User:Rob

My first choice, Sidfoqbix, was taken, so I'm Rob. Hi.

By day I'm a mild-mannered USAID contractor. By night I'm a mild-mannered father of two living in Silver Spring. I'm pretty mild-mannered generally.

I have a lot of interests and focus is not my strong suit, so I tend to know just enough about a lot of things to be dangerous. With a class 3 laser, nozzles extruding hot plastic, and computer-controlled spinny cutty things, HacDC seemed like a good place to be dangerous.

I have been a platonic amateur radio operator since 2006 -- I know the PTT button but we aren't intimate. I dig bikes. And Japan. I recently counted my passport stamps and determined that I've been to Tokyo 17 times, each for about 24 hours, which is a weird way to get to know a place.

I follow North Korea like some people follow Star Trek. The conventions aren't very good, though.

(Did you know that when Kim Jong-Un was being groomed for the succession, there was a major propaganda campaign in the DPRK about CNC technology? The idea, never explicitly stated, was that Jong-Un's youth was actually an advantage, in that he had new ideas that were going to bring North Korea a technological edge. The result was some pretty extravagant material about CNC. To wit: video )

I speak Arabic and just enough Japanese to get into trouble, but only if it's fairly formal trouble. I like to think that if I was parachuted into Central America for two weeks that enough Spanish would come back to me that I could talk my way out of the terrible situation I would have gotten into with a major gang and/or political faction by that time, but I am OK with that remaining a hypothesis.

I also speak fax, which has made it really difficult to edit this page.

My latest hacky-type project was building a bGeigie nano kit. I'm currently working on an OpenROV.I'm intrigued by the DIY cell phone project, but I'm still very much at the window-shopping stage. I'm slowly trying to teach myself GNU Radio with an RTL-SDR dongle. I'm keen to get my HackRF so I have another thing to be totally over my head in.

There is still time to get in on the ground floor of following me on Twitter.