About me
I grew up in a little village in the Alps. Not the one where you went skiing with your parents once. The one you passed on the Autobahn on the way there. I was born just in time to remember a world of landlines and snail mail. The first computer I played with ran win98 and sat in a wooden cabinet. It had a plastic shutter that my dad would close so that the keyboard wouldn't get dusty. That's how offline things were when I was a little kid.
Computers have always had a somewhat magical appeal for me. There wasn't a whole lot going on where I lived for a kid that wasn't into sports. So between hiking with my mom and sister and riding my bike around the village I would spend a lot of time with computers of all kinds. First it was videogame consoles. My dad had a Super Nintendo and a Gameboy, as well as the aforementioned PC with win98. There's a cute photo of me at around 4 years old, sitting on the living room floor, laser-focussed on the Gameboy.
The Internet came into the picture when I was about 11 or 12. There used to be a kind of proto social media site in my region back then, that all the kids were on. Looking back now, it was actually pretty cool. Everybody had their own profile page, and you could unlock html on it to customize it with gifs or have blink-182 auto-play when you opened it. I was too young at the time to really understand what html even was, but I remember copy-pasting snippets that I liked from other people's profiles onto mine.
The first time I properly dug into the intestines of a program was probably Minecraft. Before Mods and Texture packs were officially supported, you had to actually unpack the Minecraft.jar file to modify it. I think that's when it clicked for me. That's when I realized that you can make a computer do essentially whatever you want, if you can find out how.
At 14 or so, I got my first Android phone. Not too long after, it ran either CyanogenMod or Paranoid Android on it, I don't remember which. It was such a thrill to have my own custom boot animation running on it and to find out all the little things you could make it do. About that time I started playing around with Linux as well, which means that I've been exclusively using Linux for more than 10 years now. Up until today, I've never had any formal education with computers, so my knowledge is very patchy, to say the least. I never really learned to code, the closest I got to it being the year or so when I got it into my head that I needed to use Emacs for everything. But then again I guess that's the good thing about a hobby. I just learn to do things when I want, for how long I want and to the extent that I want. So if this page looks amateurish to you, well, that's because it is. But either way, it's fun for me to work on so who gives a shit.
Stuff I'm thinking about and/or working on
- Deserting Academia and building a new thing to take its place (Step 1: complete)
- Learning to grow food
- Research how to build community
- Learn how to write fiction
- Learning Spanish
- Learning to play the Harmonica
