobs, all those geeky things that should be done by the time it's warm enough to embed them in a boat? I sit at my desk, unencumbered by the customary layers of insulation, doing everything that I could have finished over the winter: populating the store, databasing sensor channels, eBaying, writing a book, assembling http://nomadness.com/blog/2009/05/digital-nomad-redux.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-3830502565075148056Mon, 04 May 2009 06:30:00 +00002009-05-04T08:24:59.852-07:00About a half-dozen times in the past 24 hours, the Polaris mobile-lab project has been reinforced. This is going to be wonderful tool, I think... not only to bring R&D facilities within range of the system I'm trying to focus on, but also to add another nickel generator to the arsenal. A fairly comprehensive electronics, networking, communications, and light fabrication shop in the marina http://nomadness.com/blog/2009/05/spring.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-6869930056679484984Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:25:00 +00002009-07-15T09:05:44.345-07:00Here's a bit of technomadic geekery that has thrice attempted to burble to the foreground, each time falling back into obscurity as I chased more delicious obsessions like boat acquisition, network design, and even the occasional adventure. (Remember adventure? This song's about adventure...)I've moaned a lot lately about the logistically absurd situation here, despite having what appears on thehttp://nomadness.com/blog/2009/04/polaris-mobile-lab.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-8309905536459833517Mon, 23 Mar 2009 07:45:00 +00002009-12-30T23:24:10.171-08:00I spoke at the Microhams conference in Redmond this past weekend... my first "gig" in quite a while. It went well, I met lots of interesting and creative digital radio geeks, and even managed to catch up a bit with some tech that I'm going to be using Real Soon Now.Making a slide presentation for the event prompted me to stabilize the Nomadness network architecture enough to be able to discuss http://nomadness.com/blog/2009/03/shipnet-architecture.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-4294151059476139902Thu, 19 Mar 2009 04:46:00 +00002009-03-19T10:38:30.074-07:00This update is a bit of a divergence from my usual breed of randomness, which typically has something to do with S/V Nomadness, development facilities, technomadic gizmology, or random noodlings triggered by any of the foregoing.I'd like to dedicate this posting to my father, Ed Roberts, who passed away in 2005. The trip to Kentucky to shut down the old family homestead was a huge 6-month http://nomadness.com/blog/2009/03/son-of-sailor.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-5868308879649283046Thu, 12 Mar 2009 08:02:00 +00002009-03-16T17:07:29.337-07:00It's freezing in the harbor, and I'm on one of my too-infrequent work trips... mapping my normal project-management context-switching into a form so jarringly physical that I have to take laptop breaks. This is not healthy; the ratio of those orthogonal activities should be inverted.Still, I'm enjoying the night aboard, and the stove is cranking at a cozy Fahrenheit 451° (according to mechanicalhttp://nomadness.com/blog/2009/03/maudlin-front-panel-retrospective.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-2089225292297553072Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:22:00 +00002009-04-04T10:44:35.504-07:00Hoo-boy, this is a crazy time. Whether on the cusp of TEOTWAWKI, the transition to an initial cap in the word depression, or just a bloody dust-up in the sleight-of-handoff of dictatorial powers, there is a sense of contextual discontinuity that makes it hard to maintain steady project focus. Of course, I'm perfectly capable of gallivanting off in multiple divergent paths even without a broken http://nomadness.com/blog/2009/03/mini-macs-escape-velocity-and-crash.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-4591318558157301716Wed, 18 Feb 2009 03:30:00 +00002009-02-17T21:51:09.180-08:00I've often moaned in these electronic pages about the inefficiency of my current facilities; despite seeming, on the surface, to be a sort of geek paradise (3000 square-foot lab in the woods), the reality borders on absurdity. With the boat a 3-hour round-trip drive away, the rhythm of the project is the precise antithesis of the Deep Immersion that is required... I work in burst mode, make http://nomadness.com/blog/2009/02/facilities-virtual-and-otherwise.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-6419306951571117974Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:18:00 +00002009-02-05T23:08:30.464-08:00It's a humble little thing, this microprocessor that will spend its days tucked away under the forward berth, tirelessly keeping an eye on such mundane matters as the amount of sewage in the holding tank and the status of associated valves... and it probably doesn't deserve all this bloggage. But the Sewage node has some meta-value that makes it a bit more significant.I deliberately chose this http://nomadness.com/blog/2009/02/first-node-flickers-to-life.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-470309447747373022Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:45:00 +00002009-01-30T11:53:18.461-08:00'Tis a busy time, this January in the Nomadhouse: a wonderful visit from my daughter, Zen Cart learning curve, Satie's Gnossiennes, stoking the home fires, magnetized boat curtains, lab entropy reduction, and plunging into ship network design... and that's just the fun stuff, interrupted too often by the psychic energy sinks of daily life and a sore back. But the show goes on, with a diffuse http://nomadness.com/blog/2009/01/busy-boxes.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-6531532551677032379Sun, 11 Jan 2009 07:12:00 +00002009-01-14T12:56:40.733-08:00Wow, I haven't been in this mode for years, and I feel rusty! Downloading libraries, reading documentation, defining data structures, parsing strings, and even sketching a retro flowchart or two... this is definitely Good Times, but man, am I ever out of shape. But still, hot on the heels of installing Zen Cart for local development under MAMP and firing up a server on the Technologic TS-7200 http://nomadness.com/blog/2009/01/learning-curve-junkie-in-zone-of.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-6102594843788386233Tue, 06 Jan 2009 05:45:00 +00002009-01-06T16:45:45.635-08:00Cold, dark winter days are demotivating and I didn't get it together to go see how the boat handles a foot of snow loading, but I am happy to report progress on three simultaneous fronts: the ship's Shacktopus network, the Boat Hacking book, and an online store to conjure a nickel generator from the first two.I have been writing in the exquisitely agile Scrivener environment that allows me to http://nomadness.com/blog/2009/01/intertwined-fronts-and-ship-stereo.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-6585147037713195624Sat, 27 Dec 2008 04:53:00 +00002009-01-11T12:23:46.774-08:00I've never been much of a fan of Christmas, except perhaps when I was a kidlet in the nuclear family of mom/dad/me back in Kentucky, long ago and very far away from other relatives. Back then, the tree glittered and new toys appeared, just as they should (nothing has really changed).Tinkertoys, trains, erector sets, the usual boring clothes and such... I was easy to please back then, and wasn't http://nomadness.com/blog/2008/12/wintry-notes-from-nomadhouse.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-7746410402942526913Wed, 17 Dec 2008 03:30:00 +00002008-12-16T22:29:11.435-08:00This freezing week has been a time for system design work, the start of a new book, waterworks fabrication, and preparing my office for use as a ship simulator during the software-development phase. We did make one brief run to the boat last week, then got stuck in a nasty snowstorm enroute back... which turned the normal 1.5-hour drive into 3.5 hours. I discovered that NEWT, my Dodge RAM 2500,http://nomadness.com/blog/2008/12/route-through-canal.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-8621620744115874416Fri, 28 Nov 2008 08:35:00 +00002008-11-30T10:58:29.924-08:00Real physical tasks are queuing up, but it's a rainy holiday weekend and I find myself more engaged in gonzo engineering than rust patrol and plumbing. It began while sketching a simple controller, and suddenly the whole Shacktopus network design became illuminated in my brain... an area that had grown murky, overwhelmed by too many choices over lo, these many years.But first, some context from http://nomadness.com/blog/2008/11/shacktopus-architecture.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-2650129826720496326Wed, 26 Nov 2008 07:03:00 +00002008-11-26T09:20:45.601-08:00The modular approach to ship system fabrication is starting to manifest itself as little pools of parts in the lab... good thing we resurfaced the crusty old particle-board workbenches a few months ago! The current lab-based projects are:Console (communications gear, audio, geekstuff)Waterworks (fresh-water processing)Bow Module (steerable spotlight/video/sensors & LED navlights)Field Radio http://nomadness.com/blog/2008/11/consoling-thoughts.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-6462354520809897564Sun, 09 Nov 2008 04:25:00 +00002008-11-09T11:43:23.335-08:00Work trip #3 was a short one, aborted by bad weather and flagging motivation. I showed up after dark with big companionway-hacking plans for the next day, hauled my table saw to the dock and covered it with plastic to keep condensation at bay, stayed up late faffing around online, then woke pre-dawn to a full gale with the Bosch threatening to take a flying leap into the drink. I lashed 'er http://nomadness.com/blog/2008/11/waterworks-shacktopus-and-simplicity.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25248918.post-8822853111699059995Thu, 30 Oct 2008 03:29:00 +00002008-11-03T11:41:58.704-08:00In what is probably going to become something of a routine, I'm now on my second "winter work session" aboard Nomadness, blogging as I go. Since the last installment, I've done a fair bit on the home front, and also posted an introductory walkthrough of the boat... the first of what should be a large collection of articles by the time this is all over.But this trip is largely about tankage... Ihttp://nomadness.com/blog/2008/10/work-trip-2-tankage.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts)6