Chris X Edwards

Welcome to the real internet! This is a web site. It is entirely owned by me, a human person, without censorship or contractual obligations to third parties. It is produced and hosted using only free, publicly licensed software  —  mostly that I personally wrote.

I am Chris X Edwards.

I am a computer nerd, athlete, engineer, adventurer, data scientist, designer, craftsman, roboticist, writer, outdoorsman, and artist.

Professionally I am interested in vehicle robotics. Here is a photo of me riding around in an autonomous boat a few miles upstream of Niagara Falls. I'm confident in its reliable performance because I singlehandedly designed all the actuation systems and personally wrote all the software. Note the custom camera I built housed in a GoPro packaging because the GoPro was not reliable enough.

I also have worked on several projects creating high fidelity synthetic data for AI training involved in other complex robotic applications.

I am a unix expert. I have used only Linux since 1997. Have you ever heard of a resume typeset with groff like a man page? Check it out here.

https://xed.ch/resume

Cursed by literacy, I write a lot  —  more than anyone could possibly care to read. Mostly it's stuff I like that you will definitely not care about. Sometimes though I write about very cool technical things that other nerds may find interesting.

And if you're a normal person you might like these.

Here's the link to the whole collection: https://xed.ch/blog

Here are the most recent posts.

I've written a lot of software. Most of it has been professional commissions which were poorly conceived by those who hired me and quickly become obsolete  —  or were ridiculous from the start. But I also write a lot of software for myself and that tends to prove its quality by providing years  —  sometimes decades  —  of useful service.

All of my projects can be found here.

https://xed.ch/project

Taking good notes is a cornerstone of good computer engineering. These are just my personal notes but they can give you an idea of how I solve (or have solved) hard problems with computers and how seriously I take documentation.

https://xed.ch/help

If you're interested in unix commands, my reference on the topic is substantial and written to help students of unixcraft.

https://xed.ch/dev/help/unix.html

Some people believe that the internet is dying. It is being killed by walled gardens and a lack of decentralized content. When search engines become gatekeepers, the searches are subverted by rational actors trying to game the system. I do not know what the big picture answer is, but putting all your trust in one company to safeguard the integrity of the internet has not proven very effective.

One painful and difficult thing that does kind of work is grassroots linking to sites real people admire and endorse. To make that less painful, I encourage people to make a page of links that is incredibly useful to themselves. I have such a page. It is a huge messy mess. But it is incredibly useful to me. I use it hundreds of times a day.

If you'd like to see what that looks like check out The Page here.

https://xed.ch/thepage

Note that if you reload it, it will default to a new random search engine  —  spread the love!

The best way for polite and literate people to communicate is with email and, for the past 30 years, that is how I have preferred to communicate with random internet strangers. Send me an email and I probably will send you one back! I get all email addressed to my domain (which is xed.ch). For example, maybe try my first name "at" that domain.

Besides English, you can write to me in other languages I've studied and can read well: German, Spanish, Norwegian. Any other languages and you're at the mercy of translation bots.

If you're a security enthusiast you've probably gone through a PGP phase. My PGP public key is here.

Sadly no. I registered the domain while living in Switzerland. Unlike other TLDs this one seems historically pretty stable. I learned enough Schweizerdeutsch while living on a farm in Switzerland to be hilarious to the Swiss and horrifying to Germans. Du kanst mir schicken zufaellige Fragen ueber Englisch und Leben in der USA.

It stands for  —  like a variable  —  my middle name. In my personal orthography a period is strictly optional and can be used or not at your whim. Fun fact: Mathematician B. B Mandelbrot also has a middle initial which can correctly be abbreviated by omitting the period. The Harry S. Truman Library insists on a period in its orthography but apparently H. S Truman was, like me, more flexible. Also interesting is U. S Grant. Also R. J Squirrel and B. J Moose, better known as Rocky & Bullwinkle.

I have lived all over the world. I learned English where it was invented. I lived for many years in San Diego, California. I moved to western New York for a job, but because I like winter and Buffalo does not have a real winter any more, I've moved to the middle of the Western Unit of the Hiawatha National Forest in Michigan. Of course the UP didn't have a proper winter in 2023/2024 but let's hope that was an anomaly.