Back in March, I wrote a thing about myself, about my interests. While it does cover a lot of my past that is immutable and fundamental, things be changing. Turns out not so easy to just keep it as a single piece that I'd keep updating. Again.

My skills & areas of interest roughly

Something something software 'logies utilization

Windows

I use Windows 10 on my machines these days. I do remember Windows 8 as I think I had it on something, and I remember Windows 7 from school and I think from some netbook where I had it Starter edition back around middle school. From middle school I remember Vista. I was a user of Windows XP for some time in primary school. I did use Windows 2000 and I spent quite some time using Windows 98, mostly unnetworked.

Windows 10

I main that OS. I did already learn about it some. Although when I joined my company in May and encountered people using it professionally for platform-independent software development, I felt bad when others could do more in it than I could despite still being able to do less than I could in Linux or Unix environments, if not even in Mac OS X, and that even relatively to supposedly broader capabilities.

Yes I still can be said to main Windows 10 on my main machine. And on my work machine too.

Although my work machine has recently gotten imposed an annoying restriction: removal from the administrative group and introduction of a tool that upon each reboot has me run it and use it again to reädd myself to it. With how I prefer my Caps Lock mapped as a second left Ctrl, and how I accomplish that with Microsoft PowerToys, that is a considerable annoyance.

Not that it has been running flawlessly on either machine. Whenever I reach a high load in the system, PowerToys sometimes suffer from a lag in a way that causes one my Ctrl-intended keypresses to happen a Caps Lock, which to then toggle back off makes me have to stop PowerToys, press the key, and then rerun PowerToys.

Overall, I'm not really enjoying maining it. When I zoomed in in the stock Photos app on a 97x97 8-bit PNG recently, while having Gimp running in the background, I got a BSOD from system service "DirectX graphics kernel subsystem" (Dxgkrnl.sys).

I run a Linux distro on one neat Atom N455 netbook I have, and if not for solely the fingerprint sensor I would NixOS this laptop happily, the dual-boot albeït unused is already there on it. I am already sometimes thinking about grabbing my X220 sometimes, if only I had an IPS LCD in it. The how it is just the matter of fpr on the main laptop probably suggests that I am going to go for it soon. The logging-in experience isn't all that great anyway since at the camp I realized battery doesn't hold in sleep anymore and turned to hibernating the laptop on lid close.

Powershell has become something I enjoy using although I had times when I was deeming it unfit and I still am not entirely out of that. The object-oriented piping is amazing to me, although how unfit it is for handling simple binary data through pipes is astonishing to me. I love, however, how neat it is not only to write cmdlets in .NET but how great the access to all .NET is in it, allowing me to rewrite lots of stuff into directly Powershell, only at first writing them in a typed compiled language for easier bug-spotting but then being able to rewrite into a .ps1 almost verbatim.

I have recently turned to using MobaXterm on my personal laptop, which has an excellent Bash environment built-in. WSL does still mostly work on my work laptop and I use the msys2 built into Git as "Git Bash" a lot there again. I will be trying to be let to move to Linux on my work laptop as soon as possible.

I never really knew Powershell well and with how Powershell is ever unpromising with slow startup times in Linux environments, I'm no longer so eager to use it outside of Windows.

Anyway, on Windows my attempts to add a Powershell installed from Microsoft Store to Windows Terminal ever end at having the Store path added, which results in the path changing whenever an auto-update occurs, and thus my Windows Terminal every so often just stops working and deters me from using Powershell until I fix it.

.NET with WinForms are enjoyable to me, I may be biased but this is the first GUI visual designer that felt approachable to me. When I want to write a graphical application, that's my first choice. I may end up doing Mono even.

Windows 98/NT/2000

The favorable encounter with Visual Basic .NET and the graphical designer in Visual Studio have made me very interested in diving into Visual Basic 6.0. I haven't quite did so yet, and installing it on a modern Windows is a pain, but I will be getting down to it.

I am recently thinking much more about going cross-platform and I thus have been hesitant to proceed with .NET again after I went stagnant with stuff for a while. I did get interested in the event-oriented Basic-family tech stacks, however, specifically in the B4X platform. As I might be ditching Windows entirely again sometime soon, I am avoidant of getting started with technologies that could then try to impose Windows-centered workflows on me. And Java platform has somehow turned a bit more appealing again; I'm thinking of writing things in B4J and B4A for shared codebase between desktop and Android applications.

Retrocomputing

I am about to dive into practical use of Windows 98 and 2000 machines. I already do use Windows 2000 on a small laptop I keep in Warsaw because as a 32bit Windows it supports my IrDA USB adapter very well, allowing me to synchronize my Palm OS 4.1 palmtop without the need to bring a cradle in the luggage. The palmtop I use for daily organisation purposes, such as todos management, datebook, and work time tracking. The laptop also has Haiku OS installed which I was at a time very passionate about and focusing on, but now it awaits being added to bootmgr.ini.

The laotop mentioned here ended up estranged from me for a while, I will maybe recover it in a week or two after it having been quite a while. But anyway, I ended up no so eager to use my Palms anyway. With todos I turned first to my Nokia E72 for quite a while and recently, again, I turn to paper notebooks, although hopefully I will proceed to reïncorporate the use of the E72 into handling some types of reminders that paper notebooks, even with enough routine, cannot do well enough.

I ended up with being about to have a PalmCard Basic from Dmitry Grinberg's rePalm project, but that's not having the driver written for a Palm IIIx. Although a removable-batteries-powered potentially PalmOS5 running device is quite alluring.

For quite some time I've been intending to switch to a Tungsten T (T1) after having gotten the battery replaced in it, but lack of a simple cable to charge it without carrying a whole cradle around has made it troublesome and deterred me from doing so — and in turn, from using a Palm device altogether. Even though it does have the SD card slot that I can have a backup on, and its flash memory doesn't get erased either.

I also have a Dell Axim X3 running Windows Mobile 2003 that only needs that I make it a new backup battery once I recover it from the same place as the HP laptop. Once I do that, maybe it could also still be a neat thing to main. Oh wait that one is actually mentioned just a bit below.

But I also own three Dell Latitude CPxH laptops, one of sentimental value with keyboard malfunctioning, one display-less with Track Stick malfunctioning, and one in full working condition. They feature a Pentium III for CPU. I intend to use the display-less one as a print server for my OKI 320 Elite that I purchased out of longing for my two wider ones, OKI 3321 and OKI 321 Elite, in both of which I replaced line feed roller motor assembly back in my high school days due to each missing a tooth on the gear, as well as which will forever await replacement of the mainboard due to having gotten fried by one lenghty Centronics cable. BTW my Optima SP 20 electronic typewriter, purchased in 2020 out of longing for those two, also is in need of a line feed roller gear replacement due to a missing tooth.

I have recently felt rather burnt out about retrocomputing. Although maybe the need for that printer will make me repair it at last at some point, and put up the Latitudes? And the typewriter just stands unused, but that hasn't really changed.

I happen to have gotten a Windows Mobile 2003 palmtop recently, after a replacement battery arrives I will see about starting to use it. Updating Odyssey Client should allow me to use WPA2 on it. Can't wait to try out MS ActiveSync.

Not so retrocomputing but I also happen to use a Blackberry Q20 Classic employing Blackberry 10 OS as a phone and email client. Blackberry Hub is real good for zeroing the inbox. It happens to be in ROM version allowing installation of freely sourced apks without the need to repackage them for Blackberry, which is how I am able to install any API ≤16 minSdkVersion apps on it. That turned me to seek ways to not touch any of the more common annoying ways of Android SDK while developing an app, which is how I discovered B4A, or Basic4android, which I am presently diving into intermittently.

The Blackberry Q20 nowadays lies unused in my drawer or bags as I keep wanting to take the data off it and give it away to someone. I wrote a large post about being done with it

Linux/Unix

I happen to have been privileged to grow up around Linux-powered computers. Bash was just a basic way to use a computer for me, hence I possessed some absolutely most basic shell scripting skills from early age. So was having installation media of Ubuntu very much at hand. And so was employing XDMCP to log in with X Windows from one machine to another remotely. Buying myself a Raspberry Pi and setting up RRDtool on it was naturally consequent to that. Later sometime in high school I ended up diving into NixOS and OpenBSD, which made me later linger around tcsh and cwm, besides other, tiling, window managers.

Having a webpage was also a thing I was introduced to early, hence the very much established practice of having one that's in me. I however avoid doing too much HTML by hand these days, as I turned to seek rapidity above anything else, choosing to use Seamonkey Composer for personal webmastering these days. In tune with the retro vibe, I practice HTML4 and CSS 2.1.

But I had always been wanting to do some actual programming beyond what I thought was to be accomplished with Bash scripting. Dad has been handing me K&R ANSI C 2^nd Ed. since I was 10 y. o., but I had never passed beyond the first chapters, doing tasks one by one. In the last year of middle school I started aiming to get started with something soon and I thus took to get a good grasp of Git version control for the source code I would be writing and putting online. Then on one night as I was finishing middle school I sat down to Python and ended up writing mixed Bash & Python contraptions for some purposes.

The Python fascination and participation in [...] programming showcase highschoolers' projects started first by my colleagues then by myself brought me a recommendation for a twice summer job in a [...] startup, where I ended up being most useful in writing shell script contraptions for automatizing LTSP netboot fat-client terminal deployments and UCarp Ethernet band bonding configuration and MongoDB replication setup automation, as well as dockerizing services, and writing Dockerfiles in general along with docker-compose (with a dash in the name at the time). I also had a lick of Ruby there in Vagrant configurations that were employed in heavy use of VirtualBox for testing netboot stuff, besides having a 2U server on my desk in the startup's office. They also made me read a thick book about Scrum (an Agile mathodologies framework). And there was some Redis scripting too.

*sigh* I am not so sure if any of these are worth mentioning anymore. This is just personal details that might be even too much for the posts here. They are thrown at the reader unprocessed, instead I should just point out the implications, the clues of a picture of my life.

Fancy new PLs and Functional Programming

But at the time of having been hired for my first summer job my fascinations were already somewhere else, with the programming language Go vel Golang. It ended up being the language I had my only ever successfully led team in a hobby project to work together on code. Subsequent fascination with Clojure did make me move that project onto it, however not so with most of my team. Clojure did however get me into a one more summer job for a fellow JUG member. And was a gateway into Spacemacs (in evil mode) and consequently Emacs.

In hopes of engaging one of the members of my project and also desperately seeking further advanced language constructs I turned to Haskell, which just made me be even more alone in the project, but I did enjoy the language truly, despite not getting a nearly far enough grasp of its ways. I then tried to take a last-minute turn of the project into first a Dart implementation and subsequently my first lick of Java and there were sparks but it ultimately never got back to life; but it was some practical experience after already months of participating in [...] Java Users Group. Besides having had decided to write my matura high school exam in Java and MySQL. And then I emigrated to a nearby bigger city at an opportunity, hoping to find more Haskellers in the larger university. I ended up indulging in reading about language design of ALGOL 68 while there.

I would guess that is way too much mention of Haskell and stuff. I should make these stuff more terse. Nobody will read through all of that purely for the original purpose of the text. I should just reinvent ways of how to present it in a tabular way. On in a variation of keyword-oriented click-to-ask way.

Twitter circles education

Twitter, once the space where I was learning all the stuff about Scala and Rust and OCaml and more. I was no longer practising anything, but I was reading a lot of short excerpts about everything. Where I discovered initiatives and people and technologies, countless to the point of not being able to list them. Since this section has so little text, maybe shall I mention that I also turned to be a fun of LaTeX at the time, even back in high school already? Although well, I have long been looking up to hopes of learning troff/nroff.

Overall this text mentions a bit too much on how exactly things went. And much of that stuff is really what a lot from my circles stumble upon at some point in life and the exact order and manner I happened to doesn't matter that much. Ends up being just personal details that make me more vulnerable with being out there.

And those circles I got in, in the long run, placed me in one of the most important circles of friends I'm in these days, and which contributes the most to my development, especially inspiring the retrocomputing re-fascination and new fascinations in it. But what had to follow first was roughly three years of a crisis forsaking education and professional activity. And just toying with stuff like dependently-typed programming languages or like Common Lisp, or getting inspired by one once-friend to get started with APL.

Not sure if that's that relevant anymore. The situations are a mess. And being like that isn't really that unique, I'm just stating things obvious to most. Nothing bad about ununiqueness, just that it's not worth it to pour that much text over it. Especially with the absurdly random mentions of technologies that I am no longer toying with anyway. Especially with how I forgot most of the stuff related to them, especially after ditching them while still a newbie in them, dropping after a lick.

Now below I have decided to just drop entire five paragraphs on things that yes I did have interest in and maybe some are somewhat cool albeït being almost history, but just may make me more searchable here. If you want to read, I can send you them in private.

And graphical calculators, especially the HP RPN ones, especially employing a Computer Algebra System, so HP 49g+ that I own and is virtually identical to HP 50g. I also hope to make a serial cable for my TI-83+ hopefully not long from now, despite no longer using it.

I used to aspire to become an Esperantist. I used to be sometimes passionate about translating lyrically song lyrics from Polish to French. I am intermittently an avid Duolingo user, having long attempted studying Chinese, Romanian, Ukrainian.. I know Cyryllic script since childhood and can usually handle reading Russian or Ukrainian.

Yeah I'm yet another person who did lots of Duolingo to little effect. I am no longer pursuing any of the languages listed here, why mention them?

I am passionate about etymologies and am thus on a basic level knowledgeable in Latin and Greek roots of words, as well as somewhat Germanic and French too, but as primarily focusing on Polish, also Slavic including Eastern influences.

Bringing up the mention of that is always so awkward. I think there is lots of people like me who just regard it as quite common knowledge, and just equally lots of people who are finding the facts rarely known and inconspicious.

Really, this page has to go to trash. I need to make something else out of it that I want tied to my name and make something else of things that are more currently my interests.

Actually, the whole idea of maintaining a list of interests that are actually current has been quite tough to grasp for me in recent years. I've had these whole quarters of years, and entire years, of stagnation, that have ever made me want to list as current the interests that I was only just having a hope to return to after months. I ended up making lists that were like "current, but last time i touched that was 7 months ago".

A while ago had some realizations about what I should keep as current in the context of interpersonal relations that I had been holding on to in a similar manner, and hopefully I will manage to apply lessons learned from there into the management of my interests.

And of course being neuroatypical needs to be carefully accounted for in how I perceive my interests. It is stereotypical of it that my interests are momentary. I maybe need to state upfront the notion on anything I write, that the interests in things usually get abandoned quick enough that the writings are usually already a retrospective on an area of interest already begone, and what may only be left is a sentiment.