Hi! For the record, my real name is Terry Hancock, and I am primarily a writer, although I am also interested in art and programming (nowadays I use Python for programming tasks).
I've been using Debian GNU/Linux as my primary operating system since about late 1999 or early 2000. I "upgraded" from Windows 3.1, after I had a look at Windows 95 and didn't like where that was going. Besides, I had used Unix systems as early as 1985, so there was a lot of familiarity to GNU/Linux for me. Today, my whole household runs Debian systems on our home LAN.
I have a science and particularly astronomy background, which underlies a lot of the projects I work on today, although I haven't worked as a professional researcher for years (I was a research assistant, not a PI -- there's not a lot of future in it if you don't have the PhD, and I don't).
In 2000, I started a project called
The Light Princess, which was intended to be a Linux-based graphical adventure game based on the story of the same name by George MacDonald. This project was my first real introduction to graphics programs for GNU/Linux as well as to the Python programming language (although I have been doing both graphics and programming on computers since the 1980s).
I've written elsewhere about some of my experiences on that project: see
(1) &
(2), for example. From a project perspective it was not very successful, although I learned
a lot. Periodically, I get a strong desire to start the project up again, but there's a lot of groundwork that has to be laid, and I have a hard time finding the time for all of it.
The avatar is original art -- this is a character design for a "science manga" that I was developing at one point. That project is kind of on hold. I was attempting to find a manga illustrator to collaborate with me on it, but based on the reactions I've gotten so far, I think I was going about it wrong, so I've decided to prioritize other projects and come back to it.
Although I started working primarily with Sketch (now called "Skencil"), most of my work in the last few years has been with Inkscape. I also make extensive use of Gimp, and I'm slowly but surely learning how to do 3D modelling in Blender.
I also do some graphics and game programming in Python. I am the current maintainer of the
Python Universe Builder (PUB), which I've been working on an extensive refactoring for. I'm also (again very slowly) working on a graphical adventure game engine based on PUB, to be called "Universe". This is hosted on the Light Princess project site.
More recently, I started a project for embedding licensing and attribution metadata onto multimedia content, called
Palimpsest. So far it only handles GIFs, and I'm working on PNG support. I hope to cover JPGs and OGG Vorbis, and then to move on to the high-level abstraction layer.
Which leads to my self-deprecating username "Digitante", contracting "Digital Dilettante".
Yeah. I do a lot of art-related stuff on the computer, but a lot of my projects are unfinished.