A Mind For LifeIndependent publisher · est. 2010

Books · Software · Long-form technical writing

Work that is meant to last longer than the thing it was built on.

A Mind For Life is a small independent publisher, registered in Kansas in 2010. It began with one book and has since become the home for software, reviews and writing that share a single habit: measure carefully, record honestly, and leave something behind that someone else can check.

The catalogue

What we publish

Four things, in three forms. They look unrelated until you notice they are all the same practice applied to different material.

Cover of The Awareness Journey by Mark Abraham

Book

The Awareness Journey

Fifteen years of collected life lessons and guiding statements, written down for people who want to live more deliberately. The first title, and the reason the company exists.

Reviewed by Kirkus Reviews · available on Amazon

Arcade Commander: an arcade cabinet, a lit control panel and a pinball machine, with the ArcadeCommander.net wordmark.

Software

Arcade Commander

Software for arcade cabinets: lighting, control, and the plumbing that makes a cabinet feel built rather than assembled. Shipped, documented, and in use.

arcadecommander.net

The NI0Z station: banks of monitors running SDR waterfalls beside racked transceivers, with the SDRZone wordmark.

Publication

SDRZone

Long-form reviews of software-defined radio hardware, published since 2011 and free to read. Twenty-four full-length reviews and articles, each one dated and marked for what was verified and what was not.

sdrzone.com · running since 2011

The Retro Experience: a Commodore 64 and an Amiga on a workbench with an arcade cabinet, under the wordmark.

Publication

The Retro Experience

Retro computing and gaming, written from the bench: the builds, the restorations, and the specific ways things fail when you make something new for a forty-year-old machine. Failures included, because they are the useful half.

theretroexperience.com

The thread

Why a book about awareness sits beside a C64 game

It is a fair question, and the answer is not that they are a portfolio. It is that they are the same discipline, practised on different material for twenty-five years.

Measure carefully

Six asteroid discoveries from a private observatory, logged with the Minor Planet Center. Astrometry is unforgiving: a careless measurement is worse than none.

Record honestly

Every review dated, every claim marked verified or not, nothing vendor-endorsed. The reviews that say a thing did not work are the ones worth having written.

Leave it checkable

Three of those asteroids carry names in the IAU catalogue and will outlast every website here. That is the standard the rest of the work is held to.