About

I’m interested in things that blink, beep, click, spin, transmit, record, or have no obvious reason to still exist.

I like old technology, weird technology, unnecessarily complicated technology, and technology that someone on the internet once said “you probably shouldn’t do this.”

You’ll find me somewhere between a workbench, a terminal window, a mountain trail and a pile of electronics that was supposedly destined for recycling.

Things I like

💽 MiniDisc The kind that could survive being dropped from a building and still have 87% battery afterwards. Old Nokias, obscure phones, strange connectors and forgotten mobile technology are considerably more interesting to me than they probably should be.

🎧 Old audio equipment CD players, cassette decks, MiniDisc decks, amplifiers, speakers, headphones and other wonderfully over-engineered boxes from before everything became a sealed slab with a touchscreen.

If it has buttons, a display and an unnecessarily large circuit board inside, I’m interested.

🔧 Gadgets & hackery ESP32s, Arduino boards, sensors, displays, relays, random modules from questionable online marketplaces, cables of unknown origin and electronics that probably shouldn’t be connected together.

I like making things do things they weren’t necessarily intended to do.

Sometimes this involves programming.

Sometimes soldering.

Sometimes a multimeter.

Sometimes all three.

And occasionally a very confident guess.

🖥️ Computers & old hardware Old Macs, PCs, Linux, servers, strange peripherals, obsolete interfaces, networking, storage, virtual machines and generally finding new purposes for hardware that everyone else has already written off.

I have a particular weakness for old machines that are almost useless.

Almost.

🏠 Home automation & self-hosting Home Assistant, MQTT, Zigbee, ESPHome, Docker, servers and assorted little machines quietly doing things in the background.

Because apparently turning a light on should sometimes require an ESP32, a database, a message broker and several hours of debugging.

🥾 Mountains & hiking When I’ve had enough of screens, cables and mysterious serial communication errors, I like going somewhere with fewer cables and considerably better scenery.

Hiking, mountains, forests, long walks and generally getting as far away from civilisation as reasonably possible.

Preferably somewhere with a good view.

The general philosophy

I like understanding how things work.

Not necessarily because I need to use them.

Sometimes because I want to know what happens if I press the button.

And then what happens if I press it again.

And then what happens if I connect something completely different to it.

I enjoy taking apart old technology, resurrecting forgotten hardware, writing little tools for oddly specific problems, modifying things, breaking things, fixing things and occasionally creating a solution that is considerably more complicated than the original problem.

I’m also rather fond of technology that has a physical presence.

A little screen.

A mechanical switch.

A spinning disc.

A relay clicking.

A VU meter moving.

A fan starting up.

A serial terminal filling with incomprehensible nonsense.

Things that do something.

This website

This is my little corner of the internet.

There isn’t really a grand plan.

It’s a place for projects, experiments, notes, discoveries, strange ideas, hardware, software, music-related nonsense and whatever else happens to catch my attention.

Some things here will be polished.

Some things will be unfinished.

Some things will exist purely because I wondered:

“I wonder if I can…”

Those are usually the dangerous ones.

No résumé. No corporate buzzwords. No inspirational life story.

Just things I find interesting.

And probably too many cables.

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Currently somewhere between: ~/projects · /dev/ttyUSB0 · the mountains · a box of old electronics