📜 Writer - 📚 Researcher - 🔧 Developer

👋 Hi I’m @b9Joker108

👀 I’m interested in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Dharmic Traditions, Bash, Zsh, Semiotics, Linguistics, Runes, oracular divination and Heathenism, amongst other things. I am fascinated by hacker culture. 🌱 I have learnt that it is best to learn languages in relation to one another, rather than individually, as it helps to convey the metaphorical extension of complex new concepts.

I’m currently learning Bash and Zsh scripting in relation to each other on my Android devices. To productively quicken this, I am building an Intranet with Notion, which is my new favorite Android app, though I have come to prefer using the web-app which is a different experience on each browser. In truth, Notion as a learning tool, is a revelation and I endorse it.

I am circa 50 years old, and am of the first generation of children who taught themselves computers and computing. That is both a boon and a bane. My first computer was a Commodore 64 and my first programming experience was as a very young child with Commodore BASIC, which didn't exactly whet my appetite for Computer Science. I later learnt GUI windows and icon technology from their point of origin and source, Amiga.

The Amiga computer and operating system were rather curious, as you had to use a physical floppy disk, a boot-disk, on start-up. With our Amiga 2000, my brother and I basically played pirated games all the time: we played them through the aid of a dongle, a mystical little electronic device that had to be plugged into the back of the Amiga in order to actually play the pirated games: a point which did pique my interest. I don't know how the dongle worked or what it did or how it did it, but it still makes me wonder. Our favourite game was Marble Madness!

The graphics and visual representation and rendering, particularly the reflections and depth perspective and brilliance of the colour on the Amiga 2000, was just incredible for the time and inspired me greatly. It also inspired my little brother, he became an IT and digital printing professional. Then, the Internet was not yet publically available.

The digital art application of the Amiga 2000 was powerful and basically, the first non-gaming application I ever used. For the time, it was a purely magestic piece of coding and formative, clearly influencing, the much later and subsequently dominant, Photoshop. The Amiga digital art app came with a number of pre-installed examples of what you could do with the application. The standout, was the Egyptian death-mask of King Tut, which was so vivid and real you felt you could really touch it and were in the presence of the actual artefact.

As a young teen, I spent too much money and time at a digital arcade playing Elevator Action, at which I was a gun. To enter the arcade, you went through a doorway that was identical to Doctor Who's Tardus. 💞️

My first Internet browser was Netscape and my first search engine was Yahoo! Australia, which I was introduced to, the first time I attempted university, at circa 23 years old. Around then, I had my first Internet hook-up LOL from a bulletin-board. I was a trail-blazer! I don't know if the Internet still has bulletin-boards, but they were once pervasive and endemic, and used for many different purposes. At university, I registered my first online email account with Yahoo! Australia, which I still use. I am probably one of the very few left with an active Yahoo! Australia email address.

The next computer I had was a second-hand Apple Macintosh, around the time I attempted another university degree. I don't remember which model the Macintosh was in particular and I didn't particularly like it, as it was just a grunt to write academic papers in, but I do know it was a few models into the series, and the model was ubiquitous and popular. The monitor was in-built into the terminal and it was rectangular, yet box-like and creamy-yellow in colour, and it used small rigid re-writable disks, unlike the larger floppy disk of the Amiga. The Macintosh model was quite a number of years after the Amiga 2000, but it didn't hold a torch to it, and its display was significantly inferior. Amiga was truly brilliant if you don't know. I still feel privileged to have had one.

My coding Kung-fu, is not particularly adept, but it is getting stronger, more nimble and agile each and every day, like my practical and experiential knowledge. Before Bash and Zsh, many years ago I flirted with Pascal on my first GNU/Linux device, which was a very small Acer Netbook or maybe a clone, I don't remember. I then favoured the Netbook models and their clones, due to their extreme ease of portability. Smartphones were not then evident, but my pragmatic usage of the extremely portable Netbook, heralded and foregrounded their arrival. I commenced learning Pascal, as by happenstance, I had read in passing, that Pascal instituted coding rigor, strong coding form, legibility and discipline, that held one in good stead for later transitioning to more current languages.

I went through quite a number of Acer Netbooks and clones. They were cheap and not very durable. It was on one of these generations of cheap and nasty Netbooks, that I discovered IRC. I learnt alot about Bash as a command-line interpreter at this time through the community assistance and mentoring available through IRC. You see, at the time, I was really pushing the envelope of digital multi-lingual capability, and intuited even then of the future emergence of the translation application. The Netbooks were always on my person: on my back and in my backpack.

My first GNU-Linux distribution was Ubuntu and I have tried circa nine others. I have used a number of iterations of Microsoft operating systems as well of those of Apple and am a power-user. I prefer GNU/Linux, the freedom, the power: the power of community and the absence of greed.

In my way, through the power of GNU/Linux, I have taught myself the rudimentary elements of more than a few human languages and hack-translated a number of religious dharmic texts due to my own devotion, for my own curiosity and edification. Being able to import and install, then input and play around with, the set of all the human languages of the world, or at least to try, was a once-upon-a-time goal of mine, so I could explore manifold religio-cultural traditions in their own tongue. To do so, that is to install and input, manifold human languages, many of them obscure, was only the province and domain of a GNU/Linux distribution. None of the other competing operating systems then came close to fording such capacity.

I wondered at the wonder and magic of Wine, and installed a Himalayan application with it that I serendipitously happened upon, that transliterated back and forth between Sanskrit Devanagari, Sanskrit Itrans and Sanskrit IAST. It worked flawlessly in Wine.

Many years after wrangling with Pascal, after a prolonged period of homelessness, I attempted university for the third time and commenced yet another academic discipline. I did a year of Computer Science, wherein I was introduced to Java 6. I didn't do very well with Java. It was too steep a learning curve, as I had no real networks nor support and was still recovering from homelessness. Most of my younger peers just plagiarised each other's code and had no moral qualms in so doing.

Whilst studying Computer Science, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed and came to love, Discrete Mathematics, as I had done no higher mathematics at secondary school and was more inclined to the written word. I had to study and work really hard for the distinction I got in Discrete Mathematics, to the detriment of my other subjects. Touchscreen laptops, had just then become emergent.

My research methodology is to utilise quite a number of Android Internet browsers, but I have come to recently favour and heaviy lean and depend upon Bing, with its in-built free ChatGPT 4.0 option. I augment this, on occasion, with the free restricted-use PerplexityAI Android app, which is an example of excellence in class. I may soon subsctibe to this app. I was wondering how soon ChatGPT would intersect with computing shell technology, and I am delighted and not at all surprised to affirm that as of the date of this README, I have become aware of ShellGPT, which I here relate with pure delight. I am soon to progress its installation, in both my smartphone and tablet. Quality AI, is a powerful and efficient learning tool, and is also on occasion an erroneous and problematic teacher. It can attest that AI, can and may falsify and faricate information, as it is fudamentally, a creative algorithm. So AI must be engaged with caution, as well as precision.

I am rather excited, as this file will be my first GitHub commit. My coding will not presently be of much assistance or use to anyone, but my procedure writing skill and manual codification and input and editing skills and product testing may. Hit me up, I have time and I like to support open source projects that develop and empower the community.

With sincerity

b9Joker108 Friday December 22, 2023

📫 soliton108[at]yahoo[dot]com[dot]au

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