public sealed record NatPortillo : Human, IArchivist, ITechnomancer, IWriter
{
    public string   Pronouns  => "they / them · elle";
    public string   Origin    => "🇮🇨 Canary Islands, Spain";
    public string   HomeBase  => "Las Palmas de Gran Canaria";
    public string[] Roots     => ["Celtic", "Galician"];
    public string   Status    => "Retired engineer · full-time preservationist";
    public string   Identity  => "Non-binary 🏳️‍⚧️ trans fem · queer 🏳️‍🌈";
    public string   System    => "Plural — Sol 🌞 & Luna 🌙";
    public string[] Brain     => ["Autistic", "ADHD", "BPD", "DID", "Intellectually gifted"];
    public string[] Code      => ["C#", "C", "C++", ".NET", "Blazor", "Avalonia", "Uno"];
    public string[] Speaks    => ["Español", "English"];
    public string[] Offline   => ["📸 IR & UV photography", "✍️ writing", "🔮 tarot & runes",
                                  "🕯️ practicing witch", "🔧 soldering", "🎧 dark music"];
    public string   Diet      => "Vegan 🌱";
    public string   Mission   => "Computing history deserves the same care as natural history.";
}

I was born in the Canary Islands 🇮🇨, and I've been tinkering with machines for as long as I can remember. I was recognised as an intellectually gifted child and was put into programming courses before most kids had even touched a keyboard. From then on I kept everything: every component, every manual, every floppy, every cable. My mother was not exactly thrilled about how much space my "hobby" took up. 📦💾📦💾

That hoarding never stopped. It turned into a lifelong mission: making sure computing history doesn't rot away on dying media. I've been at it since the turn of the century, and it eventually became my biggest and most meaningful project: Aaru.

Along the way I crossed the sea to spend a couple of years in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧, then came back to Spain and to the islands where it all started. I spent time with the communities of Tenerife, and these days I'm based in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria 🌋🌊.

I spent a few years at Microsoft as an engineer in DevDiv, working on Visual Studio for Mac. That chapter is closed now. I'm retired, and I spend my time on what I love most: preservation, writing, photography, activism, and breaking open old hardware on stream.

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timeline
    title ▓▒░ NAT.EXE — a life in sectors ░▒▓
    section Childhood
        🇮🇨 Canary Islands : Born in the islands
                          : Gifted kid, coding classes, hoarding every floppy
    section The 2000s
        BeOS · QNX · MorphOS era : Ported SZIP and the HA archiver (BeHA) to BeOS and friends
                                 : Linux ports for the PlayStation 2
        2002 : Spanish translation of Joliet Volume Access for Mac OS 9
    section The DiscImageChef years
        2011 : First commit (to SVN!) of what would become Aaru
        2014 : DiscImageChef 1.0 is released
        2015 : plist-cil · Claunia.IO · CICM Metadata
        2017 : OS & App repository managers · first 86Box commits
        2018 : Marechai is born
    section The Aaru years
        2020 : DiscImageChef is reborn as Aaru 5.0 · RomRepoMgr
        2022 : Joined Microsoft, Visual Studio for Mac · trans activism in Tenerife & Gran Canaria
        2023 : Founded Inclufem · CHM releases the Apple Lisa source, recovered with DiscImageChef
        2024 : Hit Save! emeritus · press interviews on trans healthcare
        2025 : AaruFormat V2 · libaaruformat 1.0 alpha · full Aaru GUI
        2026 : OBMAFS3 open-sourced · Aaru 6.0 beta · retired, still tinkering
             : Media Muxing Wizard, the muxer that understands the video it carries

Named after the Egyptian paradise where the righteous dwell eternally, which is exactly where old data deserves to go.

Aaru (formerly DiscImageChef) is a fully featured preservation suite. It dumps, identifies, verifies, converts and extracts almost any storage media you can find in a museum, an attic or a dumpster: floppies, hard disks, CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, HD DVDs, magneto-opticals, flash, memory cards and tapes. It talks ATA, ATAPI, SCSI, USB, FireWire and SDHCI, and it needs no special hardware.

• 🧬 AaruFormat: its own archival image format that keeps data, metadata and audit trail together, with a portable C implementation in libaaruformat.
• 🎮 Aaru 6.0 (beta, July 2026): OmniDrive support, GameCube / Wii / Xbox / PlayStation dumping, Blu-ray & HD DVD decryption, C2 secure audio reading, and flux images (A2R, HxC, SCP).
• 🍎 The Computer History Museum used DiscImageChef to recover the original Apple Lisa OS source code, which it released to the public in 2023.
• 🕹️ Aaru helped the Video Game History Foundation back up 7,000+ CDs, DVDs and data tapes from the Game Informer archives.
• 🏛️ It's used by many institutions dedicated to video game and computer history preservation.
• 🖥️ It has a CLI, a full GUI and a TUI, and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.

📚 aaru.app · 📰 blog.aaru.app · 🏢 github.com/aaru-dps

A catalog, a platform, and a tiny museum for the machines, software, magazines, people and stories that shaped computing history.

Marechai is the master repository of computing history artifacts: a searchable catalogue of computers, consoles, peripherals, software, magazines, companies and people. It has media pipelines, a public API, curation tools, and data ingestion from IGDB, MobyGames, WinWorld and OldDos. It's built on .NET 10: Blazor on the web, an Uno Platform client for Android, iOS, WASM and desktop, and EF Core on MariaDB. It has been growing since 2018, one commit (1,600+ of them) and one machine at a time.

Most muxers copy bytes from one box to another and hope for the best. Media Muxing Wizard reads your streams.

Subler only writes MP4 and only runs on macOS. MKVToolNix only writes Matroska. Media Muxing Wizard reads and writes both, on every desktop OS, and it never re-encodes your media.

_{A Matroska episode that lost its Dolby Vision configuration. One click on Repair rebuilds it from the bitstream.}

mmw probe movie.ts                               # tracks and the actions each one offers
mmw remux movie.mkv movie.m4v --action 3=aac+ac3 # remux with per-track conversions
mmw search episode.m4v --apply                   # online metadata in one line
mmw queue add *.mkv && mmw queue start           # batch a whole season

If you're a neurodivergent dev reading this:

• 🧩 You are not a puzzle with a missing piece, and you don't need "fixing". Accommodations, not cures.
• 🔋 Rest is not a bug. Burnout is not a personality trait. Ship slower if that keeps you alive.
• 🫂 Asking for help is a feature. If you're struggling right now, you can find free, confidential support near you at findahelpline.com.
• 💜 You are allowed to take up space exactly as you are.

• ✊ Founder of Inclufem (2023), an association that fights for the rights of non-binary people, with a focus on healthcare equity and access.
• 🏳️‍🌈 I've worked with LGBTIQ+ associations in Tenerife (La Laguna Orgullosa) and with Transwomen Canarias in Gran Canaria.
• 📰 I've spoken to the press (La Provincia) and on TV (RTVE Canarias) about the delays trans people face in Canary healthcare.
• 🔓 Fervent defender of open source and free access to knowledge.
• 🛡️ Protect trans kids. Always.

Engineering and spirituality coexist seamlessly. Ask me how a pendulum once helped me find a missing PlayStation part. 🔮🎮

💜 Keep the past alive

If Aaru ever saved your data, or you just believe old software deserves a future,
support me on Patreon, star Aaru, or send me a weird disc. 💾

 ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
 │  C:\> ECHO Data is history. History is people.               │
 │  C:\> ECHO Preserve both.  _                                 │
 └──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘