An Interview with Kash Lingat (@geo.kash)
From hard-shelled portable computers to a fully-usable typeface created from photos taken while walking in the woods, the work of Katarina ‘Kash’ Lingat is proof that technology and ‘the outdoors’ can work together in something bordering on harmony.
Merging old-school craft with modern tools, she combines a ‘90s open-source mindset with the DIY attitude of the Whole Earth Catalog to make clever solutions to the problems around her—whether she’s 3D printing a long-range messaging device or collecting scrap wood for a long-reach apple grabber.
At a time when planned obsolescence looms large and the strangle-hold of Big Tech™ seems firmer than ever, her home-brewed creations show that with a bit of trial and error, you can actually make pretty much whatever you want.
In this in-depth interview we talked about outdoor computing, log-cabin creation and the joy of failure…
Were you always making things? How far does this go back?
Yeah, I’ve been making things my whole life—I’ve always been tinkering. Both my parents are super creative and my dad is very much a problem solver. If the toaster breaks, he's not buying a new toaster, he's taking it apart and figuring out how to fix it. So I've always been exposed to that.
I was always making things, but then you start to become an adult and you go to school and you move out and life kind of gets in the way. And you think that you have to be an adult and you kind of lose touch with your creative side. But then in my early 20s I was like, “Wait, I love crocheting. Why do I never crochet anymore?” And I just started crocheting again.
It’s a shame how so many people stop doing all the fun stuff they used to do as a kid once they get into their twenties. That seems like a common thing.
It's such a shame. I always have people come up to me being like, “I wish I was as creative as you.” I'm like, “No, you are, but you don't exercise it.” It’s such a big part of human nature—as kids we’re coloring and scribbling and playing in the dirt—but we just lose touch with it.
That's kind of why I started sharing online—if it can inspire one person, I am so stoked. I didn’t used to enjoy posting on social media—it felt so inauthentic—but then I started sharing my projects and hearing from people that they were inspired by it or they picked up a hobby because of me—maybe they started knitting or they started 3D printing. And that really got me fired up. That’s what it’s about.
Looking at the things you make, there’s a really interesting mix of old school, classic crafts, and then technology and hardware. Where does this come from?
Yeah, it's a funny mix. I’ve got my granny hobbies—these very wholesome, crafty projects, which I think I get from my mom—but then I was born in ‘94, so the internet was kind of just coming on the scene. I remember how quickly things progressed from movies on VHS to DVD to Blu-ray and then suddenly they were just being streamed and it all happened in such a short amount of time. I got to see all of this happen in front of me and interact with so many cool pieces of technology that eventually got replaced by the smartphone or your laptop or whatnot.
I always found these gadgets extremely fascinating, but it was only in the last few years where I started to think I could make my own electronics and start building these things myself. Since the smartphone came out, there's not that many cool gadgets that people have in their houses anymore—and I miss that. The iPhone took away so many good gadgets—like a calculator, a camera, a notebook, an audio recorder, an MP3 player…
That era you’re talking about does feel like the prime time for all that kind of gadgetry before everything had a touch screen. I know it sounds pretentious, but there’s something satisfying about learning to use these machines with all their buttons and dials.
Totally. I love the tactile feeling of pushing buttons. Like with a camera, you have that clicking sound when you take the photo, but then on an iPhone it just makes that digital click—it’s not the same. Do you remember the iPod Mini when it came out? I was just Googling it the other day and it was out 21 years ago. I still think it's a very relevant piece of technology—there's a whole community now of people modding their iPods to have a new battery, to have Bluetooth.
I love how people are taking this old item and making something modern out of it. What was the first electronic project you did?
I can't say that there's a first, because when you are learning electronics, you're prototyping so many random projects. But the first real project is probably my Geodeck—which is a computer that I built in a case.
It all started because I was following a group on Reddit called CyberDecks. A cyberdeck is a term which came from The Neuromancer by William Gibson—it’s basically a homemade computer to hack into the cyber world. And there's all these people building their own versions of cyberdecks online. And I was just so inspired and so fascinated by it because I love computers, and I loved the ruggedness of a cyberdeck.
I was like, “Geez, I wonder if I could build one?” but I wasn’t very good with electronics. I was still reading Electronics for Dummies—but I was able to 3D print things and 3D model things. So I knew I could make the case part of it, but I was like, “Can I make the guts of it?”
And I eventually just did it. I think that's always my way to approach a big project—just do it. You'll figure it out as you get there. Everything is ‘figureoutable’. Like if you just take the time and go step by step, you'll make it there if you just persist.
And so that's what I did. I started making it with cardboard, just taping things together. I remember I posted it on Reddit at that point, and people were like, “Yeah, cardboard and tape—that classifies as a cyberdeck.”
Just so I can understand it in my head—you were basically making a laptop which then sat in a portable housing. What were the basic ingredients of this thing?
People do it in all kinds of different ways. I did it with something called a Raspberry Pi, which is a micro computer on a single board. So I had the Raspberry Pi and I got a screen that would connect to it. I knew that I wanted buttons, so I actually ended up desoldering them from an old alarm clock I had found at the re-use centre. And after that it was just a matter of connecting it all together.
The mouse was the hardest part. I didn’t know how to do it because my case was only so wide and the keyboard took up most of the space. Most people use a trackpad or a little joystick—and I tried that but it was very clunky—so in the end I settled on a very small mouse and built a little storage space so it could be put away.
And I’ve taken it outside—I’ve taken it on adventures. You can connect to Wi-Fi, you can program on it, you can play movies—so many people ask me, “What does it do?” And I’m like, “What does a computer do?”
What about that gadget you made for counting things… the aptly-titled ‘Thing Counter’? What was the idea behind that?
Again—I like gadgets and I like pressing buttons. I just wanted to keep making electronics to practice my electronics making—and the Thing Counter is such a niche product because it's totally unnecessary. I already have a digital version on my website for counting things, and I also just write on paper to count things, but I thought it could be a fun electronics project.
People are like, “Well, what are you counting?” And it's all kinds of things. I do a lot of 3D printing where I’m printing the same thing over and over again—so if I had to make 50 of them, I would keep track on a piece of paper. So I thought, “What if I just had this device that I can press a chunky button on to count up and down?”
It’s not something I plan on selling widely—it just fulfilled a need and it's something I wanted to use, so I made it. And that’s like most things I make—I make them because I want them. So many times people are like, “Why are you doing this?” But why not? Now I have this ‘Thing Counter’—and I love the contrast of it next to my knitting projects—it’s such a sharp contrast.
Quite often nature and technology are seen as polar opposites, but your stuff kind of mixes it all together. Is it all the same thing to you?
I see it all as one. It's funny because you're not the only person to point that out—I didn't really notice that I was doing that—I was just sharing my projects that are obviously influenced by the outdoors and by nature, because that is where I spend my time.
I spend a lot of time at my desk—because by trade, I'm a software developer. But then also I spent a lot of my time outdoors. I don’t think it was my intention, but I think that’s why I started to bring nature into my projects. I don't know if you saw my letters in nature on my website?
Yeah, the alphabet thing where you made a font out of letters you’d found in nature?
Yeah, exactly. I was just out for a walk, and a woodpecker had made a very obvious lowercase i in the tree, and it really caught my attention. I stopped and took a picture, and after that my head was dialled into thinking about letters in nature. So I ended up finding the capital A on the same walk—and I was so excited. And then I just started seeing letters in nature everywhere I went. And I was like, “Man, it'd be pretty sweet to be able to type with these letters and write a poem or write my name.” But it took years until I got the full alphabet.
How militant were you with that? Could you move things at all—or did the letters have to be as you found them?
No—that was one of my rules—I couldn’t move the branch to make it look more like the letter G, you know? I wouldn’t let myself do that because then it would kind of ruin the fun if a human altered it. But then I started being conflicted because one of my Os is an O from a tree stump that was cut. So a human did cut the stump at some point.
But that’s outside of your control I suppose? I’d say that was fine. What was the hardest letter to find?
G was actually very hard to find. I ended up finding it in a mushroom and in a tree. Q was also very hard.
What’s kind of surprising is that it actually works. I messed around with it a bit on your website and it’s pretty legible.
Yeah—one of my rules was that they couldn’t be too obscure—they had to very clearly be the letter they’re supposed to be.
Where’s the buzz with these projects for you? Is it when you’re on the hunt or making something, or once you’ve completed it?
I love making things. I get so much joy out of the process of making, and then also knowing that by making, I’ll be learning something. I know that if I take on a project that's less familiar to me, I'm going to come out of it smarter and more into the topic.
So many people are like, “I want to do this thing, but I don’t know enough.”, but I say just do it. If you literally just start, you already know more than you did when you didn't start. You might be having your morning coffee when this idea comes to you—but then you don’t act on it, so what I've been trying to do lately is to go and do it, right away—because there's no better time to start than when you have the idea.
But of course, that's not always a realistic thing to do. Maybe you're driving your car, picking up your kids from school—but if you can, my biggest advice is that if you have an idea, just go and do it right now. Go, go, go, go do it right now. Because that state of mind is a very special state to be in, to create. If you don’t act now, the idea is going to be gone. But if you at least start on the project, then it'll be more in your mind. At the very least, write it down.
That makes sense. Starting things usually isn’t as hard as it seems in your head. I suppose the idea of failure kind of gets in the way sometimes. Are you bothered about failure?
No, I actually think that failure is one of the most important parts of learning. I'm always saying, “Fail as fast as you can,” because the sooner that you fail, the sooner that you've learned from that failure and you can move on with your new knowledge.
There have been so many times where something I've built fails… but is it a failure? What does failure even mean? Okay, maybe that version didn't work, but another version is going to work because I'm not going to do it the same way that failed. Fail fast, learn faster—that's just part of the process.
I'm also a big fan of proof of concepts. I love proving a concept—proving an idea is viable and that you can do the thing you’re imagining. I love prototyping something and just proving that it can work.
I saw that you’d recently made a log cabin. That seems like the dream for a lot of people—but not many actually do it.
That was a dream for me and my boyfriend for the longest time—get some land and build a log cabin. It was like, “If not now, when?” Doing something like this when we’re retired in our 60s is going to be so hard to do—so we thought, “Why can’t we do it now?”
I think that it's very intuitive and part of human nature to build yourself a shelter—it’s part of us, but we never exercise that part of us because we have homes.
Yeah—it’s like growing food—it’s a pretty innate thing that’s now treated as beyond us.
I think people underestimate themselves. We can do hard things. Our brains are extremely powerful. If you want to build a log cabin, you can build a log cabin and you will figure out how to do it if you really want to do it. You just gotta do it.
What was the reality of building your cabin? How hard was it?
It is definitely hard. Logs are very, very heavy. But you just go step by step. You start from the bottom and you work your way up. And then we got to the roof—that part was very difficult because of the height. I wanted a really simple roof because we didn’t know what we were doing, but my boyfriend was like, “No, let's make this really whimsical, curvy roof.” In the end I’m glad we went with the harder curvier roof because it makes it so much more magical.
So yeah—it was definitely difficult. But nothing was impossible. It's all doable. YouTube is an insane source of information. We would come home at night and just watch YouTube and try to figure it out.
Is the fact that it's difficult almost a good thing? Is coming up against challenges and then getting past them part of the appeal. If things were super easy they’d be boring, wouldn’t they?
I think if we knew what we were doing, it would still be enjoyable, because the process is enjoyable. For example, prepping one log takes a lot of work, you have to cut it, clean it, strip the whole thing—it’s a lot of effort, and then you’re like, “Oh my god, I need 50 logs.” But the alternative would be to buy a log, right?
Yeah—there’s log cabin kits, isn't there?
Yeah—but then I have to work somewhere else to make money to pay for that thing. Or I could just put in the sweat equity to just do it myself. So yeah, the journey is just as fun.
You’ve made a computer, a cabin and the alphabet. What next?
I'm currently learning game development. That's something that I'm very excited about as I love video games and I love programming. I worked full time as a developer—and I always wanted to learn game development, but it’s such a steep hill to climb. I'm very, very bad. I was in the flatline of the learning curve for so long, and it just felt like I was making zero progress, but I finally feel like I'm hitting the curve, and things are starting to click more.
And then I am also slowly working on another version of my cyberdeck. I really want to have a portable workstation, because I am sometimes off grid or in the woods and I want to be able to bring the tools I use with me—my full size keyboard, my external monitor, my mouse, my MacBook, my video game console.
Is that the dream? To be out in nature, with your computer, making video games about nature?
Totally. At our piece of land I sometimes just bring my computer and set up my desk outside. And it is so inspiring, even just in terms of sound design—you hear the birds making sounds, and all those sounds could be in your video game. But yeah, I would love to make a game on a Geodeck outside somewhere—that'd be awesome.
Thanks to Kash Lingat for the answers and to Sam Waller for the questions.
Follow Kash here
