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Adam Smith from UC Santa Cruz joins us to discuss local Small Language Models (SLMs) and building open, autonomous tools. We explore his BayLeaf AI counterplatform, transagency (the "me-and-the-car" concept of human-agent collaboration), context distillation, and running models locally without relying on data-harvesting corporate clouds.  Adam also shares practical strategies for working with coding agents, including why plain-text AGENTS.md files outperform model weight fine-tuning for long-term knowledge retention. He also describes how he uses open-source tools like OpenWebUI, OpenCode and OpenChamber to integrate small and local LLM integration into development environments and web chats.  Discussion Resources & Links Adam's Projects & Research: BayLeaf AI Counterplatform: Hyper-local, open-source AI infrastructure built for UC Santa Cruz. See also the BayLeaf Getting Started Guide and BayLeaf Blog. Adam Smith's UCSC Directory Page & Personal Website Adam Smith on YouTube & GitHub (@rndmcnlly) Open-Source Agent Harnesses & Wrappers: OpenCode – Open-source command-line coding agent harness with VS Code integration (comparable to Claude Code) OpenChamber – Graphical desktop wrapper for OpenCode with VS Code support (comparable to Claude Cowork) OpenWeb UI – Self-hosted web interface and desktop app for local and remote LLM models OpenRouter – Token broker/middleman routing requests across competitive LLM inference providers r/LocalLlama – Community subreddit for local LLMs, open weights, and hardware advice AGENTS.md Convention & Agent Skills Standard – Open standards for persistent context management Context Distillation Paper (arXiv) Adam's Guide to Building Transagent Capabilities: Scope by Project Roots: Harnesses like OpenCode and OpenChamber use project root folders to establish clear, safe boundaries for agent execution. Store Context in Plain Text: Keep global and project preferences in simple .md files (like AGENTS.md or GLOSSARY.md). Plain text files make your accumulated knowledge portable across different model front-ends and harnesses. Handle Errors by Rewinding: When your LLM or agent makes a mistake, don't yell at it or try to correct it inline—go back in time to before the error and alter your prompt or context to lead it away from the mistake. Refactor Preferences into Skills: As your AGENTS.md context grows, ask the agent to factor recurring preferences out into modular skill files (.agentskills). Teach Transagency: Distinguish between standalone agent capabilities (autonomous work) and transagent capabilities (how the agent works with you). Build Local Tools: Ask the agent to build desktop helpers (QuickLook triggers, push notifications, or fuzzy glossary lookup) to keep a shared orientation. Elecia: "Complete one project or start a dozen?" Adam: "Tens of thousands, and start hundreds more within the starting of the other projects recursively forever." Transcript

Aaed Musa joins us to talk about building robot dogs, custom actuators, and his YouTube channel. He shares how he moved from 3D-printing servo robots in his parents' garage to designing capstan drives, and how he uses reinforcement learning to train quadrupedal walking gaits. We also talk about his senior design project (CARA 2.0), his Spider-Man web-shooter build, lessons in storytelling and video editing, and why he's starting a company to bring friendly, expressive quadrupeds into the home.  Aaed Musa is a mechanical engineering graduate from Purdue University, a hardware creator on YouTube, and co-founder of the robotics startup Mecha.  DISCUSSION RESOURCES & LINKS AAED'S CHANNELS & PROJECTS: Aaed Musa on YouTube: Project videos covering quadrupedal robot dogs, Spider-Man web shooters, and custom actuators. Oh, and planetary gears. More detailed project write ups are under projects on his personal site, including CARA 2.0. Github repository Robots Everywhere with Aaed Musa | The Amp Hour ROBOTICS & ACTUATOR TECH: Dyneema DM20: synthetic rope with zero creep used in zero-backlash capstan drives NVIDIA Isaac Sim: simulation and reinforcement learning environment for robotics OpenMV: Very smart MicroPython-powered machine vision modules. Kwabena Agyeman has spoken with us about OpenMV before: 497: Everyone Likes Tiny  477: One Thousand New Instructions 212: You Are in Seaworld SOME YOUTUBE CHANNELS MENTIONED: Good 3d printing youtube channels: 3DPrintingNerd  CNCKitchen  MadeWithLayers  Jeremy_Fielding: great for explaining how things work and coming at engineering from a non engineering direction (Embedded 385: I Just Wanted an Industrial Arm) James Bruton: Robot dogs!  Mark Rober has fantastic storytelling and approachable engineering. Stuff Made Here has robots and gadgets, generally a broad scope of engineering.

Author Susan Lammers joins the show to discuss the 40th anniversary edition of her classic book, Programmers at Work. We discuss what it was like to interview young and pioneering software developers like Toru Iwatani, C. Wayne Ratliff, and Michael Hawley and how the personal computer revolution was built by individuals seeking freedom from corporate mainframes.  Susan also shares her experiences as Editor-in-Chief at Microsoft Press, leading Microsoft's early interactive CD-ROM division, founding Headbone Interactive in the 1990s, and why she's bringing retro games like Elroy Goes Bugzerk back to Steam today.  SUSAN'S BOOK & WEB RESOURCES: Programmers at Work: 40th Anniversary Edition – Official site featuring updated bios, excerpts, and current career paths of the 19 interviewees Programmers at Work on Amazon or on Simon & Schuster website Overview and list of interviewees on Wikipedia HEADBONE INTERACTIVE & RETRO GAMING: HeadboneInteractive.com Headbone Interactive - Wikipedia  Elroy Goes Bugzerk on Steam – The classic 1990s interactive cartoon adventure game brought back for modern platforms SOFTWARE & HISTORICAL MENTIONS: VisiCalc on Wikipedia (The first computer spreadsheet) Ukatsuke Komachi (The automated receptionist robot at Namco in 1985) The Paris Review interview series (The literary inspiration behind Programmers at Work) Transcript

Kevin Santo Cappuccio, founder of Architeuthis Flux, joins the show to discuss creating Jumperless, an open-source breadboard that replaces physical jumper wires with software-controlled analog crossbar switches. We explore the need for 445 RGB LEDs on a breadboard, using MicroPython to create scriptable circuits, some of the lessons that can be implemented with the Jumperless, and how it might be used to create new instruments. Kevin also shares the story behind his upcoming Barnacle Board. DISCUSSION RESOURCES & LINKS Jumperless Project & Hardware Resources: Jumperless Docs and Discord Jumperless Shop (Also available via CrowdSupply but any discounts only apply to Kevin's shop) JumperlessV5 · GitHub: Open-source hardware files, schematics, and firmware Barnacle Board - GitHub:  The future of jumperless includes a modular breadboard with custom-stamped clips and removable protoboard tops Other Resources and Mentions: Wokwi Simulator: Online browser-based electronic circuit simulator  Falstad Circuit Simulator: Kevin's favorite browser-based analog simulator Hackaday Prize 2023: Jumperless took 2nd place in the 2023 contest.  Peter Griffin made an Microsoft Excel plugin interface for Jumperless, we discussed it with him in episode 505: Potato in a Number Field.  Kevin also talked with Chris Gammell of The Amp Hour with more information about the electrical response, timing, and the crossbars. Giant squid - Wikipedia

Elecia and Christopher celebrate winning the IEEE Educational Activities Board Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education! A huge thank you to Mark Omo and the wonderful listeners who submitted nomination letters. Chris and Elecia talk about learning Hungarian to qualify Chris for an EU passport. They also cover Cory Doctorow's new book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, smart ways to hand off codebases, and the most valuable skills they've relied on through their engineering careers. DISCUSSION RESOURCES & LINKS AWARDS & MILESTONES: IEEE Educational Activities Board Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education "For creating and sustaining Embedded.fm, a long-running technical engineering podcast that bridges academic theory and industry practice, champions underrepresented groups in STEM, addresses professional ethics, and provides informal technical mentorship to a global audience." Huge thanks to Mark Omo for submitting the nomination and to the other nominators for advocating for our work. To the 450+ guests—artists, makers, educators, entrepreneurs, and traditional engineers—who have generously shared their time and deep expertise with us: this award belongs to you too. And to our incredible global listener community: thank you for tuning in, sharing episodes with your colleagues, and keeping the STEM pipeline strong. If Embedded.fm has ever helped you solve a tricky bug, navigate a career transition, or stay inspired in hardware/software design, we'd love for you to celebrate with us by sharing your favorite episode with an early-career engineer or student this week! Embedded episode 501: Inside the Armpit of a Giraffe, an interview with biologist Meredith Palmer and engineer Akiba, won a Communicator Award for an Individual Episodes-Science & Technology, Distinction 2026. BOOKS & READING LIST: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow Programmers at Work: Interviews With 19 Developers Who Shaped the Computer Industry by Susan Lammers (1986) Embedded AI: Intelligence at the Deep End by David Such (No Starch Press, Early Access) TECHNICAL & LANGUAGE MENTIONS: The Hungarian phrase "Boldog vagyok" ("I am happy"). Elecia's Duolingo page Zephyr RTOS and embedding Rust libraries into Zephyr environments Memfault observability, CSV data extractions, and battery performance analytics AI models escaping sandboxes (The OpenAI and Anthropic benchmark incidents) Transcript

Marine biologist Dr. Steven Haddock joins the show to share the alien, glowing, and transparent wonders of the deep ocean. We discuss his beautiful new book, The Radiant Sea, and explore the complex engineering and high-sensitivity optics required to capture living deep-sea creatures. Steve walks us through the evolutionary logic of biological light, how vantablack organisms trap photons in the dark, the horizontal sun-compass navigation of jellyfish blooms, and what it's like to play games underwater with giant Pacific octopuses and jumbo squids. Dr. Steven Haddock is a Senior Scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and an adjunct professor at UC Santa Cruz. Some related MBARI Videos Bioluminescence in the deep sea: How and why do animals create their own light? Steven Haddock explains the diverse and striking functions of light emission in the ocean's twilight zone. (So many pretty pictures!)  Mysteries of the Deep with Dr. Steve Haddock — Bioluminescence! Long-form lecture on the physics and evolutionary biology of bioluminescence. Live Blackwater Diving Q&A with MBARI and Aquarium Scientists! | Into The Deep Q&A with scientists about diving in the middle of the ocean at night. Rarely Encountered Seven-Arm Octopus in Monterey Bay: Footage captured by Steve Haddock and MBARI's Biooptics team shows an octopus with a jelly snack. Discussion Resources & Links Steve's Books: The Radiant Sea: Color and Light in the Underwater World  by Steven Haddock and Sönke Johnsen Practical Computing for Biologists by Steven Haddock and Casey Dunn Scientific & Marine Mentions: Steven Haddock's Wikipedia Page Steven's MBARI home page. His lab is the Biodiversity and Biooptics Lab Electric Disco Clams Exist—Watch Them Light Up This Coral Reef | National Geographic  Why is she like this? Disco Snails (Official Video) - Music More neat creature videos Jelly-like Siphonophores Astound with Breathtaking Beauty: A close-up collection of the incredibly complex, colonial siphonophores that Steve mentioned, showing off their bizarre structures and flowing shapes in the pitch black. How the Disco Clam Uses Light to Fight Super-Strong Predators: See the "electric" flashing effects inside the disco clam's mantle up close, alongside an explanation of how their silica spheres scatter ambient light to startle predators. Absurd Creatures: Comb Jellies Are Ready to Rave – A fun, fast-paced video exploring the "Skittles" rainbow iridescence caused by the moving rows of cilia on ctenophores under white submersible lights. Transcript

Chris Svec returns to the show to discuss the messy, non-linear realities of engineering management and onboarding new college graduates. We explore why companies should bother hiring fresh grads in the first place, how to prevent junior developers from going dark when they get stuck, and why admitting ignorance publicly is an absolute workplace superpower. Along the way, we dive into managing genius firmware engineering hires, battling technical debt and software entropy, and why your development team shouldn't communicate solely through pull request comments. Chris Svec is the Director of Embedded Software Engineering at Insulet. If you're looking for an experienced leadership or management thought partner to help scale your development team, Chris Svec offers private coaching and consulting. You can reach him directly at the email given in the show (or hit the contact link and we'll forward your message along). RECOMMENDED BOOKS FOR ENGINEERING MANAGERS & TECH LEADS The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier – A guide for navigating tech leadership and managing engineering teams. Resilient Management by Lara Hogan – A book dedicated to the human side of engineering management. SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE & EMBEDDED SYSTEMS RESOURCES A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout – A high-level philosophical perspective on software engineering and architecture. The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas – A classic text on software development best practices. Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky – Insights on software development methodologies and managing tech teams. Making Embedded Systems by Elecia White – A comprehensive guide to firmware design patterns and embedded architecture. Embedded for Everyone by Nathan Jones – A curated repository of accessible embedded system learning resources. EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMMING GAMES Shenzhen I.O. by Zachtronics – An interactive puzzle game for learning assembly programming. Typer Shark! Deluxe – A classic game to improve typing speed and precision for developers. MENTIONS AND EPISODE CONTEXT Embedded.fm blog post: Resilience is a Skill and Embedded Skills Tree  The "Meow Meow Beans" episode from the TV show Community (season 5, episode 8), see a snippet. All Systems Red by Martha Wells – The sci-fi novel featured in today's closing quote If you want to dive into Svec's previous appearances on the podcast, be sure to check out: 78: Happy Cows (His very first appearance, discussing empathy in software development) 250: Yolo Snarf (All about version control, gitflow, and D&D) 297: Mice to Do My Bidding (Focusing on attentional focus and workflow psychological tricks) 402: We Are a Lazy Species (Software schedule estimation alongside Philip Johnston) 436: 20 GOTO 10 (Discussing modern kids' programming languages and the longevity of the Joel Test) Transcript

Tyler Hoffman returns to the show to discuss diagnostics and observability data in embedded systems. We catch up on his life after startup acquisition, explore the hows and whys of keeping product data separate from operational data, and consider the realities of fleet management at scale.  Tyler is the co-founder of Memfault. Memfault was acquired by Nordic Semiconductor about a year ago. While Nordic has nRF Cloud as a smaller scale solution for Nordic devices (~100 devices), Memfault will continue to maintain support for non-Nordic platforms as well. During the discussion, Tyler advocates for a "device-in-control" philosophy, emphasizing that edge devices should retain the intelligence to manage their own firmware updates and telemetry. We also discuss the practical constraints of remote fleet debugging, outlining why tools built for high-bandwidth web infrastructure will quickly bankrupt an IoT company, and identifying exactly when a project is too low-bandwidth, or too small, to justify an external observability platform. Christopher shares his recent experiences with Memfault which leads to a discussion of chunks, flash memory buffers and MDS. The Memfault Diagnostic Service (MDS) is a standardized way for BLE devices to send the chunk payloads to a gateway device (mobile phone) which can then forward the data to the Memfault cloud. If you want a deep dive into the reasoning around starting Memfault, Tyler was on Embedded.fm episodes 390: Irresponsible At the Time and 395: I Can No Longer Play Ping Pong. Reaching back into the archives, Elecia, Tyler, and Phillip Johnston were on the Memfault Coredump Sessions podcast, a special crosspost with Embedded.fm, episode 451: From Concept to Launch  You can also find technical deep dives on Memfault's Interrupt blog. "What we do makes a difference and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make."  – Dr. Jane Goodall, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey. Transcript

Chris and Elecia talk about pushing out of their comfort zone, networking advice, adding STARs and action verbs to resumes, using rust, thermo forming plastics, soldering together audio gear, and winning awards.  If you are looking for an update to your resume or are interviewing for a new job and you haven't heard of the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result), it is a good way to formulate what you've done in a way that helps people see your impact. The Rutgers College Career Development Center has a STAR description that includes how to take your current, boring "did the task" resume bullet point and move it into STAR format and then into resume format to say "got great things done". There are lots of examples of STAR in practice (ex 1, ex 2). We mainly talked about resumes but it is very useful for having coherent stories during interviews. (Search "STAR resume", "STAR interview", "STAR engineering" to find a presentation that works for you. The college career sites are probably the best ones I've found.) On the topic of resumes, if you don't know about resume action verbs, let us share some lists that will make writing your resume 25% less painful. Again, college career development centers have the best ones (Harvard Business School's action verb list is good for managers, Penn State has a nice set of verbs for engineering or see University of Houston's verb list for engineering.) And on the topic of interviewing and networking, do you have an elevator pitch for yourself? A short introduction of who you are? It is really handy to have that for conferences as well. Princeton has a short write up on putting one together; UPenn has a long write up (ironic given the topic but still useful). Will Chris be adding the Rust language to his resume? Too early to tell. He's been learning with Rust for Embedded C Programmers - OpenTitan Documentation.  Elecia has been playing with origami molded fabrics, as learned on Instructable Paper Mold Origami Fabrics 3.  The term on Instagram seems to be #plissage and it is covered in (super famous origami guy) Paul Jackson's encyclopedic Complete Pleats.  Chris has built a Colour Duo 2-Channel Colour Channel Strip Kit (a preamp with modifiable analog processing). This kit is from DIY Recording Equipment. He's enjoying working with it while recording music.  After Elecia's New Year's Resolution to apply for awards, we won a Communicator Award for Individual Episodes-Science & Technology, Distinction 2026 for an episode about engineering the landscape of fear and conservation technology in the wild: 501: Inside the Armpit of a Giraffe. This was quite the honor but after some consideration, we are even more honored to be nominated by listeners for the IEEE Educational Activities Board (EAB) Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education. This award "recognizes IEEE members who volunteer their time and effort to improve the informal education community, helping to promote engineering to students, parents, and the general public." Having fulfilled the objective and gone beyond, Elecia is still planning to apply for the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards where we'll need to find one or two episodes from July 2025 to July 2026 that show off "scientific accuracy, initiative, originality, clarity of interpretation, and value in fostering a better public understanding of science and its impact." Transcript

Dr. Victoria Serrano spoke with us about STEM outreach, fostering curiosity, and inspiring students with engineering education. Victoria is a professor at the Technological University of Panama (her faculty page: UTP | Dra. Victoria Serrano). Her youtube channel is CIATEC PANAMA which talks about circuits, electronics, and robotics. The channel goes along with her ciatecpanama.com website which shows the types of courses and outreach she does with Arduino UNOs and other low cost equipment.  Victoria is also a Fulbright Scholar, an IEEE STEM Champion 2023, and Honorable Mention IEEE Rising Stars Conference 2024. She also received the IEEE EAB Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education in 2019 (the award Elecia and Chris believe is related to their work on Embedded.fm and for which they were honored to be nominated). The final quote was from Haben Girma's book: Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law.  Transcript

Dr. Tom Williams spoke with us about robots, ethics, teaching, and books. Then we talked about mines, umpires, water, and more books. Tom is the author of Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice (free at MIT Press: Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice!).  As part of the discussion, we talked about some other books and media: Nonfiction: Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI by Ayanna Howard (Embedded episodes 367: Data of Our Lives and 207: I Love My Robot Monkey Head) Embodied AI Safety: Reimagining safety engineering for artificial intelligence in physical systems by Philip Koopman (related Embedded episode 514: Just Turn Off All the Computers)  Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford Waki Kamino's research on robot umpires: Beyond Accuracy: Rethinking the Value of AI in Decision-Making Through Baseball's Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) System (or see the summary in the Cornell Chronicle: AI on deck: assessing impact of MLB's new ball-strike system) Fiction: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chalmers  Platform Decay (The Murderbot Diaries Book 8) by Martha Wells (Embedded episode 432: Robot Bechdel Test)  Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor The Good Place TV show was mentioned a few times as an introduction to ethics for people who prefer their education crammed with amusement. Critical Role web series There was a discussion about water use in AI. Tom recommends Why is Everyone So Wrong About AI Water Use?? while Elecia unsurprisingly mispronounces synecdoche.  Tom is a computer science professor at the Colorado School of Mines where he runs the Mines Interactive Robotics Research Lab (MIRROR lab). See also Tom's page on mines.edu. The final quote is from an essay written by Karel Capek and translated to English in in The Man Who Coined the Word "Robot" Defends Himself - IEEE Spectrum.

Nathan Jones spoke with us about hardware security, motivation, conference talks, and writing. Nathan wrote an in-depth series of posts about the benefits of superloops vs RTOS: You Don't Need an RTOS (Part 1), Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. He also wrote about How Hardware Gets Hacked (Part 1) and Part 2 which discusses the MITRE embedded CTF (Capture the Flag) challenge. See his EmbeddedRelated profile and Digikey profile. And Nathan's excellent Embedded for Everyone Github repo. Nathan recommends The Hardware Hacking Handbook by Jasper van Woudenberg and Colin O'Flynn. It is an excellent resource on embedded security. We spoke with Jasper about the book in 431: Becoming More of a Smurf and with Colin about the Chip Whisperer in 286: Twenty Cans of Gas. The European Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) has specific features that are required to be implemented by all devices that want the safety CE label. This is important for products shipping to Europe. If you are going to the Embedded Online Conference, you can get a discount with the code JONES100. Nathan will be giving a workshop on the Chip Whisperer Nano. (Recent guest Mark Omo will also be presenting: Security for the Rest of Us: What Matters and Where to Start.) Another conference for the security-minded is Hardwear.io which is in Santa Clara, CA, USA at the end of May and in Amsterdam in November. Last year, Nathan spoke about Exception Handling for EOC 2025 (video). Elecia mentioned her own Creating Chaos and Hard Faults from EOC 2024. The Embedded Slack book club is reading The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition. Well, some of us are just watching.  The quote came from Elizabeth Bear's Ancestral Night (White Space) which is part of a series with some neat mechanics around brain chemistry.  Transcript

Chris and Elecia chat about Leapfrog toys, things they like, large company politics, awards, and open source governance.  The Toy Story 5 Trailer with LilyPad toy which is suspiciously similar to the LeapFrog LeapPad tablet. Which is different from the original LeapPad which had cartridges and capacitive touch (capacitive touch was used on the globe as well… the latest globe also has a screen). Why does Elecia want an award? Who knows? But right now, she's getting ready for a listener to nominate the show (Chris and Elecia) for IEEE's Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education. Probably. But we've got nominators and endorsers so that's mostly sorted. She also signed Embedded up for the Women Podcasters Award which is a popularity contest. You can vote here: www.womenpodcasters.com/awards-voting. The show is under the Science Podcasters category. Some things we like: Ctrl-R: In a command shell, ctrl-r searches your history. Better than ! because you don't have to remember as much. Data bars in Excel: This can create a plot of your data in the column. Merlin Bird ID: Want to know what bird is making that sound? Want to know the name of the bird you just saw? Merlin Bird ID is a free app that is amazing. Plucky Cards: Want to have a 1:1 where you talk about more than your status? Choose a card, any card. Or maybe just look through and have a 1:1 by yourself Just reading about Bunnie Huang's new RISCV board Dabao Evaluation Board for Baochip-1x taught us things! We're not sure what we'd use it for yet but it does spark a few ideas.  The Embedded.fm Patreon Slack book club is reading Pragmatic Programmer 20th Anniversary Edition. Talking about open source projects and governance models, we referenced three contributing guidelines: Valetudo, ESPHome, and Zephyr. Some later research led to Leadership and Governance | Open Source Guides and presentation by Cornelius Schumacher – The spectrum of FOSS governance models (Slides). The link between the politics associated with the size of companies and the open source governance models clearly needs a bit more thought. Transcript

Sonia Grego speaks with us about a topic no one likes to talk about, but could be used to monitor personal dietary health and widespread disease outbreaks. Toilets! Sonia leads Duke University's Smart Toilet Lab and the spin out Coprata which makes the Microbiome Activity Tracker.  As discussed in the show, when developing a project far from where it will be deployed, there are many common issues. The Lessons Learned chapter of Sonia's recent book gives an excellent introduction to the unexpected environment far from the comfort of desks. The book is (free online!) Engineering Field Testing of Non-Sewered Sanitation Systems: Compendium of Lessons Learned,  See Sonia Grego at  Duke Electrical & Computer Engineering, the Smart Toilet Lab  as well as Sonia's company Coprata.  Some terms that came up in the show: Coprolite: fossilized excrement (Wikipedia entry has great(?) pics!) Scatological: material, humor, or language that relates directly to bodily waste Helminths: parasitic worms including roundworms, tapeworms, and fluke (oh look. more great images on Wiki entry) Poop jokes Transcript

Kenneth Finnegan entertained us with stories about accidentally contributing to the internet's ability to network. Wondering how the internet works? All those terms about IPv4, IPv6, BGP, OSPF, CDN and other alphabet  soup? Check out the YouTube videos by NetworkChuck. Kenneth writes about his adventures on his blog, The Life of Kenneth. Some of the posts related to this show are: Creating an Internet Exchange for Even More Fun and Less Profit Building an Anycast Secondary DNS Service  Building the Micro Mirror Free Software CDN  We also mention FCIX aka fcix.net or the Fremont Cabal Internet Exchange You can also find Kenneth at @[email protected] where you will find more about half-dollars, nickels, and trains. If you also secretly long to run a locomotive, take a look at the Run-A-Locomotive program at WPRM. The title is related to the XKCD comic 2347: Dependency. Transcript