Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “I played with a super fancy wooden computer”.
There’S something about modern industrial design that feels like very cold and inhuman to me, whereas working with materials like wood and leather, it’s warmer, it’s nicer, it feels more personal. It feels sleep better. Overall, this is Keegan McNamara. He lives in Los Angeles, where he spent a good chunk of the last year trying to build his own computer, but the one he built, which he calls the Mythic one is almost certainly nothing like any computer you’ve ever seen before. I was pitching it as like something that looks very different from a normal computer. It’S made out of wood and it’s functionally very limited compared to a Macbook.
It’S like a limited computational experience. One of my favorite instances of like commercial success of a functionally limited device is the Kindle like all it does is read books whenever they add like a web browser. You know some like marginal feature. I’M, like you shouldn’t. Do that, like it’s fine as it is, you know it does what it should.
The design process is extremely weird, because you have no idea what you want to do and there are no precedents for like these sorts of things. The thing that really kicked it off for me was actually going to the met and seeing this arms and armor exhibit, I mean the main thing that occurred to me was like these are functional objects, they’re guns, they shoot projectiles out of a tube, but there were People three four five hundred years ago, that thought it was worthwhile to add that additional layer of like I don’t know, I think the right word is beauty onto a merely utilitarian object and I was like man nowadays that just doesn’t really exist like and especially it Doesn’T exist for computers, you know I went home and sat down on my MacBook and I you know I like you’re, like examining every single facet of the MacBook and like how it’s machined and it’s like a metal rectangle sure it’s like a very well machined metal. Rectangle, but it is just a metal rectangle and compared to the sort of like form, experimentation and Engraving and all this kind of stuff that that I saw in the guns I was like yeah. This is just a completely different design philosophy.
When I set out, I didn’t have like a concrete idea of like what colors I wanted or what wood species I wanted. So for me the very first thing was the Nook, the Intel Nook. It’S like the brain. I’Ve experimented with Raspberry Pi’s in the past, and I just in general, found them to be like rather underpowered when you’re making something that’s like luxurious and it feels beautiful. You don’t want it to be like stunted by the electronics. You want it to feel like blazing fast, and I think that, like modern Intel processors, they are unbelievably whip fast.
When you’re doing something relatively simple to me, The Woodworking aspect is like the best part of the job. It’S like I’m a kid you know. I just have, I have like sharp objects, I’m just like swinging a hammer and just like destroying things. But it’s like it’s constructive destruction.
I do the arms first and then I do the body and then at the very end, I like do all the through-holding so that the components can connect and then I glue them together like this is like two different keycap sets and they’re PBT keys, because I, Like the thought of that and like this is a hot swap PCB, underneath and like I have like foam padding and an aluminum plate, because I like a little bit of paininess but not the pinginess of brass. It was about a month and a half of like raw construction. The final Cherry is like when I put the key in, I turned it. I pressed the toggle and the lighting sequence, matched exactly what I had in my mind and it worked and then the thing kicked on.
I was like okay, that’s good Keegan made this first computer kind of on a lark more like a summer project than anything else, but when he finished he liked it. So he posted some pictures and some details on Reddit and Twitter and elsewhere and it kind of went viral. I didn’t really have any expectations. I basically just wanted to explain why I like hadn’t, been you know, doing work or like had maybe been a little less responsive than people were hoping. So I was kind of just hoping that, like my my friends and you know, acquaintances and people that I’ve met through business and all that kind of stuff would see it and be like. Oh, this is cool, and that explains why he was like kind of AFK for a while and yeah. I was like blown away at how at how well it did it’s cool to have. You know people that I admire thinking that it’s good and then yeah on Reddit people were really really complimentary and thought that it was awesome but yeah it kind of blew up everywhere, which was a surprise, but a very welcome surprise.
I think the number of people that probably even saw that I’ve been like doing this as a commission was an option, was significantly lower than the total number of eyeballs that I caught and then the number of people that are willing to like craft an email. To me was, probably, you know, reduces it even further and by the end of that chain I got. Probably I don’t know like five people like Desiring one.
One of those people who reached out was Max novenstern, who is, among other things, the co-founder of the crypto startup World coin Max had spent a long time wanting a different, less exhausting kind of computer Max reached out to me via Twitter DM actually, and he asked Me could I build a device that was a computer stripped of its dopamine faucets, but they retained its crystal balls. What are the dopamine faucets of the computer? Well, I think most of the dopamine faucets actually just come from the internet. In the case of the one that I’m building for him, there will be like a couple IP addresses that can get through the firewall, namely the ones to like interesting, open AI products.
So chat GPT, you imagine experience where, like you get jazzy pte, but you can’t go use arbitrary internet functionality afterwards. The way that he framed it to me. It’S like a condensation of all of the internet into a textual interface, and you know if I can only use that thing, then I get access to basically the entire internet without all the other crap.
Another thing is open: AI whisper, which is a transcription service. There will be microphones that can pick up audio from anywhere in the room where he has the computer and then transcribe it and then the third things, a thermal receipt printer integrated into the body and the way that I’m imagining it is very simple. In implementation, like you basically have a text file called like print.txt or whatever, and then you have a button on the computer and when you press the the button, then it just takes whatever is currently in that file and then prints it on thermal paper.
And then you know you can tear it off and fold it up and put in your pocket. Do whatever you want with it, and I like his vision, a lot interesting. New avenues will be opened up to him that are not accessible to like really anybody else. In the world right now he has a room. The room will basically be dedicated to this sort of a thing. The computer will be like the focal object. There will be a variety of like you know, books around him, things that make him comfortable things that make him feel like he’s in the zone. He’Ll use it to like right to think basically like a digital study that doesn’t exist right now, because you’re constantly connected to everything people are reaching out to you.
You’Re worried that something’s going to happen when you’re not looking at your phone. There’S like this totalizing anxiety that I think is associated with modern computing. You don’t need the modern capabilities like you can get away with, having worse worse, Hardware, uh, and especially if the like. The the benefit is that you can do in your garage, like that’s pretty cool yeah.
One of my friends called this like Jeffersonian Computing and the reference to like Jeffersonian democracy. They got their farms and then in their garages. They like making this stuff – and this is like the American sort of ethos to me – which I think is very cool, and I think we might be on the cusp of this like coming back, at least within with Computing yeah.
This is the process you can see. These, like tiny, divots and awesome .