My interests include creating and improving free software, learning all I can about computer science, playing story-driven games, photography, and writing.
Much of what I do with computers is about helping people, whether that's through writing simple scripts to automate things or writing software to make things more accessible.
I got into computers from a young age, and would spend more time playing around with the control panel on my parent's Windows 2000 machine than actually playing games on it. I played a lot of LittleBigPlanet, trying to make complex contraptions and logic machines to accomplish tasks within the game.
The type of software I want to create most is that which helps people, whether it be through providing or improving on accessibility options, creating tools that aim to simplify complex tasks, or even writing documentation that makes existing software easier to use - I find it by far my greatest motivator.
I don't really consider myself a hardcore gamer, but I do enjoy video games - usually those with a focus on creativity or story. I've tried to make a few games before, but never completed any outside of short little minigames and TI-84 calculator toys. I'd like to make a few small games of my own, and I'm really interested in one day making mods for existing games to make them more accessible - lowering difficulty, removing epilepsy-triggering sequences, removing potentially phobia-inducing elements, and so on. {% comment %} FOOTNOTE - why do so many games have spiders!!!! {% endcomment %}
{% comment %} {% include h.html level=3 content="Some things I've made" %}fif is a tool to find and optionally correct files with misnamed extensions. It's written in Rust, partially to teach myself the language, and partially because it's (in my opinion) a more suitable language for a small CLI project like this than something like C# or Python.
I've made a lot of software to help my wife Petra, but much of it is too specific to her needs to be useful on a greater scale, with perhaps a few exceptions, such as Buypeeb, a simple program for tracking prices on Buyee auctions.
I've also written some more widely applicable software, such as OCRbot, a tool for automatically transcribing the text content of image posts on the Fediverse, and bcao, a small script for organising music from the .zip files provided by Bandcamp into the user's music directory.
{% endcomment %} {% include h.html level=2 content="What I use" %}All my computers and laptops run Linux, perhaps unsurprisingly. I mainly stick to Fedora and Debian, although in the past I used Arch. Up until my most recent one, every Android phone I've ever owned (with the exception of my very first) ended up running Cyanogenmod or LineageOS at some point, usually soon after purchase. One UI finally won me over, and rooting phones is just too annoying now, with Play Integrity (formerly SafetyNet) and all that.
I consider myself an advocate for free and open source software, and all of my existing projects are licensed under copyleft or permissive licences.
I'm fairly active on the Fediverse, and I self-host Mastodon. You can follow me on my account at fedi.lynnesbian.space!
For info on what programming languages I tend to use, see my skills page.