Welcome to my website, where I write about and catalogue things that are interesting to me, and maybe even to you, too!
{% include h.html level=2 content="What I do" %}I'm Lynne. My interests include creating free software, playing story-driven games, photography, and writing.
Most 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.
While making games and tools was (and is) enjoyable to me, what I want to do most is create software that helps people - 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, etc. {% comment %} FOOTNOTE - why do so many games have spiders!!!! {% endcomment %}
{% include h.html level=3 content="Some things I've made" %}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.
{% include h.html level=2 content="What I use" %}All my computers and laptops run Linux, perhaps unsurprisingly. I mainly stick to Arch and Debian. 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. This includes my current phone.
I avoid proprietary and/or closed software wherever I can without hugely inconveniencing myself. The vast majority of the software on my computer(s) is free and open source. I am strongly opposed to almost all forms of DRM, and either avoid buying media with it, or remove it after purchase. For example, I buy all of my music from Bandcamp and download the OGG version of the albums. I do this for both ideological/philosophical and practical reasons.
I used to use social media (the Fediverse, specifically) a fair amount, but I've since moved away from all forms of social media besides reddit (where I never post).
Most of my programming is done in Python. I'm also somewhat familiar with C# and JavaScript, and I'm (slowly) learning Rust.