Spring: Shipping Papers, Boards, Agents, and House Hunting
This one was dense. Looking back at the list, it’s the quarter where a lot of long-running threads finally turned into things that exist outside my laptop, and where house hunting joined the mix.
On the home front, we started hunting for a new place: visits, a second visit, an offer, and a surprising amount of paperwork. It gave the second half of the quarter a very different flavour, and taught me a whole new vocabulary =)
On the AI and side-project front, spring was the season of building with Claude. I installed NanoClaw and set up a handful of small agents (todos, birthdays, newsletter, a bit of house hunting), then used it on a run of weekend projects: an OSINT toolkit for “dark” ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a CV-to-RDF pipeline, a FIFA 2026 predictor, and learn-bangla, now closed. The ESP32 MUD got a v0.5 revamp too, and the website got its new project pages. On the writing side, a first full draft of a thesis-style paper on the proletarianisation of advisory (reviewed with Fable, which was humbling), lay-reader docs for Formed Not Prompted, and a companion doc to AI and the Art of Being Human.
Hardware didn’t slow down: the 32-channel MUX tested, HV modules and USB3 boards ordered and received, a storage board with the SD holder the right way round (second attempt…), PRF pushed to 10 kHz, acquisitions with a new piezo, and a lot of design reviews on the USB3 (CH569) and AFE/pulser boards, plus the FPGA/gateware work getting back on track. For pic0rick, a dedicated NDT library, boards sent to Taiwan, India and (via a revived Tindie shop) the US, and a fresh SEPIC + CH569 v1.3 order at JLCPCB.
Work and teaching had their own rhythm: London (several times), Manchester, a strategy meeting, an AEC event hosted at the office, joining the internal AI club, and, on the project at work, pushing information requirements towards case studies, knowledge graphs for sustainability and the first OIR workshop. The project finance course at HEC wrapped up with scoring, a debrief and an alumni evening. And on the PBN side, a milestone: we worked in Athens in April, the article was restructured (faces blurred, ORCIDs in), and the Maptivity paper was submitted to Sustainability (MDPI) in June. We also released the open dataset behind the Maptivity website. Very happy about that one.
And yes, still play and culture. Trips to Athens and Prague (postcards sent, cakes for the neighbours on the way back), plants planted for Plantes pour tous, a cherry-ginger homebrew finally bottled, a friend’s wedding, a dance gala, La Bayadère, MTG and CS sessions. Reading went on a run: the rest of Abercrombie’s First Law, Spaceman of Bohemia, This Is How You Lose the Time War, Pratchett’s Pyramids, Wayfarers 2 and 3, Les sentinelles, La Guerre du Pavot, and a binge of Dungeon Crawler Carl (2 to 5, no regrets). Watched: Nosferatu, Anatomie d’une chute, The King, Magnetic Rose, Planète B, Projet Dernière Chance in the cinema, Disclosure Day and Vox Machina S3.
Travels: Athens (PBN work), Prague, Manchester, and London (three times).
If there’s a theme to the quarter, it’s things making it out the door. A paper submitted, a dataset published, repos public, boards shipped to four countries, and a home search well under way. The work was the same as always; this time more of it shipped.
