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: 2024-02-13

Primary Desktop Setup

For those curious, the hostname is snowcone, after the deadmau5 song.

• A custom desktop build optimized mostly for largely-parallelized development work and running RAM-intensive development tools, but also for light (eg. Factorio, Oxygen Not Included, Dorfromantik, etc.) gaming (even at the crazy resolution I push - see displays bullet point below).

  • AMD 7900 gently overclocked to about 5.6GHz
  • 96GB RAM (2x Crucial 48GB DDR5 5600MT/s sticks)
  • 2TB Samsung 990 Pro SSD
  • AMD 7600 GPU (8GB)
  • Cooling is handled by a huge array of BeQuiet products, including a Dark Rock Pro 5 CPU cooler (it’s nearly silent, indeed)
  • Cased in a Thermaltake Tower 200

  This machine runs Void Linux x86_64-glibc (for now) on a ZFS root.

  My dream device in this category...

  I'm not even sure any more - I guess give me an ARM64 or RISC-V rig with 32-128GB of RAM and a GPU capable of playing things no more intensive than Minecraft, and make it draw less than 30W at full tilt. Now make it run Linux and/or FreeBSD and/or OpenBSD well, and let it be powered off DC easily to avoid AC inversion costs in DC-native environments (although I currently no longer live in one, I intend to some day again in the future). At this point, the only currently-available devices that would fit the bill are probably the Qualcomm-based Windows Dev Kit 2023 ("Volterra"), which until very recently had nightmarish problems booting Linux, and a Mac Mini with a modded power supply (which still requires tons of work from the Asahi crew to be usable, so it's a bold bet). Or maybe something in the RK3588 family.

• 2x LG DualUp Monitors with the LG Ergo Stands. Turned landscape and angled into somewhat of a “curved field of view”, this setup functionally resembles the ultrawides I once used, but with a significantly better vertical aspect. The bezels in the middle of my field of view are annoying, but the upshot is that I now have two physical monitors, which can be window managed independently. Keeping chats and other distractions (or documentation, or whatever) on one monitor, and the primary task at hand (editors, games, whatever) on the other is an excellent workflow, and something I didn’t really get to do during my 6+ year stint with ultrawide monitors previously.

  These DualUps have more than exceeded expectations so far (so much so that after 6 months on a single one, I bought a second), and the near-square aspect ratio is significantly better than any widescreen aspect ratio for my uses.

  My dream device in this category...

  I've been saying for years my ideal setup would probably be two e-ink displays of reasonable size, and an OLED display for watching video or otherwise colorized or high framerate content. I'm still interested in trying this, but every time I poke at Dasung and Boox's offerings in the standalone e-ink monitor space, they're just so horribly expensive that I can't justify the things, especially with enough physical screen space to be useful to me for dev work (2x 13" or one 21" or bigger panel). Honestly though, for as long as I'm on the IPS/LCD screen train, I think I already have my dream setup. Thanks, LG, for thinking way outside the box!

• For keyboard input, I primarily use a Unicorne LP running a Dvorak-based layout you can find in my QMK config repo. This was a huge change after about 5 years running the same Keebio Iris keyboard with my own KMK firmware, but it was time for some lighter, shorter switches and a change of layout.

  I’m starting to dabble with even-smaller keyboards: I’m starting to put together a layout for an Osprette MX, and have a custom board mostly based on Sam’s Clog V3 coming soon.

  Trivia: I barely know how to type QWERTY on a desktop/laptop keyboard at this point. I’ve been using Dvorak for somewhere near 14 years that I can remember, meaning I’m now in the “half+ of my life on Dvorak” club. I’ve recently started considering some other layouts, perhaps Hands Down, but the prospect of moving punctuation out of the top left at this point frankly terrifies me. This is also why a brief attempt to learn Colemak-DH didn’t stick. I do, however, still use QWERTY on touchscreen phones, and believe it’s excellently suited there.

• For pointer input, I recently brought my Elecom Huge back into the fray after many years in storage. Other devices in the rotation include a Ploopy Classic trackball and a space gray Apple Magic Trackpad 2.

• My webcam is some Aluratek “4K” thing I bought for about 7 billion dollars during the lockdowns when there was a run on webcams, my microphone is an Elgato Wave 3, and for on-camera lighting, I use two RaLeno RGB key lights.

• Bulk storage is on three Samsung T7 Shield SSDs (2x 2TB, 1x 4TB), all running ZFS.

Laptops

My primary laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad X13S Gen4 AMD with an AMD 7840U and 32GB of RAM. My only complaints about it in general are that it’s a bit too big (11-12” is my ideal, the X13S is very close to 14”) and the battery life is truly awful (~5hrs on a good day). It’s otherwise excellent: plenty of port selection, fast USB-C charging, matte 16:10 aspect ratio screen, a fairly decent keyboard (I’ve used better, but almost never on a laptop), and a huge, smooth trackpad. (Unlike many Thinkpad fans, I couldn’t care less about the trackpoint).

For those curious, the hostname is nocturnes, after the Silicone Soul song.

I also own an MNT Reform (the original thiqq version). If I’m being honest, this is more of a project car I get to take around the block a couple times every few months before something else about it breaks (or I just run out of RAM - 4GB on the stock model - to handle my workflows), whereas the Thinkpad is more of the trusty Honda Civic I can drive to work daily. This Reform has been plagued with countless problems and has honestly spent most of its life in storage bins or closets, which makes me deeply sad, because I really, really want a sturdy, repairable laptop with a mechanical keyboard and commodity battery cells to be reality. It’s just not currently my reality.

Elsewhere in my arsenal of portable machines, I still own two barely-usable machines:

• A Samsung Chromebook Pro from 2017, which was bootloader-unlocked, made to run Coreboot, and still barely runs Void Linux x86_64-musl. While the 3:2 aspect ratio has always been incredible, the keyboard has always been unbearable in both size/layout and feel, and at this point, the 4GB of RAM and extremely slow Skylake m3 processor make the system largely unusable for any “real work”. I’m not sure what its future is.

• A Lenovo C630 fold-back Qualcomm-based ARM laptop. It has at various points run Gentoo and Void Linux, but it’s never been usable in any state that wasn’t plugged into a USB-C dock with ethernet. It’s been completely unused since late 2020, so at this point I doubt the battery works for long, and the OS will need fully re-imaged. (If you, dear reader, can put this thing to better use, it’s yours for the price of shipping anywhere in the US).

Servers

Most of my services are hosted on a small fleet of Linode (er, “Akamai Cloud” - whatever, corporate) VPSes, all running Alpine Linux and managed with Terraform, though all config and state management is currently manual (no Nix, Kubernetes, etc. here - I use those when I’m paid to. Ever hear about how cobblers’ children have no shoes?).

A few things run on a Raspberry Pi 4B here at home, notably, Home Assistant to control a litany of Zigbee devices (light bulbs, plugs, temperature/humidity sensors, etc).

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 Pixel 7a which runs crDroid with MicroG and no Google services. It perpetually brings two Nolan Lawson articles ¹² to front of mind, for sure… especially since I actually have to keep my prior phone, a Moto G Stylus running stock Googled Android, around to log into certain systems at work. Sigh. (yes, YubiKeys exist, yes, I used to use them at every startup job I held between 2018-23, no, the enterprise org I now work for doesn’t allow them as replacements for the closed-source auth stack we use. Sigh again.)

Also somewhere in my piles of rotting tech shit are three PinePhones. They’re all slow, fragile, horrible shit, on both the hardware and much of the software sides, don’t buy them.

Other Gadgets

• I am still frequently found wearing a Pebble 2 smartwatch from 2016, before smartwatches pivoted to being health trackers (I don’t care about this) with LCD/OLED displays (I actively don’t want this) and short battery life (this Pebble 2 which has been abused to hell and back, including spending 2 years in a box with zero charge whatsoever, still gets 3-5 days on a charge). At one point I tried moving to a Watchy as a replacement, but at the time, the device was far too fragile and the software too buggy. I no longer own the Watchy, and frankly, would happily buy a new-old-stock Pebble 2 at its original list price even today. It, and the Pebble Steel I owned before it, is still the gold standard in smartwatches to me.

  Alas, my next watch purchase will almost certainly not be a smart one given the Watchy’s fragility (portable devices in my life often get tortured mercilessly) and Pebble being a long-gone company: it will be a dumb watch, possibly a mechanical watch.

• I still own a reMarkable v1 tablet. It gets very little use these days other than as an occasional EPUB reader. Bloated software updates have made this usecase unbearably slow and bug-ridden on this device; it’s pretty clear this v1 is bound to become e-waste unless I can figure out an alternative OS situation for it. If you know of ways to turn a reMarkable v1 into a better e-reader (and ideally not completely nuke the stylus, though I use it fairly rarely), please get in touch!

• I still own a Kindle Paperwhite from about 2015. At this point I have no idea if it even boots: about once a year, I get it out of storage and charge it, and then promptly decide to read on some other device (or no device… I’m bad about reading, y’all). If you know of good uses for a nearly-decade-old Kindle Paperwhite (maybe they’re rootable now and can be made to run alternative firmwares?), please get in touch!

Audio

Beware the rabbit hole that is “audiophile” culture. I own what I own because it performs well and otherwise scored well on my personal rubric in every category I cared about, including repairability. I don’t necessarily endorse you buying the hardware I use, and if you do snag any of this stuff, I definitely endorse finding used deals on one of the many audio gear marketplaces. You can save hundreds to thousands of dollars.

When at my home office, I listen to either my Edifier R1280T speakers or one of a few ZMF over-ear headphones I own, with digital-to-analogue translation and headphone amplification handled by an RME ADI-2 DAC FS. At this point, barring an upgrade to the speakers (I’m eyeing some KEF Q150s or Polk ES10/ES20s some day), my home office audio stack is considered “complete enough”. I’m mostly done trialing too much new gear and happy with where I’ve landed.

On the go, I listen to Truthear Zero IEMs via a Qudelix 5K DAC/amp (which works as both a USB-C device and a Bluetooth sink). I may consider adding another IEM or two to this list eventually, but otherwise am, again, largely happy with where I’ve landed.

I’ve also crowdfunded the Tangara portable media player, which I hope will help me use my phone for fewer tasks, and use open-source task-dedicated hardware for listening to music on the go. Also, it was just nice to support an internet pal’s OSHW venture :)

Software

As a non-exhaustive list:

• Linux as my OS on effectively everything, somehow or another
• neovim and helix, for text editing
• sway, for window management
• cmus, for music playing
• newsboat, for feed reading
• I basically hate all chat apps these days, but by choice or by force I can generally be found on Matrix, Discord, IRC, Slack, Zulip. ³ For IRC I use catgirl.

… 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.