Natural Languages

• English (impeccable; four years' UK residence, culminating in Oxford D.Phil.)
• Estonian (excellent, but not impeccable; significant book editing)
• French (sufficient for competent socializing; j'ai passé un été fort agréable en France en 1972)
• German (as of 2014, sufficient for slightly awkward socializing, and for reading der Spiegel with four or so dictionary lookups in every paragraph)
• classical and ecclesiastical Latin (two years' university, in Australian academic years 1981 and 1982, under Betts et al. at Monash University, with grades equivalent to University of Toronto A+), culminating in one book of the Aeneid; skills revived through about 210 hours' private study, 2007 September through 2009 February, working from initial chapter into final chapter of the Betts self-teaching textbook, then with full read of first book of Caesar's de Bello Gallico, using 1960 edition-and-notes of E.C. Kennedy (etc)
• classical and koiné Greek (self-taught; massive studies in 1970s and early 1980s, culminating in much reading of Aristotle as graduate student in Oxford 1975-1976, and of Plato as lecturer 1978-1981; I never touched the poets; the Greek, although now rusty, is still a modestly useful tool for reading an interlinear-translation New Testament)
• Hebrew: 169 hours private study 2009-2013, but results unsatisfactory (still very far from even the most rudimentary text-reading capability)

Laboratory Shelves
and Professional Library

• minor, but adequate, equipment for basic amateur-astronomy outreach: 20-cm "Discovery" Dobsonian reflector with moderate-quality 25 mm, moderate-quality 12.5 mm, and high-quality 5 mm eyepieces, with erect-image right-angled finder and Kendrick dew-removal system; binoculars 11x80 and 7x35; USSR-manufactured "Turist 3" 20x50 spyglass; three Tirion atlases; all three volumes of Burnham;  …
• the bare beginnings of an electrical-electronics laboratory capability (rather sparsely populated junkbins and similar; multimeter, microammeter, …: still a long way from acquiring first oscilloscope)
• unremarkable, essentially standard, collection of a few dozen textbooks for undergraduate maths-and-physics-and-astrophysics (including both editions of the Carroll-and-Ostlie Modern Astrophysics, and including the 2009 Gray-and-Corbally Stellar Spectral Classification) (but it is mildly remarkable that the collection has full photocopy of the 1919 edition of the Godfrey-and-Siddons United Kingdom school text Elementary Geometry: Practical and Theoretical, and that the collection has A.E.E. McKenzie's United Kingdom school texts A Second Course of Electricity and A Second (M.K.S.) Course of Electricity)
• standard shelf of manuals for English-language editor in general Canadian practice, with specialization in science: Chicago Manual of Style (14th edition); Words into Type (3rd edition); Editing Canadian English; Judith Butcher's Copy-Editing: The Cambridge Handbook for Editors, Authors and Publishers; Nancy Mulvany's book-indexing manual; Peggy Smith's workbook on North American proofreaders' marks; the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and Physical Review guides to notation; the CBE Scientific Style and Format manual, …
• standard shelf of dictionaries for English-Estonian editor in general international practice: (unabridged) fine-print Oxford English Dictionary; (unabridged) Webster's Third New International Dictionary; smaller English-language dictionaries, including Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (10th edition) and ITP Nelson Canadian Dictionary of the English Language; Collins Robert French-English English-French Dictionary in a 1982 edition; Brockhaus-Bildwörterbuch Englisch-Deutsch Deutsch-Englisch in a 1976 edition; Paul F. Saagpakk's Eesti-Inglise Sõnaraamat; Kull-Raiet Õigekeelsus-Sõnaraamat in a 1980 edition; the Lewis-and-Short Latin lexicon in both a modern abridged edition and in the unabridged 1879 edition, from the impression of 1927; the Liddell-and-Scott Greek lexicon in an abridged 1871 edition, in an impression from possibly around 1871, …
• standard shelf of technical manuals for an editor using TeX and LaTeX: Wynter Snow's TeX for the Beginner, Donald Knuth's The TeXbook, Leslie Lamport's LaTeX: A Document Preparation System: User's Guide and Reference Manual, and the Goossens-Mittelbach-Samarin LaTeX Companion
• standard shelf of technical manuals for an editor using HTML, XHTML, SGML, and XML: the O'Reilly Definitive Guide books for XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets, Charles F. Goldfarb's SGML Handbook, the O'Reilly DocBook guide, the Simpson Just XML and Just XSL books, …
• standard shelf of background books for knowledge worker running Linux workstation (including the New Riders MySQL offering and the Sun Microsystems Java Tutorial: Third Edition; and I am particularly fond of my O'Reilly books by system-administration gurus Welsh-Dalheimer-Kaufman and Frisch)

Computing Skills

• solid skills in plain TeX (user since summer of 1996; self-training done in Linux, from both Knuth's and Wynter Snow's manuals; see also, in the "Literary" section of my http://www.metascientia.com, the unpublished articles "TeX Self-Test" and "Whither TeX in the XML Régime?"); in JadeTeX (used for typesetting to PostScript of 700-page Estonian-language book drafts; HTML output from Jade is uploaded to to http://www.interlog.com/~verbum/kv/ladumine/book1.htm); and in LaTeX (self-training done in Linux from extensive reading of Leslie Lamport's LaTeX, and consolidated by the copyediting of numerous physics papers for NRC RP Research Press, with NRC RP *.cls and .*sty LaTeX add-ons)
• intermediate-level mastery of Linux system management (one achievement is a pair of successful IRAF astronomical image-processing suite installs at the University of Toronto; another is the installation of Debian GNU/Linux on a small machine under my control in Nova Scotia, though not under my ownership)
• rudimentary grasp of scripting in bash and Perl (an instance from the toolbox I have created, with a little outside help: a routine that, when invoked at the command line with an argument such as somefile.txt, copies somefile.txt to the backup somefile.txt____BAK20031210T054520Z if the time happens to be 2003-12-10 05:45:20 UTC, and to the backup somefile.txt____BAK20040210T054521Z if the time happens to be 2004-02-10 05:45:21 UTC, ...)
• solid grasp of SGML principles (veteran user of DocBook DTD, in 700-page Estonian SGML-to-simultaneous-PostScript/RTF/HTML publishing project)
• solid grasp of contemporary Web typography - XHTML 1.0 (equivalently, HTML 4.01), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Computer Hardware (Desktop, Laptops)

• self-built Debian-and-Windows desktop workstation, on a 2009-acquired Intel DX48BT2 motherboard and a 2009-acquired Intel E7400 CPU, in full-tower case, with burn-in 2013 January (on ADSL broadband Internet connection)
• (retired, but retained: ASUS EEE PC laptop machine with an obsolete Xandros Linux)
• (retired, but retained: obsolete IBM ThinkPad 128-MB laptop machine, running some obsolete Microsoft, with internal drive and USB external drive)

Computer Software:
Laptop Machines

• for ASUS EEE: vendor-supplied Linux
• for ThinkPad: Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Word 2002, MathType 5, CINDEX 1.5 book-indexing tool - all with formal commercial licences
• for ThinkPad: WordPerfect 8, from legitimately purchased shrinkwrapped copy (installed in 2003, when Corel Corporation had discontinued formal support for WordPerfect 8, but needed to service a client who in 2003 specified this version number rather than the currently supported versions 9, 10)