Statistics on my edits to en.wikipedia.org, to fr.wikipedia.org, to commons.wikimedia.org.

My user pages on French Wikipedia and on Commons.

My watchlists on French Wikipedia and on Commons.

About

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My faithful commuter road bike, "Steely Dan", built by me starting from a high-quality 1980s touring bike frame

I received my PhD in physics from the University of Maryland, where I studied nanotechnology, in 2010. I'm very passionate about riding, building, and maintaining bicycles: I think it's good for the environment, good for health, good for communities, and an enjoyable hobby to boot. I'm also a Free software guy, a big fan of Linux, and an amateur hardware hacker and electronics designer.

I spent the summer of 2008 working for Seagate Technology at the company's research headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I worked on modeling the structures and dynamics of magnetic materials used in hard disk drives with computer simulations.

In December 2007 I got a new Pentax K10D digital SLR camera, and which I've used to take several pictures for Wikipedia and for Wikimedia Commons.

Interests

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My interests include:

  • Nanotechnology
  • Bicycles
  • Rock climbing
  • World politics, especially of the US and the Middle East
  • French language and culture, especially bande dessinée
  • Other languages, especially Spanish, Persian, and Hebrew
  • Judaism, Islam, and early Christianity
  • Developing and using free software... especially OpenConnect, Linux, GNOME, Emacs, OpenOffice, GStreamer, Apache, Python, Perl
  • Reverse engineering of proprietary communications protocols
  • Computer hardware design
  • Data storage technology, especially magnetic storage and flash memory.
  • One big interest of mine is in documenting computer hardware and software standards, and in helping to describe interfaces which lack documentation, often because the manufacturers refuse to provide it without a non-disclosure agreement and licensing fees. This information is vital to those who write free and open-source operating systems, so that they can support new hardware devices and file formats as thoroughly and as quickly as possible. It's also important in order to continue supporting devices and file formats which the manufacturers have abandoned. To that end, I've tried to clean up and expand Wikipedia's information on how hardware works, and provided links to external documentation (which has often been obtained only through a painstaking process of reverse-engineering). To that end, I've added information to several articles.

Contributions

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Statistics on my edits to en.wikipedia.org, to fr.wikipedia.org, to commons.wikimedia.org.

These are articles and images which I've created or to which I've made substantial contributions.

Bikes

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Computers & Electronics

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Documenting undocumented stuff

  • Inkjet printer (added info on third-party ink and cartridges, chip resetters, etc.)
  • SD card (added info on official specs, reverse-engineered docs, and open implementations)
  • xD card (added info on reverse-engineered docs, hardware interface, hobbyist hacks)

Digital photography and optics

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Physics

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Translations from French to English

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Linguistics

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Animals

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What can I say? I like to take photos of animals!

Places

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Etc.

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