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My expertise in computing falls mostly in the Sand-to-C part of the stack, with relatively little interaction with the nebulous underpinnings of the modern Internets. Even maintaining a wordpress blog to document my projects is more of a hassle than I would like, but alas, here we are. After a few wordpress upgrades (and a lot of projects), things had gotten both very slow and fairly crowded around here. I finally sat down yesterday and sorted out the back-end issues that were making the site so slow (I put the blame squarely on a nefarious plug-in), and organized my projects

I normally only post to this site when I finish a project (or have something fun to show off). My ability to come up with ideas for projects has always far outstripped by ability to execute on them, though, so a lot of ideas never get realized (or get built halfway and wind up collecting dust in my basement). Here’s a rambly list of projects I’ve considered in the past, and might one day consider again in the future:  Building a ‘kitchen sink’ laptop – I’ve always loved the idea of hackers crafting their own heirloom laptops (a la Bunnie

  A long time ago (after I built my FIBIAC), my friends at Makerbot used their botfarm to make a boatload of 3-digit counters for me. I hadn’t really decided what to do with them at the time, but I thought it would be fun to see how far I could push the delightfully-inefficient instruction-set architecture I had come up with. After languishing for 2 years or so, I finally decided to do something with them. The punch-card chain of the FIBIAC has been replaced by a somewhat more robust stepper-driven instruction drum, and there are now 8 (!) 3-digit

I think I started this project around 2 years ago, but got bogged down in trying design my own printable, movable-type font (it turns out font design is a whole crazy world I want nothing to do with). I recently discovered the “Write” library for openscad (along with Makerbot’s cool ‘customizer’ tool for thingiverse). The result is a neato, pocket-friendly printing press. Customize a plate of type, print it out with a 3D-printer, and then 2D-print until your heart’s content. You can finally make the tiny zine you’ve always wanted to!

I finally got my 3D-printed, fully-mechanical computer running! Go check out the Turbo Entabulator – and then go build your own!

I had gotten bogged down with the data recovery effort from my COS disk pack in the last year (and my day job building slightly more modern supercomputers got a bit busier), but an awesome programmer named Andras has picked up the torch and carried it ridiculously far! He not only re-wrote all of my disk recovery software to overcome most of the disk corruption, he also reverse engineered the file system and wrote a simulator for an entire data center’s worth of equipment (4 CPU Cray X-MP, with 4 IO Processors, a peripheral expander, printer, wyse 50 terminals, a

My efforts have slowly been converging on a workable design for a 3D-printable, all-mechanical computer (with an emphasis on the word *slowly*). Inspired by this recent post I saw floating around the ‘net, I thought I would post my most recent attempt at building a fully-mechanical stepping mechanism (to replace the stepper motors used in my FIBIAC project). Eventually I will get around to integrating this with my electromechanical counter so that I have a fully mechanical counting mechanism. And video!