A greybearded man wearing glasses and a black shirt on a black background

Daniel F. Dickinson

Creating opportunities to follow a passion for life and tech for the common good

A cleanshaven middle-aged man wearing glasses and a dark green sweater

Daniel Dickinson (he/him) has been using and exploring computer and electronic technologies for over three decades1 while continuing to learn and update his skills. This has included maintaining the Node.js package perfectionist-dfd on NPM and ensuring proficiency with modern Windows as well as various flavours of Linux (for desktop, server, and embedded systems).

Daniel is currently cross-skilling on Microsoft’s Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, etc), will soon be taking exams for related Microsoft certifications, and has achieved CompTIA A+ · ce certification.

The code Daniel has written exists in various open source and proprietary2 projects. He has many contributions on GitHub under the username danielfdickinson as well as on Gitlab, also with the username danielfdickinson .

Daniel also enjoys sharing his knowledge with others. This included being a critical member of a team of volunteers that created and implemented a successful robotics programme for kids 8-12 (eight to twelve) called Bots and Bytes (offsite PDF) at the Midland Public Library. In the same vein, Daniel volunteers with the Gateway Centre for Learning in Midland, Ontario.

  1. Daniel’s interest in tech began in grade school with the Commodore 64 (for which he wrote a hidden TSR3 early in his high school career, not realizing the implications of what he was doing). This interest carried onto PC’s with DOS, then Windows 3.1, and continues with the current generation of desktop, mobile, and embedded (smart) devices and covers multiple operating systems. ↩︎

  2. Since the proprietary projects are not owned by Daniel, he can’t show them to you. ↩︎

  3. People will tell you that this is technically impossible. If you have the right documentation (Daniel had the Jim Butterfield books), use the chainable hook (wedge) for the keyboard, and (prevented on modern operating systems and hardware) use self-modifying and self-relocating code (and you don’t know or believe that it’s impossible) you can make magic happen. Of course the technique ends up meaning you have to use special tricks if you cannot avoid using the kernel routines (because part of the secret was that Daniel had to swap out the kernel ROM to access the RAM underneath). Daniel thinks there is even a printout of the code in a relative’s stack of boxes in the house where Daniel lives. ↩︎

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