People occasionally ask what Cyclotronic means. The honest answer is that it isn’t a single word — it’s three ideas compressed into one, chosen because the overlap between them is where most of what I find interesting actually lives.
Cycle
The first piece is the most literal. A cycle, a bicycle, specifically a Brompton folding bike that goes almost everywhere with me — city rides on weekend mornings, detours down side streets that looked more interesting than the main road, the particular unhurried rhythm of riding somewhere with no fixed deadline to meet.
Cycling is the hobby that gets me outside and moving through the world at exactly the right speed to notice it. Not fast enough to blur the details, not slow enough to miss the broader shape of a place. The Brompton made it a daily practice rather than an occasional intention, and that shift — from “I should cycle more” to simply doing it — is one of the better things to have happened to a normal Tuesday.
Cyclotron
The second piece comes from physics. A cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator — a device that uses magnetic fields to spin charged particles in a spiral path, accelerating them with each revolution until they reach the energy needed for an experiment or a collision. It was invented by Ernest Lawrence in 1930, and the elegance of it has always appealed to me: a simple, repeating motion that builds, incrementally, into something with real force behind it.
Physics is what I studied formally, and it left a particular way of looking at things that doesn’t entirely switch off. The instinct to ask what’s actually happening underneath a surface — why a system behaves the way it does rather than just accepting that it does — comes from those years of working through problems where intuition was usually wrong and the equations were usually right. A cyclotron is a good symbol for that: something that looks like it’s going in circles but is actually building momentum with every pass.
Electronics
The third piece is where the physics became personal. Electronics, computing, the specific joy of making machines do things — and behind all of that, a ZX Spectrum sitting on a carpet in front of a television set, rubber keyboard and cassette deck and BASIC interpreter and all.
The Spectrum was my first home computer, and it was the machine that made the abstract concrete: here is a processor, here is memory, here is what happens when you type something and press RUN. From there came the Amstrad CPC 6128 with its green phosphor monitor, then the long chain of digital cameras and cycling computers and home lab servers and Docker containers and static site generators that connects that rubber keyboard to the screen this blog is running on now.
Electronics, in the broadest sense, is the thread that runs through all of it — the interest in how machines work, what they can be made to do, and why some of them, designed forty years ago in someone’s spare room, still feel worth writing about.
The Overlap
The name Cyclotronic sits at the intersection of all three — the physical world of cycling, the formal discipline of physics, and the hands-on practice of electronics and computing. It’s a compressed autobiography, a single word that tries to describe someone who is equally happy on a bike on a Saturday morning, reading about physics on a Sunday afternoon, and tinkering with a home server on a weekday evening.
The blog reflects that overlap. Retro computers and folding bikes and developer tools and Japanese philosophy don’t have an obvious common thread if you look at them from the outside. From the inside, they’re all part of the same curiosity — the same impulse to understand how things work, why they were designed the way they were, and what they feel like to actually use.
That’s what Cyclotronic is. A signal from the place where those three things meet.