About
Hi there! I'm Supa, welcome to my official website. 😊
Hobbies & Interests
My favourite pastime is tinkering with computers. When I'm not near a PC, you can often find me with my face in a book. From graphic novels, to books on technology, computing, gardening, nature, science and science fiction.
My first experience with computing, was way back in the early 1980s, when I was gifted a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k for Christmas. While other kids were having fun playing outside, tormenting the neighbourhood — you'd find me sat indoors on a Saturday morning, next to a plate of half-eaten toast and a tower of cassette tapes, typing blocks of code from Input magazine into my ZX Spectrum. The shear sense of achievement and joy that came from completing little programming tasks like this was something that would stay with me to this day.
In the early 2000s, I designed my own website and set up a IRC channel for Amiga users called "AmigaONE IRC". Inspired greatly by my time spent as a one of the first channel ops over at amigaworld.net on the Undernet IRC Network , (big shout-out to DaveyD from your old friend Fly^)
I was an Amiga user up until 2003, when my Amiga had a hardware fault and became unusable, so, reluctantly, I had to move to an IBM PC clone running Windows.
Discovering Linux
Like most people interested in computing, I've used many versions of Microsoft Windows over the years. However, my favourite operating system has always been GNU/Linux . The first Linux distribution I used, was Ubuntu 4.10: Warty Warthog in late 2004.
Linux, for me, encompasses everything that made me fall in love with computing all those years ago, that being, the ability to tinker with almost everything about the operating system and customise it to my liking. Linux doesn't hold your hand nor prevent you from making mistakes and learning new things, and there is always something new to learn with Linux.
I've used many Linux distributions over the years, distro-hopping from Ubuntu to Linux Mint, Ubuntu MATE, MX Linux, Fedora, Debian, Manjaro, and EndeavourOS to name a few. My distro-hopping days ended however, when I finally plucked up the courage to install Arch Linux. Arch Linux has been my daily OS for a number of years now, and I love it.
If you're interested in my software configuration, I've made my dotfiles available on GitLab.
Second Life
I joined Second Life® back in June 2005. Within the first month, I had created one of the first aquatic pet shops in Second Life®, named "Tropical Fish". After expanding my product line, I changed the name of my outlet to "The Virtual Aquarium" at the end of 2005.
I have provided digital content, custom-builds, ideas, help and service to hundreds of residents over the years. With almost a quarter of a million visits, my little aquarium is still attracting aquatic lovers today.
My Second Life® group is named Space Bums. The name originated from a shared love for science fiction with my friends. Most of the group members have sadly moved on from Second Life. However, I'm still here tinkering away and thinking of new ideas for things to create. Most of my time is spent building when I'm online, but in my free time, I love to sail, and you can often find me exploring Second Life on my boat.
My Workflow
All pages for this website are written in Markdown from within Emacs on Linux. I use the Hugo static site framework to convert the Markdown syntax to HTML from within GitLab CI/CD. All pages are pushed to GitLab via the Magit Emacs git client. The images for this website and my Second Life creations are created using Gimp, Krita and Inkscape.
Here is a list of the other software I use:
| Workflow | Software |
|---|---|
| Operating System | Arch Linux |
| X11 | awesome |
| Wayland | Hyprland |
| 3D Design | Blender |
| 2D Design | Krita, GIMP, gThumb, Inkscape, XnView, Stable Diffusion |
| Office | LibreOffice, Thunderbird, Joplin, ghostwriter, Mailspring, calcurse |
| Internet | Brave, newsboat, Dropbox |
| Multimedia | Ardour, Handbrake, OBS Studio, Kdenlive, mpv, mpd, ncmpcpp, ffmpeg |
| Development | Meld, Git, Zsh, kitty, Neovim, Sublime Text, VSCodium, Emacs, PyCharm, Hugo |
| Social | Mumble, Telegram, Signal |
| Gaming | Steam, Heroic Games Launcher, Lutris, GameHub, RPCS3, itch.io |
| Virtual Machine | KVM, virt-manager, QEMU |