Looks like after 4 years in the Fediverse, it's time to post ...

2026-10-10T11:18:09Z

Looks like after 4 years in the Fediverse, it's time to post an #introduction 🙂

Since childhood, I was amused with electronics and computers. Everything started when I disassembled the unnecessary reel-to-reel tape recorder Комета МГ-201, and during the process learned the soldering and how the common electronic components - like capacitors and resistors - work. Then, the grandparents bought the "Encyclopedia for a beginner radio amateur" authored by B.S. Ivanov - and the fun with diodes and transistors begins - I soldered the amplifiers, multivibrators and other analog things. Meanwhile, I read a lot of books about programming in the school's library - about BASIC, about programmable Soviet-era calculators - but in these times it was impossible to use this knowledge.

It was an 199x so the computers were accessible mostly on the workplace of parents. For the most of the people the PC (or ZX Spectrum) wasn't the essential item for the household. So, I wrote my first programs on the paper and a first encounter with computer happened in the primary classes of the school - I got an opportunity to use an Электроника БК-0010-01 while the computer class was demolished and the "Informatics" was removed from school program 😞. Then, at near 2005 year, the grandparents bought me my first computer: Pentium 4 with ≈4Gb RAM, ≈250Gb HDD and Windows XP inside (and after some time with MOPSLinux - a Slackware fork - inside).

Here the fun begins: I learned Pascal, enrolled in the big and famous university in the big city to became a computer engineer. I selected the embedded programming path, because it looked like A Real Programming for me: writing a C code with high requirements for memory and CPU usage, and real-time, sometimes soldering something, sometimes sitting with oscilloscope during the debugging sessions.

Meanwhile, I had fun with some of my hobbies. A cycling: first I had an MTB Cube Attention, since the MTB bicycles are the most popular in the district of my residence, despite the landscape here is flat as a table 😀. Then, I realized that fork with amortization and a straight bicycle handle are not so necessary and comfortable - and bought my current bike - the gravel Merida on which I performed the first 100km ride with "Baltic Star" randonneuring club.

A photography: everything started with a grandparents' Zenith which was superseded by Makinon CX, because of quality and robustness. Most of the time the camera was load with black and white film since I develop the photos by myself with the help of Crocus photo-enlarger. Later, I ended with film photography, since film prices are skyrocketed, and started to use Olympus E-M10 Mark II for digital photography.

For now, I'm working as a Java programmer (because of money - embedded programming here is a path to poverty), while C, Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp are left for fun. Most of the time I write here about NetBSD, Emacs, selfhosting notes and experiments, posting my photos and ranting about something 🙂.

Nostr notes by Dragon of BSDCafe

Looks like after 4 years in the Fediverse, it's time to post ...