Jon — KD7SWH

Amateur radio operator in Oregon. The bench holds Linux boxes, microcontrollers, radios, eight-bit computers being brought back to life, and synthesizers — the kind that make music and the kind that talk.

I'm not an engineer or a computer scientist. I come to all of this from sociology and assistive technology: statistics by way of social research, computing by way of making machines work for people they weren't designed for. My research interests live there — disability studies, human input devices, vision loss, and text-to-speech systems.

The data side is just as much home: data science in Python and R, particularly as they are used in epidemiology, public health, and biomedical engineering research. That practice is the basis of abax, a keyboard-first statistics workstation.

Accessibility and open standards aren't side commitments here — they're where I come from. Tools should work for everyone, on anything, and the formats that matter should be the ones anyone can implement. This site practices that: no JavaScript, system fonts, real contrast, and a plain-text edition of everything that matters.

I write C, Node.js, Python, and Rust, mostly for small machines and small tools. On the air you'll find me on the Amateur Radio Relay Group's repeater system, including the Monday night Linux User Net, whose weekly link list this site carries.

I also build with AI tools, and I'd rather say that plainly than leave you wondering — this site and projects like star and abax included. I know there are good reasons some people are wary. For me it's a powerful tool that has let me do more than I could have alone, and the control never leaves my hands: what ships is what I chose, reviewed, and understood.