Mad science, beer brewing, and Arduino antics.
Beer
It seems like this is becoming a less and less unique hobby as time rolls on, but I brew beer the nerd way. I'm in the process of building an all-electric, fully automated grain brewing apparatus using actuated valves, relays, and 7,000 watts' worth of heating elements. It uses a highly efficient Heat-Exchanged Recirculating Mash System (HERMS) and, just for geek chic, I'm building a bunch of analog meters for voltage and current draw into the control box and using an old industrial label punch for that 1960s charm. The brains of the operation is a Brewtroller, an Arduino-based MCU custom-built for homebrewers.
Electronics
The crowning achievement of my adolescence came at age 18, when over the course of a summer my father built a GPS receiver out of odds and ends from his workplace and I wrote the software for it in 8051 assembly language. It gives you a real sense of gratitude to the authors of fundaments like libc and the Python standard library when you have to implement things like strlen and printf on your own, instruction by instruction.
FI've always been kind of an imp when it comes to hardware. I don't know if I was rebelling against my father's military-grade discipline or I just needed a hobby, but I use electronics to silly ends. For the University of Chicago's infamous Scavenger Hunt, I contributed a computer which I made explode using nothing but its own parts. It's amazing what you can do with a few reverse-biased filter capacitors and 12 volts wired to various creative places. My swan song, though, was a fully-functional copy of Dick Cheney's Duck Hunt.
Free Code
A lot of the widgets I use on this site are properly modularized and parametric jQuery plugins, for instance the news ticker at top and the iPhone screenshot scroller. In addition, all of the file uploads on this site are run through an AJAX uploader tool using an unfortunately complex combination of Python and Javascript. When I get a free minute I'm going to throw them all my work up on Github in the hope of saving some of my fellow developers an annoyingly large amount of hair-pulling.
Spoken Latin
I collaborate with Jason Pedicone and Eric Hewett on the technological needs of the Paideia Institute, a summer program for teaching people how to speak Latin, and, in the future, classical Greek. Jason and Eric are two of the cleverest people I've had the privilege to work with, and their enthusiasm for the revival of a spoken Latin culture is infectious. I'm working on new ways to integrate Lexidium and Lexiphanes into their curriculum, so stay tuned.
