Stuff I Use

Hardware

• A Lenovo Thinkpad T430 (which is over 10 12 years old now but was new when I got it)

  • I also have a Librem 14 from Purism, though I haven’t used it much.
• A discbound notebook (Arc notebook, Junior or A5 size), currently I’m using more traditional ring binders and clipboards

  Discbound notebooks are great because they’re kind of like a binder and clipboard in one: you can change positions of things easily and you can fold it over to write on it while standing. However, there’s a few drawbacks of discbound notebooks compared to traditional binders:

  • Discbound notebooks can be expensive (at least for the covers), so if you want dedicated binders for projects, discbound notebooks are less economical.
  • It’s hard to label the spines of discbound notebooks in order to see what they are at a glance on a bookshelf
  • Discbound punched paper doesn’t feed easily into scanners

  For personal notes and calendars, though, I think discbound notebooks work pretty well. You can make your own templates and such.

• A couple Brother laser printers - an MFC-L2710DW and an HL-L8260CDW

  Brother has pretty excellent GNU/Linux support. I’ve experienced some user-hostile features in competitors like HP or Epson, mostly in undismissable nagging prompts in their software. However, I think recent versions of Brother drivers might no longer be open source. This isn’t much of an issue since you can still use older drivers, but there’s some things I couldn’t change, like I think scanner properties.

• Pixel 6a running GrapheneOS

  Radon Rosborough at an Emacs SF meetup read this page and then showed me their setup with a Pixel 6a and GrapheneOS. I was at the time looking to replace my super old Pixel 2 XL (*cough* that was no longer receiving security updates *cough*), so I unashamedly copied that setup. I considered the Pixel 7, but decided I really didn’t need the features compared to a 6a. Anyways, thanks Radon!

  GrapheneOS is great in that you can completely separate out Google stuff. If you want, you can put it in a separate profile. I rarely switch to this profile, though, because once I do I get bombarded with engagement-chasing notifications.

• Jabra microphone for video calls
• Yubikey 5 Neo as a second factor
• BQ Cervantes as an E-ink reader, which is GPLv2 Unfortunately I accidentally broke the screen
• A Keychron K8 Pro

  Got it from Central Computers.

  I think I have “brown” or “tactile” keys. It’s my first mechanical keyboard, and it’s pretty satisfying. I definitely like how Keychron advertises it as an open-source keyboard. I haven’t yet flashed firmware, but I definitely want to put some macros on it at some point.

  For the next keyboard I think I’d just get a full-sized version with a numpad.

Software

I exclusively use free software.

• Emacs (see my .emacs)
  • org-mode for notes
  • magit for git
  • notmuch for email
  • dired for browsing folders and operating on files
  • calc for numbers
  • eshell as my shell
  • shell or ansi-term when eshell doesn’t work
• GNU/Linux
  • NixOS for all my GNU/Linux needs, both on my laptop and increasingly on my servers
    • home-manager
  • Debian for where I don’t use NixOS
  • systemd for writing and managing services (as well as timers a.k.a. cron jobs). systemd helps me use Linux-kernel-specific features without having to write C every time.
  • Either Gnome or Sway, depending on my mood. Both use Wayland, but I still have some X11 applications. (Back when I was using X11 I used sawfish and FVWM.)
  • Wireguard
  • btrfs as a COW filesystem for snapshots
  • Pipewire for audio
  • GNU Bash, zsh, or eshell as a shell
  • Unbound and dnscrypt-proxy2 for DNS resolving
  • systemd-nspawn and podman occasionally for containers
  • For my keyboard, my xkbOptions are grp:switch,ctrl:swapcaps_hyper,compose:rctrl, and I use us(symbolic) (English (US, Symbolic)) for the layout. Occasionally I use ibus for when I need to type Chinese.
• Firefox
  • uBlock Origin

    (source/homepage, add-on)
    to block tracking and other web spam
  • Multi-Account Containers and Cookie AutoDelete to isolate websites from my browsing history
  • Redirector (see my Redirector rules)
  • Privacy Badger from the EFF (though uBlock Origin does most of my blocking needs)
  • HTTPS Everywhere now I just use Firefox’s setting to try HTTPS first
• mpv

  (homepage, source)
  for playing media
• Anki for spaced repetition and learning
• Inkscape any time I need to make a diagram or annotate photos. I’ll manually edit these SVG files with Emacs as well.
• Krita when drawing things with a tablet
• darktable for photo processing
• Occasionally Blender for 3D stuff or editing OBJ files
• ffmpeg for converting or compressing/optimizing media formats
• OBS Studio for streaming and video calls
• Zotero for papers
• PostgreSQL
• nginx
• Clojure and Pedestal via Jetty
• git-annex for syncing, backing up, and archiving data
• BorgBackup for backing up files
• Android GrapheneOS (which contains Linux but unfortunately not GNU) on my phone
  • Firefox Nightly (which allows you to add arbitrary extensions like Redirector)
    • uBlock Origin
    • Redirector (otherwise sites like Reddit try to make you download their app)
    • Dark Reader
    • Cookie Autodelete
  • F-droid for most apps. Others I sideload. I don’t have Google Play installed on my main profile.
  • OsmAnd and Organic Maps for orienting myself in the real world
  • Signal
  • Element (for Matrix)
  • Anki
  • NextCloud
  • VLC
  • Unexpected Keyboard (which contains the Control key for when I use Emacs on my phone)
  
  I’ve also used a PinePhone with Mobian and hope to eventually move more to it.
• FreeSwitch for telephony/VoIP for my phone numbers

Services

• Firefox Relay for giving out emails
• Digital Ocean and Linode for VPSes
• Mozilla VPN

  (homepage)
• Wikipedia
• The Internet Archive (and especially the Wayback Machine)
• MDN
• Nextcloud for backups and RSS/Atom feeds
• OpenStreetMap
• The National Weather Service (weather.gov) for weather data
• Hacker News
• A VoIP provider for my phone numbers (and occasionally for fax when I still need that)
• Mostly Kagi for searching the web. Otherwise a combination of DuckDuckGo, Google, and occasionally Marginalia and Wiby.
• fatcat, Internet Archive Scholar, Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar for looking up papers (see /scholar notes). And *cough* Sci-Hub *cough* (even when I have an institutional VPN, as many publishers add tracking data to their PDFs)
• SomaFM for radio

Other /uses

Check out other /uses pages at uses.tech.

• sive.rs/uses
• secluded.site/uses/
• galen.me/uses
• maya.land/uses/
• iotcl.com/uses/
• jcs.org/uses