Bits and Bobbles of Things

Hello Dear Friends (and assorted others),
You have indeed found my page in Cyberspace, so please follow the painted arrows, watch your step, and avoid clicking on any random links by accident.

This page might be a bit untidy at times, but if you poke around at it long enough you might just find what you're looking for. If not, then at least you've still got pickles. Unless you're out of them right now, in which case you're probably very hungry.

Sincerely,
Robinson (aka "qubit" or "womble" or "that bearded man who makes the delicious bread")

This website is currently split up into several pages. If you get confused, just pop back 'round to the index page and start over again.

• Work -- A necessary component of life, your work should hopefully be fun and exciting, stimulating you to learn new things and empowering you to teach others and improve yourself and the world. Well, that's the plan, anyhow...
  
  I've worked with various groups and labs, including
  • The Document Foundation, where I currently work as a QA Engineer, and serve as a volunteer Community Outreach Herald for LibreOffice, a Free/Open Source Office Suite that you should try out.
  • Tiltfactor Lab, on the Metadata Games project.
  • The Interactive Media Lab at Dartmouth Medical School, designing tools for multimedia authoring environments and helping to create Virtual Worlds to train medical professionals and first responders to deal with hazmat and terrorist incidents.
• Blog
• Pictures
  • Some of my pictures are available up on Zooomr
  • Some of my Sketches are here on this site.
  • Other images are located in various places online. I'll add more links soon.
• Food -- I love cooking and baking, harvesting and enjoying good food.
  • We'll harvest the Hops soon, and then I'll have some pics up of hops and of beer making!
  • I enjoy making all kinds of bread, especially sourdough (though my starter is quite young, only about 10 years old...)
• Gardening -- There's never enough time to get around to planting things, and then the deer eat the tender shoots!
• Sustainability -- There is a certain elegance to recycling, composting, and simple changes to make a process more efficient and less wasteful. Just like a resourceful cook, I enjoy finding new ways to do more with less, more quickly, and with less effort.
  
  I've posted a number of articles about sustainability to my blog, including
  • Compostable Dishes -- Brief notes on what's available.
  • A trip to the Dartmouth Composting Facility
  • A trip to FreeGeek in Portland, OR (a community-based volunteer computer recycling and education organization)
  • Green Cleaning At DHMC -- How DHMC is switching to safer, more sustainable cleaning tools, chemicals, and procedures.
  • Recycling Plastics at Dartmouth -- I wrote this to help people realize that we can recycle plastics #1 - 7 at Dartmouth (subject to some restrictions on type of item, not resin code)
  • 100% compostable Milque and Cookies -- I helped the undergraduates at Phi Tau run an event where all of the waste was compostable.
  • Recycling and Composting at Phi Tau -- More improvements to the recycling and composting program at Phi Tau Fraternity.
  • (Coming Soon) A trip to the Zero-Sort facility in Massachusetts (with pics and video)
  • (Coming Soon) How to deal with plastic bags and other plastic items that can't go to the Zero Sort facility!
• The Outdoors -- It's so lovely.
  I enjoy hiking and camping, boating and lumberjacking. I still get to do a bit of the latter whenever we cut and split wood for our stove for the winter.
  
  I was quite involved in the DOC when I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth, and I was pleased as punch to get a Lifetime Membership as a graduation present. See my page about the DOC here.
• Building and Hacking on things -- Too many things to mention and too little time.
  There are probably pictures of various things that I've built up in my Zooomr photostream. Some of my favorite items recently have included
  • A frame for wall-mounting a historic wrought-iron balcony grate
  • A free-standing, rolling, combination cooling-rack/drying rack (it's incredibly sturdy for being so lightweight)
  • An under-pool-table rolling storage sled
  • A gigantic spice rack (it's build to hold pint jars)
  • An exercise bike made out of an old non-functional bicycle and about $10 in parts from Home Depot
  • A boat (it's....a work in progress)
  • Some nice, sturdy benches
• Personal Projects -- of various sorts
  
  • A 3D model of the Android robot (made in Blender)
  • An android with an octave sombrero -- A quick mascot (of sorts) for Corbin Champion's Octave-on-Android Kickstarter project.
• Community Projects -- because we shan't be hermits all the time
  A number of projects (mostly Free Software) that I am or have been involved with
  • Gnash -- A Free Software (GPLed) Flash player -- Testing, wiki/documentation, and random tech help.
  • Wikipedia -- One push I enjoyed was coverage of topics present in other encyclopedias, such as the 1911 Britannica and the Nuttall Encyclopedia.
  • Coreboot -- Formerly distributed under the name "LinuxBIOS" -- I made a few minor code contributions.
  • LibreOffice -- Code/bug review, some marketing efforts (including T-shirt designs), and various documentation/wiki additions/fixes/cleanups.

Friends and sites worth frequenting:

• Sukimon -- My friend/coworker's site. Tennis. Technology. Yard Sales. No Bullshit.
• Jonathan Baldwin -- Art, Technology, mishmashed together.

Me on other sites:

email: qubit (at this domain)
twitter: xqubit (I'm on Identi.ca much more frequently!)
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/qubit
IRC: I'm usually either qubit or colonelqubit on IRC networks...
Facebook: I rarely use my FB account, so don't take it personally if it's been 2 weeks and I haven't responded to your friend request.
I'd prefer an Open system of Distributed Social Networks to arise, but no strong contenders have appeared yet!
Skype: I dislike the fact that Skype is proprietary and closed, but I have been required to get a Skype handle for work (I prefer open protocols such as XMPP Jingle, but it still seems like a work in progress!)