My desk
My desk.
Video
Video where I tell Neil about myself and the stuff you can see on my desk
He was particurlarly interested in the historical Tandy computer.
The candle
During the dark winter months I light a candle on my desk every day to keep my father with me.
The simplest plywood laptop stand
My ThinkPad laptop can become totally flat! So I milled a simple stand out of two pieces of birch plywood and lasered the Fab Lab Ísafjörður logo onto it.
On the right is a vertical monitor that I use for coding, reading documents and browsing the internet. Not many people use a vertical monitor, but I quite like it.
BEAM robotics
In the window on the left are two BEAM bots that I made from salvaged components using instructions in Mark Tilden's book Junkbots, Bugbots and Bots on Wheels. They collect sunlight and store it in capacitors. When the capacitors are full, they release the energy into the motor and the bug moves a little bit. In the summertime, my bugs go wild and sometimes fall off the windowsill. I got the little solar cells from Solarbotics.
Around 2012 I was fascinated with a take on AI called situated robotics that started with a paper called Elephants Don't Play Chess. This was long before the large language models. The paper argues that higher level cognitive functions like logic came very late in evolution and therefore our AI efforts should focus on the basics of perception and motion that nature has mostly focused on for billions of years. A BEAM bot has a simple nervous network made of a few analog components that make up a special ring oscillator that Mark Tilden invented. This oscillation can generate crawling and walking motion. The robot is put into its environment, where it does a random walk and hopefully finds some light, and subsequent generations are improved using the roboticist as the force of evolution.
First 3D prints
Also in the window is the second thing I ever 3D printed, the Stormtrooper Buddha. The first thing I 3D printed was a replacement knob for a drill press, which Bas Withagen asked me to document.
Vinyl cut sensors
Lined up next to the Stormtrooper Buddha are vinyl cut touch sensors on little acrylic plates, made by my students in the Fab Lab course at Ísafjörður Secondary School. I had the group make these sensors the week after I did it myself in the Fab Academy.
The step response sensor design comes from Hafliði Ásgeirsson. Hafliði took me through making a step response touch sensor when we had the Fab Lab Iceland Bootcamp in Ísafjörður in 2022. That was my first time milling a circuit.
Fab Academy components arrive
The image below shows my desk when all the components for the Fab Academy arrived. Yay! Outside the window you can see Ísafjörður harbor and the mountain Ernir. Ernir is also the name of my older son.
My desk when the parts for the Fab Academy arrived. Can you spot the good old Tandy 102 computer?
Tandy 102
Sometimes I use a Tandy 102 laptop from 1985 for writing, because it has the best keyboard I've ever used by far.
The Tandy 102 was my father's first laptop. It was one of the first laptops, period.
My dad ordered a device that plugs into the computer's RS232 port and allows me to put the files onto an SD card. They're in the ancient .DO format. First came .DO, then .DOC and finally .DOCX. When I insert the SD card into my modern laptop I run a little converter program and voilá! I can put the text on the web.