1) Stienman posted a while back about one of his sons struggling with bullying and autism, and expressing willingness and/or desire to hurt himself. Does he feel like providing an update on their struggles, and how the family is coping?
Stienman's son in question is doing better, and changes are being pursued slowly. No change in medication for now, but a change in therapy has given everyone involved a better perspective and a few more tools. In particular it doesn't yet appear to be a serious call for self harm, but his parents are proceeding under the assumption that it'll eventually turn into one without effort on their and his parts.
He is currently testing us to see if we notice him - disappearing and seeing if we look for him. It's easy to feel lost in a large family, so stienman is now spending one on one time with each child on a regular basis - movies, games, outdoor activites, etc.
2) Has steinman done any programming for networked devices? My father's company occasionally has need of someone to write apps to track their clients' extruder output logs and report back to the mothership for QA purposes. They seem to prefer electronic data to flying a person to the client's site to read the logs and troubleshoot - I can't imagine why, but suspect it may have something to do with one of their main clients being located in the Czech Republic.
Yes, it's essentially a form of telemetry, which is something stienman has done many times over the last few decades. If the machine already has a network interface and an API it's fairly easy. If not it can be a little more challenging, but he can add intelligence to dumb machines or reverse engineer unknown protocols on smart machines to obtain status information.
Usually that's the easy part. Getting the machine configured and talking on a network can be a challenge, and often what's done is a local machine with an app is used to gather the data, then send it to a web server, which can either report the logs/status directly, or then be pushed down to another app or database elsewhere, or send alerts (text, email, etc). In such cases stienman has written both the apps and the server portion.