Uses

This is a living document in the spirit of uses.tech and Uses This where you’ll find a rough rundown of the hardware and software that makes up my daily working stack, and (where relevant), what my dream setup would be (in my current state of mind, at least!). If you’re looking for what hardware my boat uses, instead, see her dedicated page.

I’m constantly changing my setup and tinkering with things on a monthly or at least quarterly basis in some form or another. The history of this page is all in version control, that history may be useful or entertaining or both.

Most recent update: 2023-07-06

Primary Desktop Setup

For those curious, the hostname is woods, after the Bon Iver song.

Laptops

I technically have three of these, all in various states of dysfunction:

Phones

I HATE SMARTPHONES.
I WANT ALL SMARTPHONES TO DISAPPEAR.
I HATE MOSTLY-HAVING TO OWN ONE TO LIVE IN MODERN SOCIETY.
I HATE WHAT THEY’VE DONE TO MODERN SOCIETY.
FUCK SMARTPHONES.

Okay, now with that out of my system… I currently use a Moto G Stylus 2022 because it’s what I could reasonably source locally on short notice (that would have an unlockable bootloader) when my old Pixel 4a’s GSM radio kicked the bucket and refused to stay connected to towers anymore (the USB-C port was pretty shot, too). Ironically, I’ve never had time to bother with de-Googling this phone so the unlockable bootloader became moot anyway. This is the first phone I’ve used the stock Google Creepware ROM on since 2017, and it comes with some serious ups and downs. It brings two Nolan Lawson articles 12 to front of mind, for sure.

Also somewhere in my piles of rotting tech shit are the old Pixel 4a (I thought I’d want to pull files off of it, in almost a year now I never have bothered), three PinePhones (they’re all slow, fragile, horrible shit, on both the hardware and much of the software sides, don’t buy them), some other old Moto phone I killed, and… probably other stuff. Cell phones are by far the most fragile tech gear I’ve ever encountered: I’ve probably killed a dozen or so in the past decade, and at this point I buy the cheap shit I know is only designed to last a year or two anyway, because I know from experience that not even the more expensive stuff outlives it anyway.

Audio

Ahhhhh this rabbit hole. I’ve dabbled with everything from onboard headphone jacks on terrible PC motherboards to headphones that retail for $4k USD. These days my stack sits between those extremes, and is a series of compromises mandated by cost, space, and power usage (the latter two particularly being functions of my living space on a sailboat).

I use four IEMs:

… through two dongle-style DAC/amps:

It does the job given the circumstances. I’ve grown to miss over-ear headphones, though - I still own HifiMan Sundaras and might get back into them soon.

I had a “my dream setup” section written here, but (1) my markdown processor chokes on handling markdown inside a <details> element (presuming, I guess, that it’s not markdown inside an HTML element), and (2) it was half as long as this entire page, so I’ll kick that to its own article at some point. tl;dr: Over-ear headphones, but not those that break the bank - or my neck.

Software

As a non-exhaustive list:

… and whatever else you find in my dotfiles.

I tend to build software using (in no particular order): Rust, Zig, Python, TypeScript, and plain old shell scripts. Oh, and I’m working on my own language, too, I guess.


  1. Living With An Open Source Phone, 2017 

  2. Tech Veganism, 2019 

  3. And of course all of these require separate windows on my screen these days because the golden era of using Pidgin to merge all protocols into one sensible UI is long gone (in Discord’s case, you’ll get banned for even trying, which IMO should be damn near criminally chargeable for a company to enforce).