What am I up to right now? I like Derek Sivers's idea about answering this question in a "now page" -- sort of, what you'd write in a holiday card, but without actually having to send holiday cards. So I hope to keep this page up to date with, approximately, what I've been doing over the past 6-12 months, and what I anticipate my focus for the next 6-12 months will be. I think it's more fun to have this in bullet form. Whenever the date is up top is when I lasted updated this.

Also, when I was very young, it was impossible to get me to do anything in a timely fashion. (It still is, but it's my problem now.) My mom, reportedly, used to say "Joshua, now!", to the degree that the neighbors thought it to be a funny nickname! I think as a teenager, I was presumably mortified about this (like everything in one's life as a teenager), but obviously it is just much funnier to accept it. Below, you will find Joshua Now.

• Where I live: I recently moved to Pittsburgh, PA.
  • After 15 years in Mountain View, I just moved across the country to Pittsburgh, where I am excited to spend time with friends in close walking distance, to have enough space for machine tools, and to see billboards for things other than A"I" companies.
  • I still live with one small cat named Peanut, who I got in 2021, when I think she was about 1 year old. She is adorable.
• Work: I'm working as half of a two-person hardware and software consultancy, Accelerated Tech, Inc..
  • I've been doing digital logic design, and also software. But also a lot of project and product management, because it turns out people rarely know what they need.
• Physical: I have been biking and climbing a bunch.
  • I had two shoulder surgeries in 2024. I'm very glad to be back to climbing fake rocks again! It has been a long time in the making! I know a lot more about shoulder anatomy than I ever thought I would. Ask me about it.
  • I have been racing cyclocross. Even though I am absolutely godawful terrible at it, I love it.
  • I have been having a lot of fun riding a stupid singlespeed bike around. In 2025, I climbed Mt. Diablo on my singlespeed in 1 hour 3 minutes, which is not bad at all by any standard (though I sure would have liked the hour), but especially good on a singlespeed. My legs hurt the next day.
• Projects:
  • My main side project over the past few months, unsurprisingly, has been uprooting my life and moving it across the country. Soon, that should get to move on to other things!
  • I've been working a lot recently on understanding how Bluetooth LE works on a radio level. I bought a BladeRF to try to run Mike Ryan's Bluetooth sniffer, and this has sort of taken flight as a project -- I have a lot of Jupyter notebooks open decoding radio captures. We'll see how far this goes.
  • I have taken to experimenting with making things out of DMLS titanium. I've been working (along with Astosia) on some titanium Pebble watch cases, and also I've been been working on a titanium fountain pen.
  • I finally finished up my term on the Board of the Rebble Foundation, and now serve as the Treasurer of the Foundation.
  • I just finished up getting X1Plus Expander into the world! It was a huge project that fully took over my life, manufacturing just shy of 2,000 items and distributing them through Mouser Electronics and Crowd Supply.
  • I also spent a lot of time in 2024 on the X1Plus custom firmware for the Bambu X1 Carbon 3D printer. I think that is winding to a close now.
• Thinking about:
  • I would like to learn more about RF and high speed test and measurement equipment. I think it is a lot more expensive than it has to be and I think we can do better.
  • Some day, I would really like to try out wafer.space or similar and fab out an ASIC of my own, maybe a small 100MHz-class DAC? That seems like it's 5 years out or so but that probably means starting soon.
  • I'm trying to figure out what my new outdoors time will look like on the East Coast. I had originally had aspirations to pick off some Sierra peaks this year. How about some climbing, instead?