Archive

Personal knowledge base. Second brain. Working in public. 213 pages and growing.

Learning what I can, Reading what I find, tracking Questions worth pondering.

Making Things

The Dotfiles hold it all together — Nvim, tmux, CLI workflows, the shader system that makes the terminal glow. Every morning starts with CIPHER, an AI ritual that reads your whole context and tells you what matters today. Code gets committed through AI Commit, reviewed in lazygit, shipped from the VPS. Talon lets you drive the whole thing by voice when your hands are elsewhere.

The project list sprawls: Coach Artie as an AI companion, Scrapbook-core for visual publishing, Exif-photo-printer for photo metadata. Personal APIs feed the Quantified Self system — the personal panopticon, willingly built. Same data, many interfaces is the design philosophy underneath it all.

Out in the Field

The Field Kit is deliberate — every item chosen according to a philosophy of constraint and capability. The full Tactical Loadout and Gear reviews live here. The Motorcycle gets you there, and the repair kit gets you home.

The radio work runs deep. Ham Radio connects to Frequencies worth monitoring and a study guide for the license. NOAA Satellites let you pull weather images directly from orbit. Meshtastic builds mesh networks where infrastructure fails. HackRF and Flipper Zero are for understanding the RF spectrum, and ESP32 projects bridge the digital and physical. FPV Drones get you perspectives no one else has — there's a whole training regimen for that.

The Electronics Lab ties it together: Soldering, 3D Printing, building the tools that build the other tools.

Journalism & Investigations

The practice means Data Journalism and visualization, FOIA requests that take months to land, careful Source Handling, and OSINT Monitoring that runs in the background. The Investigations page tracks what's active.

In the Hudson Valley, that means watching ICE, DHS, and CBP — the Chester ICE Facility, the Orange County detention center, and the people and money around them. The Entity Index maps the connections: Pat Ryan, Sean Eldridge, Steve Neuhaus, Zephyr Teachout, Howard Buffett, Carl Icahn, and the companies they run through. Local power, followed carefully.

When Things Go Wrong

The Runbooks exist because they have to. Digital security incidents, solo medical emergencies, vehicle failures, setting up a new machine, recovering locked accounts — each one written before you need it, because you won't be thinking clearly when you do.

Underneath that: operational security as practice, Threat Modeling as habit, Key Management and PGP and hardware keys for the things that matter. SSH tunnels, Emergency Communications plans, field safety protocols. The Security Quick Reference Card is the one-pager you print and keep in the bag.

Thinking

The influences run through Stewart Brand, Stephenson, Ram Dass. Creative Principles and Creative Constraints shape the work. Appropriate Technology asks: right tool, right scale, specific problem. Practice & Presence says be here now, as method. Hacker Culture says curiosity is a virtue and building your own tools is how you learn what you actually need.

The systems thinking lives in Sensemaking Systems, Context Alchemy Primitives, and Information Architecture for Humans. There's a Skill Development Framework and a belief in Documentation Discipline — write it down or it didn't happen. Habits compound. Exercise is non-negotiable.

Daily Life

Coffee in the morning, always. Food and Cooking and Foraging when the season allows. Watching the Weather in the Hudson Valley, knowing the Local Resources. Flash photography outside, film when it matters, thinking about Composition either way. The Motorcycle is transportation and meditation and repair practice all at once.

Main Page