About

I’m an Electronic Engineer with a passion for Free/Libre & Open Source Hardware and Software.
I live in Cambridge, England with my wife and daughter.

Over the years I have worked in various industries: Telecoms, Telematics, IT, Marine, and Disability/Communications all of which in the grey area where Electronic hardware meets Software (in support, development, design and management roles).

For the past decade or so I have been fortunate enough to work on Open Hardware and Software for my day job….  Wow this is beginning to feel like a CV…

Changing tack.

In my “spare” time I like to support the Debian GNU/Linux project, where I am somewhat involved in the Debconf Video, and CD teams (I am in danger of moving a way from non-uploading DD into an uploading DD if things continue on their current heading).  Most of my programming is low level C – embedded code, but slowly I am writing more user space applications and have recently started to learn some python and shell script.  No, this still reads like a CV…

I am too fat.  I don’t feel it that much, but when I look in the mirror, then I realise it.  I am trying to do something about this, and have renewed my gym membership and am trying to attend 3 or more times a week, slowly increasing the time I spend in the gym and number of lengths in the pool.  I have also taken up Target Air Pistol shooting and suspect that this is helping me mentally more than the physical (although I am using one of the heavier guns at the club).  I get a different feeling of ‘good’ afterwards compared to a swim or gym session.  Loosing wait is going to be hard though – I like my food too much, whilst I do eat a varied and balanced diet with a relatively low ‘processed’ / junk food content, I eat too much.  I am slowly cutting back on both portion size and at the same time trying to reduce the proportion of meat to vegetables per meal (both from a calorific value and from environmental/ethical standpoint).

I read a lot of books, this is mostly Sci-Fi or fantasy but there are a few textbooks, thrillers, and detective novels thrown in the mix.  I probably should blog about the books I read, one of these days I shall make good on that promise.

I can usually be found on IRC (I can normally be found on OFTC or Freenode as RattusRattus) and if you want to email me my Fingerprint is C0E6 366A 2050 781B 72A8 2ED5 BB41 D457 70EF 06F7.

 

Andy Simpkins, February 2019