Anindya Maiti, Ph.D01 / 2003
Honda Accord Coupe
Based in Norman, Oklahoma
A familiar old friend, trusted for the long drive and the way back home.
Open photo albumSystems / Reliability makes exploration possible
Care for it.
Take it further.
Make it home.
Old cars on extremely long drives. Coffee for the late nights and early starts. Drones for another perspective. Servers loudly doing their job.
01 / Cars & the long road
Reliability is part
of the adventure.
The adventure is taking an old car a very long way. The real trick is getting it back home under its own power.
I like understanding a car well enough to trust it a long way from the garage. The route and the maintenance belong in the same story, along with a few good stops for coffee. Long drives also make me curious about the infrastructure and everyday decisions that keep communities connected.
Three cars. Plenty of road.
Meet the traveling companions.
The journeys, the detours,
and the stories along the way.
02 / 2012
Toyota Kluger AWD
Based in Geelong, Victoria
Long outback roads, red dust, and room for the next unexpected little detour.
Open photo album
03 / 2020
Toyota RAV4 AWD
Based in Norman, Oklahoma
For rough tracks, cold starts, and the long way through winter.
Open photo album
Road trips & route maps in Exploration
Behind the miles
The care that gets me home.
Before the road / 2022
First, get to know the car.
Before pointing the Accord toward Alaska, I worked through the drivetrain, steering, brakes, and part of the engine.
Winter on the road / 2023
North, with extra layers.
Frozen Kluane Lake, Yukon, December 2023. Snowy mountains, short days, and a very long way from Oklahoma. The RAV4’s turn to see Alaska in winter.
Along the way / 2023
Always have a backup.
A wiper motor quit at Pukaskwa. The spare OEM motor ordered just before the trip meant a few extra hours with the toolkit, then back to the road.
02 / Coffee, wherever the day goes
From one more idea
to one more mile.
Coffee has a place beside an overnight stretch of work, an early start, and a very long drive. Sometimes the desk changes into a picnic table, and the view improves considerably.
I like the small ritual of making a cup, paying attention, and taking a pause before the next thing. A cup also has a wider story: where it was grown, whose work made it possible, and the different rituals people build around it.
The coffee lineup
From campsite to countertop.
01 / Outin
Nano
A small espresso stop that can come along for the drive.
02 / Nespresso / De’Longhi
Inissia
The office and lab coffee stop, ready for the next question or experiment.
03 / Nespresso / Breville
Vertuo & Aeroccino
A quick capsule coffee for one more page, one more idea, or an early start.
04 / Philips
Series 3200
Beans to cup for the days when the work has its own rhythm.
05 / Breville
Barista Express
For slowing down, dialing in a shot, and giving the next idea a little room.
03 / Drone photography
A little height.
A different perspective.
A little height makes it easier to see how roads, coastlines and landforms fit together. I like bringing that view back to what I notice on the ground.
Life at ground level
The flying companions
Meet the drones.
01 / DJI
Mavic Air 2
For wide landscapes, winding coastlines, and the places worth slowing down for.
02 / HOVERAir
X1 PROMAX
For the moments when I’d rather be in the picture than behind the controls.
03 / Potensic
ATOM
A compact companion for a different angle on the next stop.
Seen from above
Patterns in the landscape.
A few places seen from a little higher up.
Aerial reels
A landscape in motion.
A few longer looks from the air.
04 / Servers & self-hosting
The louder side
of keeping things running.
I colocate my servers in enterprise data centers, self-host Nextcloud, GitLab and Plex, and participate in Storj. Keeping these services dependable also keeps me thinking about access, including how services can remain reachable under censorship.
All my travel photos and videos are backed up to my own Nextcloud while I explore the world.
Files, travel photos and video, kept in a service I host.
Self-hosted repositories for code, experiments, and keeping track of changes.
A self-hosted media library for browsing and playing my own collection.
Taking part in decentralized storage, alongside the services I run for myself.
Data & distributed systems
The research connection.
Self-hosting also supports my research, from keeping longitudinal datasets available to running experiments and measuring distributed systems.
- MagnetDB
BitTorrent discovery data matched to film and television metadata.
- EtherBee
Ethereum node performance, network sessions and honeypot interactions.
- Ethereum reconnaissance
Evidence of reconnaissance targeting Ethereum node infrastructure.
- NinjaDoH
Moving-target DNS-over-HTTPS designed to stay reachable under censorship.