or: If I Had a Million Dollars

Over the last few years, I’ve occasionally thought about how I’d spend my time if I could retire in the near term. These thoughts have been triggered by a few different circumstances, but I consistently arrive at the same set of ideas. I’m very lucky to be able to pursue these ideas at a hobby level already, and lately I’ve been thinking about how to put more effort toward them while also keeping my bills paid. This post is mainly for me to organise some of those thoughts, but I want to share in case you have ideas!

Broadly, I want to make the world better; probably most people would relate to that, but here’s my particular take.

NZ Conservation

In a word, conservation in Aotearoa New Zealand is about killing. Aside from a couple species of bat, we had no land mammals until humans showed up about 700 years ago; our native birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, insects, and plants have been - and continue to be - decimated by introduced species. Simply (not easily!) removing pest species from an area allows remnant populations of natives to recover. We’ve had some successes in this direction, however there’s loads of work left to do.

Trap Monitoring

I help maintain trap lines in/near Dunedin for a couple organisations (City Sanctuary and Forest and Bird), aimed at possums, rats, and mustelids. When I’m walking between traps, I often think about a technical solution that we sorely need: an inexpensive remote monitoring system for live capture traps.

Broadly, there are two kinds of traps we use for removing animals; kill traps and live capture traps. Both do what the name implies, kill traps are far more common than live capture ones.

The ideal trap design would entice the target species to enter it - we quantify this attribute as the “interaction rate”. A low interaction rate means that the trap is unappealing to the target species and they tend to steer clear, a high interaction rate means that a targeted animal near to the trap is more likely to enter it. Cacophony has done work on this topic, see this post.

Another important consideration is that the trap should only affect targeted species. Free roaming pet cats are a particular challenge in front-country New Zealand - in areas where people’s pet cats might be, we use lures that are unappealing to cats, and kill traps that are engineered to not be triggered by cats. An unfortunate side-effect of this engineering to avoid harming cats (which, to be clear, is a political choice - cats are a major conservation problem) is that the interaction rates for targeted species are reduced. (This problem doesn’t go away if the cat problem does, because we also have a few species of curious native birds which are about the same size as targeted pests.)

Live capture traps, for instance cage traps, have a very much higher interaction rate for target species compared to kill traps. They also provide a workaround for the cat problem: a caught cat won’t have a fun time spent in the cage, but the trapper can release it unharmed (in an ideal future, only after confirming that it is a pet rather than feral). However, cage traps have a major drawback in that they need to be checked at least daily; in practice they are only used for the very most important projects, I believe usually by professional trappers.

One possible resolution is to equip cage traps with monitoring devices, so that when a trap is triggered, the trapper can be notified. This would free trappers from the requirement to check every live capture trap every day, just in case any animals were caught. Trappers would be able to leave many more traps deployed, since they could go straight to the traps that need attention. Indeed, there is at least one commercial implementation of this idea, but it’s quite expensive and requires skilled work to deploy, and so not widely used. An inexpensive and simple trap monitoring system could have a huge impact on trapping efficacy, and I think developments like Bluetooth Long Range have made this quite feasible.

Subantarctic Logistics

In addition to the three or four main islands that most people are familiar with, New Zealand includes five groups of outlying islands known as the subantarctics. These are important sanctuaries for wildlife, in particular seabirds, however for a variety of reasons it has gotten increasingly difficult for DoC, researchers, and conservationists to access them.

My good friend Steve runs a 25m expedition yacht, Evohe, which is the most viable option (and I think in some cases, basically the only option) to get people and equipment to/from the subs. I help out with Evohe when I can, sometimes crewing on trips! It’s incredibly rewarding but often quite hard work. I’m not sure what it would look like in practice, but I want to ensure that the work Steve and Evohe have done for decades keeps on going after he retires, possibly sooner than later.

Techie Stuff

Open Source Software

On-and-off over the years, I’ve contributed to a few open source projects that I feel are socially beneficial. Mostly, these could be described as tools that I use for nerdy projects, for instance FreeCAD and atsamd-rs, and I’d love to be able to get back in to that scene.

Recently, the main issue I’ve faced is simply burnout from programming professionally for too long. It feels like the burnout mainly came about through my work often feeling unrewarding and sometimes being quite frustrating. In contrast, when I’ve been able to contribute meaningful amounts of work it felt quite rewarding, and volunteering provides freedom to step away before it gets too frustrating.

Fun Projects

Creativity is ultimately what makes engineering fun for me, and occasionally I like to do things just for the fun of it. Sometimes, these are stand-alone projects that other folks might find useful too, for example kicad-halftone, sometimes (like my Accutron coil rewinding) they are projects that could be commercially viable, and sometimes they’re explicitly for fun but involve learning things that are professionally useful (eg Nissan Leaf VSP hacking), but really they are just driven by my own amusement and curiosity. To the extent that I currently tinker with fun projects, I tend to spend most of my time doing the thing, as opposed to blogging about it, so of course there’s the option of turning the blogs (or instead, podcasts/videos) in to a product in their own right.