Roberts tells me he’s in the process of eBaying most of these things. I notice a stack of Macintosh computers. They’re the really old “classic” models, the ones with the tiny built-in black-and-white monitors. The genial Roberts, a tall and bearded fellow, says I can take one or more of them if I’m interested. I politely decline, being one of those people who avoids collecting items for which I have no use.
I’m a little surprised by all of this stuff in his place. When I first contacted him over the summer of 2005, Roberts told me how in 1983, then 31 years old and living in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, in a three-bedroom ranch-style house, he worked as a freelance writer (reporting on technology and electronics), and felt trapped. “I was working my ass off to pay for things I didn’t want, a lifestyle I didn’t want. I was doing things I didn’t enjoy,” he recalled.
Seeing his workshop, however, I was reminded of an email in which he lamented: “Almost everyone I know is bogged down by ‘complexity’: Creaky but familiar tools one doesn’t dare replace; new toys not yet learned; incompatible power supplies; unlabeled mystery cables clogging drawers; lost documentation; and the vulnerability of it all becoming utterly useless.”
Back in 1983, back with all those things he didn’t want, Roberts yearned for simplicity and adventure. He had not planned on it, but he was about to become a pioneer of the “tech-nomadic” life: a man who used mobile technology to live on the road, to stay in touch with the world wherever he was, and to free himself from a dreary existence.
The Souped-Up Canoe Roberts became interested in electronics when he was 8 years old and growing up in Louisville, Ky. His father was a mechanical engineer, and Roberts was inspired by him to build machines.
Roberts’ road warrior box, the Shacktopus contains three transceivers, GPS, wi-fi, environmental telemetry, solar power, speech synthesis, audio recording, Bluetooth, a deployable antenna, and more.
As a child, he made numerous electronic projects, which he usually entered into the school science fair: an induction magnet that could pick up aluminum, a Morse-code translator, and a speech synthesizer based on his own vocal tract, taken from an X-ray of his head.
He shows me his latest project in his workshop, a souped-up canoe. Actually, “souped-up” is an understatement. It’s been totally overhauled with the addition of two smaller hulls, one connected at each side to the main hull where the pilot sits. Eight blue solar panels, four on each side, are set across from the smaller hulls to the main hull. This water vehicle even has retractable wheels. Why does a boat need wheels? Roberts felt it would be more convenient to move from shore to water if it had wheels, so he spent years designing and building this elaborate mechanism.
This super-modified boat, christened the Wordplay, looks more like a starfighter out of a science fiction TV show than something meant for the water. This analogy isn’t too far off, considering the onboard technologies it packs: satellite and cellular phone, ham radio, and marine VHF. And this doesn’t even include the video cameras and other gizmos that aren’t mounted to it the day I visit. There’s a circular, triton-looking antenna set toward the craft’s bow that Roberts explains is an “ultrasonic transducer.” Once a second, each of the three forks communicates with the other in order to collectively measure the surrounding air mass, wind speed, and wind direction.
Yet Wordplay travels by decidedly low-tech means: by wind with a sail.
Roberts shows me around the rest of his cluttered workshop. One item catches my eye; it looks like a control panel ripped out of a jet fighter cockpit. It served as the control panel for his first tech-nomadic vehicle, the Winnebiko.
Back in Columbus, 1983, Roberts went to a party out in the country. That night, he stared into a campfire and then things “just all snapped
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