Welcome to my vanity page.
In my spare time, I'm an Assistant Explorer Scout Leader for The White Stags ESU in Cranham (Gloucestershire), treasurer at Cheltenham Hackspace, and I pursue my own open source software projects, experiment with metalwork and electronics, and learn things. I work from my little lab at the end of the garden, and I enjoy tinkering with the structure of the building itself too! My goal in life is to develop technology, to make everything more awesome.
What I'm learning at the time of writing:
- Morse code
- Drawing (still terrible at it)
- Lock picking
- Welding
- Amateur radio
- Lojban
- Analogue signal/power electronics
Things I'd like to learn, but aren't pursuing right now:
- Archery
- FPV quadrotor piloting
- Advanced mathematics
- How to compose music
Things I've learnt in the past:
- Krav Maga
- Digital logic design
- Pretty much every area of computer science
- First aid / survival
- Rifle shooting
I live in Gloucester, England with my wife Sarah and our children. Sarah and I share a blog, www.snell-pym.org.uk, so our mutual friends can keep track of us. However, I've been putting rather a lot of technical ramblings up there, so I've divided it into categories. For just my writings, visit https://www.snell-pym.org.uk/archives/author/alaric/; for just technical things (by either of us), visit https://www.snell-pym.org.uk/categories/sci-tech/; and for stuff relating purely to our personal lives, instead see https://snell-pym.org.uk/categories/the-family/. I'm also to be found on Twitter as @alaric and @Kitten_Tech, on amateur radio as M0KTN, The fediverse, Reddit, LinkedIn, and if you must, Facebook.
My mental health isn't great - not in ways most people would notice, but the bit of my brain that's supposed to detect imminent threats to my life triggers when it doesn't need to, so I spend a lot of time distractingly full of adrenaline and fear. Sometimes this just happens randomly, and sometimes it's triggered by particular things: I'm very cautious about going to parties and pubs as they're full of things I struggle with, so please don't be offended if I don't come to yours, or leave early!
You can find more about me by
exploring 
my FOAF. My face looks something like this.
My Amazon wishlist contains A tiny subset of the things I want; you can send me some Bitcoin to 1ALAricQjEj5ErpDCLDZWYHGv15jMq1gEM, or Nano to nano_13mzub66o8ue7gp68mq19ny9p87qq8fhantgawxnby8fz6jk6rnz9fs5khti.
One day I'd like to:
- Go rock climbing frequently.
- Take up archery and/or clay pigeon shooting.
- Build a Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor, a Tesla coil, a compulsator-powered railgun, an Explosively pumped flux compression generator, a wearable computer, and a Tesla turbine, amongst other things. You get the idea.
- Implement all of Open Research and ARGON.
- Master metalcasting, blacksmithing, and machining.
- Write lots of technical books.
- Publish my fiction.
- Invest in the stock markets and all that.
- Be a gentleman scientist, spending all my time doing bizarre and eccentric research out of pure curiousity.
- Build a Seastead, and then establish a habitable colony offworld.
Lastly, I of course have a PGP key. My key ID is 50633C18 (replacing my old C38DBA49 and 7371086A), my fingerprint is B608 66B6 BC24 B19F E4D0 BD08 F1D6 C29E 5063 3C18, and my public key can be found on the SKS keyserver pool.
I'm a proponent of the Web of Trust model - I will happily sign keys. Show me a government photo ID and I'll use caff to sign your key at cert level 2, or level 3 if I know you personally anyway. Give me reasonable evidence of your ownership of a pseudonym and I'll sign that too. Since I'm also into RDF, as well as sending you signatures by email using caff, I'll also publish my assertion about the mapping between your name and your key in my signed FOAF file (linked above); if you receive the signature caff sends you and I notice it's been uploaded to the keyservers, or I have other reason to trust your email address is yours, I'll add an mbox:sha1sum statement to my RDF on you, thus publishing the same statement in RDF.
There's a detached signature for the raw source of this page.