About
Hi, I’m Ray.
A Melbourne technologist who has been pulling things apart, and putting them back together, for about as long as I can remember. Computers, amplifiers, electricity tariffs, the occasional engine bay.
It started with a 386
My first machine was a 386DX-33 running Windows 3.1, and I was hooked on the spot. In 1998 I installed Red Hat Linux 5.2 and, with great confidence, overwrote my entire Windows installation in the process. First lesson learned the hard way, and far from the last.
For a good while our home phone was effectively out of order. I was perpetually online over a dialup modem, and my poor mother could never get a line out. That obsession never really left; these days it shows up as a rack of self-hosted infrastructure, a set of AI agents I wrote myself, and a soft spot for vintage Unix iron, which I used to write about back when I kept a blog.
A taste for the finer things
I grew up about twenty minutes from the Barossa, which is a dangerous place to develop a palate. I have chased good food and drink ever since, and I treat the kitchen like a lab: authentic recipes, the scientific method, and little patience for shortcuts. I have reverse-seared enough rib eye on a humble Weber kettle to declare it comfortably better than my pellet grill.
The same itch runs through everything I enjoy: hi-fi, Japanese craft and cuisine, cars, and anything with interesting engineering inside it. I built my first headphone amplifier at seventeen, a Cavalli Audio OTL kit from a Head-Fi group buy, and I have been soldering ever since.
Curiosity, professionally
The tinkering eventually turned into a career. For my final year uni project I built the on-board data handling system for SUSat, the University of Adelaide’s satellite: hardcore embedded engineering in safe C, with hardware watchdog timers, bare-metal networking and FreeRTOS. I also designed and implemented its telecommand space-link data protocol, with a Python ground-station client. My research went the other way, into evolutionary computation and optimising wind-turbine layouts, before I moved into enterprise web and spent years delivering large DXP and commerce platforms.
The optimisation instinct never went anywhere. It is exactly what the live energy dashboard on this site is up to: squeezing value out of my own solar and battery against a moving electricity tariff.
Out in it
I have been fortunate enough to travel every main continent, usually with a camera in hand, and a good deal of it lands on Flickr. Closer to home I am a committed camper, and I take every excuse I can get to disappear into the Victorian high country.
These days
Today I am based in Melbourne’s leafy north east with my wife Phuong and our cat Mimi. Still tinkering, still cooking, still finding reasons to head bush.
