Stuff I use | Josh Mōller-Mara

Tools and technology that I use. You can contact me with any suggestions.

Hardware

A Lenovo Thinkpad T430 (which is over 10 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)
A Brother laser printer

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.
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

Software

I exclusively use free software.

Emacs (see my .emacs)
- org-mode for notes
- magit for git
- notmuch for email
- dired for browsing folders
- 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 (I think this is increasingly less necessary)
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 (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
- F-droid for most apps
- OsmAnd and Organic Maps for orienting myself in the real world
- Signal
- Element
- 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

Statistics and Data

R for statistics with ESS as an interface

It’s a GNU Project! This is what we used in statistics courses at Berkeley. I also TA’d Stat 133 a bit. I’m so glad we were able to use free software rather than proprietary environments like MATLAB.
Stan
(homepage, GitHub)
for Bayesian inference (previously used JAGS)
Previously used D3.js a lot for visualization. Also tried React Three (see /rtft/ for an example visualization I made) via Reagent and ClojureScript.
data.table, but also tidyverse stuff
ggplot
ColorBrewer for a color palette
Sometimes Clojure and ClojureScript. Clojure for where I’m doing realtime analysis (instead of batch). ClojureScript for interactive visualizations and presentations using reagent/re-frame.
LaTeX for writing math, which I’ll embed using MathML (preferred) or MathJax.

Web Development

Backend

Clojure and Pedestal
- Jetty
- GraphQL via Lacinia
- PostgreSQL for data
- WebSockets for real time events
nginx for reverse proxying and some static resources
LetsEncrypt for my certs
~~node.js and Express~~ (not so much recently, but this site used to be run through node.js)
- ~~MongoDB~~ - Not anymore. They’re no longer open source, and Postgres does what I need anyway.

Frontend

HTML5 written in the XML syntax (formerly “XHTML”)
- Occasionally RDFa for metadata
For JavaScript I either use
- Handwritten JavaScript
  
  Gives me a better feel for various Web APIs
  - Web Components
- ClojureScript
  (homepage, source, issues)
  - React via
    reagent
    (homepage, source)
  - Shadow CLJS
    (source/homepage, docs)
- node.js
  - Webpack
  - ~~Angular 1~~ - Never made the jump to Angular 2, I just started using React.
- ~~require.js~~ - Back before JavaScript modules became a thing
For CSS I either use:
- Handwritten CSS with a lot of flexbox, grid/subgrid
  - CSS custom properties along with cascade layers for theming
- Semantic UI
SVG
- Inkscape
  (inkscape.org, GitLab)
  - For manually drawing, editing
- Emacs - For tweaking and optimizing SVGs, adding metadata, creating SVG filters, and so on
- Usually CSS keyframes for animation, but sometimes SMIL
- D3.js
- React/reagent
- R when creating SVGs with data
WebGL
- Three.js (sometimes via React Three Fiber)
~~Static site generators~~
- ~~Hexo~~
- ~~Pelican~~

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)
A combination of DuckDuckGo, Google, and occasionally Marginalia and Wiby for searching the internet
fatcat, Internet Archive Scholar, Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar for looking up papers. 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.

Other cool /uses pages (in no particular order):