“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labour and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.” - Yvon Chouinard
A few of my activities and projects
Commodore CHESSmate
The origin story of the Commodore CHESSmate, the hardware version of Microchess, including recollections of my time spent with Bobby Fischer in 1978.
Microchess for the Kim-1
Microchess for the Kim-1 was the first commercial game and the first commercial implementation of artificial intelligence for home computers. After six months of development, the first copy was shipped on December 18, 1976.
Tracking Fish at Stony Lake
Some of the fish in Stony Lake have surgically implanted ultrasonic tags. I decided to go and find them in my kayak using a DIY ultrasonic detector.
Covidometer
New cases and deaths per hour. Day by day.
Updated in real time.
Viewed in over 100 countries within hours of publication on reddit.
When It’s Over
A public blackboard to record what you are waiting to do.
Portraits of Resilience 2021-22 at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
In Memoriam Corona
Remembering the victims of COVID-19, one by one.
Heuristically generated obituaries. 2020.
Propagation Maps
A web based directory of KiwiSDR receivers currently online sorted by propagation forecasts for the transmitting station. 2017 project.
KiwiSDR IBP Extension
An extension for the KiwiSDR receiver for plotting waterfall spectrum analyses of the International Beacon Project beacons.
Additional features for saving waterfall images based on preset intervals for longer scale propagation and noise analysis.
The open source code is available on GitHub. November 2017.
GoPro Projects
I received a GoPro camera as a Christmas gift to use as a helmet camera to take photos and videos during my paraglider flights.
An interest in time lapse photography led to me hacking the camera interface and designing a powerful controller accessory for GoPro cameras.
Instant demand for the controller led to the creation of cam-do.com, a web site offering solutions for GoPro cameras.
As sales grew, cam-do.com evolved into a real business, despite my best efforts to keep it small. Professional photographers and videographers embraced the cam-do.com solutions.
Cam-Do.com
In 2014, Timia Capital and Todd McCann took over the operation of CamDo Solutions Inc, now offering a complete line of GoPro accessories, Time Lapse solutions, and underwater equipment to customers world-wide.
VE3SUN DX Monitor
In 1989, I began a project to collect and display DX spots retrieved by packet radio from a DX Cluster in Northern California.
In 1993, this project evolved into DX Monitor and was offered as freeware. Since then, the program has been continually improved and expanded. It is now used by tens of thousands of hams in over 150 countries.
DX Monitor is a Windows application.
Stony Lake Cottagecam
In 1997, I installed a camera at our cottage on Stony Lake and created a web page called the Cottagecam. Now it shows several cameras around the lake and reports on lake conditions.
In the summer, there are now 5 cameras put up by various neighbours showing what the lake looks like to those not lucky enough to be here.
Weather forecasts and lake temperatures are also shown on the Cottagecam Page.
Artistic Adventures
1024.jpg "Dia de Muertos")
Confusing illusions. 3D stereograms. Mathematically generated sculptures. Op art. Dark visions.
From time to time the muses encourage me to manifest some of my artistic visions into physical form.
TrekEarth Photos
For a number of years I contributed to the TrekEarth photography site (shut down in 2022), sharing images captured on my travels. Here you will find a curated collection of my favourite images from that time.
More travel photography is displayed in numerous albums on this site, grouped by destination.
Pocket Guide to World History
Jane and Peter Jennings wrote the Pocket Guide to World History while travelling in Europe from 1985 to 1989 as a pocket reference book.
In 2002 it was shipped on all C-Pens, a small device that could scan text and perform dictionary lookups in the book. It was also available as a download for the Pocket PC and HieBook.
The PocketHistory tweetbot tweeted history entries from April 2009 to July 2023 when Elon changed the game.
Since 2009 it has been available as a Webapp for the iPhone.
Microchess for the Kim-1
Microchess for the Kim-1 was the first commercial game and the first commercial implementation of artificial intelligence for home computers. After six months of development, the first copy was shipped on December 18, 1976.
In preparation for the 2002 Vintage Computer Festival, I powered up the same Kim-1 used to write the original program and loaded Microchess into memory.
The program and data required all of the Kim-1's memory - 1K. How things have changed since then!
VisiCalc and Personal Software
On April 8, 2003, Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston, and Mitch Kapor gathered with Charles Simonyi to speak about the Origins and Impact of VisiCalc.
This got me thinking about those early days and my own first encounters with the program in 1978.
I was lucky to be able to use VisiCalc for several months before it was introduced to the market. There were even a few bytes of my code in the original Apple ][ version.
