Computer

The hardware I use has to be powerful but portable enough to not be a millstone round my neck. While a lot of the heavy lifting that I’m doing happens in the cloud these days, there are still plenty of tasks that can’t easily be outsourced and where raw computing power makes a big difference in overall velocity. Hence I’m always looking for ways to improve my setup to allow me to be portable yet have enough processing power in order to be independent from stable internet connectivity or somebody else’s computer.

cbrspc7

My main workstation is a custom SFFPC on a Xtia Xproto-N frame running Gentoo Linux.

The initial build had the Lian Li Galahad 240 AIO for cooling the CPU. However, after the Galahad died roughly ~11 months later, I replaced it with a Noctua NH-C14S air cooler.

The PC runs kernel 5.18.16 with encrypted ZFS in mirror-mode across two 1TB NVMe M.2 SSDs. I use Sway – a Wayland window manager – to mainly have multiple instances of Alacritty and Firefox on two 4K displays.

Software Management

I use portage for managing most software that I have installed. If I need something that is not available through the official sources, I either check the overlays or git clone the repo and link its binary manually to /usr/local/bin. Often times I install Rust tools using cargo, since it’s a pretty solid package manager. Go tools are a bit complicated to go install and keep up-to-date, but I have my .zshrc functions that help me with that. When I need Python or Ruby tools, I usually installed them through Portage because everything else is a PITA. For Node.js I use NPM, although I rarely use Node.js tools.

CLI / TUI

I have a separate list with most of the command line tools that I used.

GUI

I don’t use many GUI applications. The main reason for me to use GUI tools is for creative work (like editing photos) and for that I use my MacBook.

Other than that I use the following programs under Linux:

• Alacritty
• bemenu
• Blender
• EasyEffects
• Firefox
• FontForge
• GIMP
• Inkscape
• KeePassXC
• Lens
• LibreWolf
• Mako
• Monero GUI
• Nheko
• OBS Studio
• OpenRGB
• OpenTTD
• proton-bridge
• pavucontrol-qt
• Resilio Sync
• Session
• Sway
• Syncthing
• Transmission (GTK)
• Ungoogled Chromium
• VIA (releases)
• virt-manager
• VLC
• Waybar
• zathura

For the following applications I use dedicated VMs:

• 0 A.D.: Fedora VM
• Ledger Live: OpenSUSE VM
• Tor Browser: Tails VM, no hard disk

Engineering & Development

The command line is my go-to environment for everything related to engineering and development. I don’t use an IDE and instead do all my writing and development in NeoVim. Whenever I work with a service or a platform I check whether there is a TUI or at least CLI for it and, if there isn’t, I sometimes build one myself.

Photos with different cooling setups.

d3lt4

My laptop is a 2018 15" MacBook Pro with 32GB DDR4 RAM, an Intel UHD 630 and an additional AMD Radeon Pro 560X 4GB on-board graphics card. It’s one of those MacBooks without a physical escape key.

For my eyes’ health I use a matte anti-glare screen shield which unfortunately makes the already dim display a notch dimmer. Additionally I have black tape glued over my laptop’s camera for privacy reasons.

The MacBook runs the latest macOS release. Security, privacy and the overall dissatisfaction with Apple hardware in general is what had pushed me to invest effort into switching from macOS back to Linux. On the long term, I’m looking forward to replace cbrspc7 as well as d3lt4 with an AMD-powered, 16" Framework, as soon as dedicated AMD GPU as well as HHKB keyboard modules become available.

Software Management

I use brew for managing most of the software that’s running on my MacBook.

CLI / TUI

On macOS I have a tmux session that’s constantly running inside a single instance/window of Alacritty. That’s due to Alacritty not really supporting multiple windows/tabs/panes on macOS.

The shell that I used even before macOS made it the default was and still is Zsh, with Oh My Zsh installed and my own carefully crafted .zshrc

I use to keep my .zshrc functional on both, Linux and macOS, so that I can easily sync my dotfiles between machines.

GUI

For the most parts I’m using the Mac when I need to do something that requires a graphical application like an image or video editing software. I’m looking forward to move these tasks to my Linux workstation as well, but so far it has been more easier to continue using them on macOS. I will continue doing so up until the point when the hardware might fail.

However, besides of the crude command line interface I use LaunchBar, because it lets me keep my hands on the keyboard while performing UI-related actions and tasks. LaunchBar brings a large set of functions and allows for easy extensibility. Other UI programs and little helpers that I use include:

• iStat Menus, for monitoring the MacBook’s crappy thermals
• Little Snitch, because I don’t like apps to send weird stuff into the interwebs interface is a PITA
• Monodraw, for drawing fancy ASCII documentation
• Numi, for notes in which I need to do some math
• OpenEmu, for the little time I don’t spend outside and/or working on things
• Resilio Sync, for use with my very own encrypted storage, will move to Syncthing as soon as there is selective sync and an iOS client available
• SmartScope, for hours of SPI-debugging fun
• Steam, for Cities: Skylines and Parkitect
• TimeMachineEditor, for taming TimeMachine git commands.
• WireGuard, for my own VPNs to all sorts of servers and devices

Creative Work

I stay miles away from Adobe software and successfully got rid of the very last Adobe program I was using, which was Lightroom Classic. For the little creative work that I’m doing, I’m using the following programs:

• Capture One, Affinity Photo and Pixelmator Pro for photo editing
• Affinity Designer and Sketch for vector editing
• Affinity Publisher for DTP
• Apple Photos for storing and managing all mobile photography
• DaVinci Resolve for video editing

I really don’t do much creative work, though. It’s more of a hobby. The reason I keep things like Pixelmator around is for the times when people send me PSDs or when I really do need to draw a few things on my own.

h4nk4

h4nk4 is an ultra-portable data center that offers a fully-encrypted network attached storage as well as KVM hosting. It runs on NixOS and has 5 GBit NICs.

The case is a custom designed, 3D printed enclosure that was built with portability in mind. h4nk4 has no HIDs nor a GPU – the Ryzen is not an APU – and is therefor configured to use a LUKS encryption key on a USB stick, that can simply be unplugged in order to make the device useless.

More info about what this device does, why and how I designed and built it can be found here.

r0n1n

r0n1n is a Docker host and IoT gateway. It’s part of my portable, open source home area network.

Previous to being a tiny server, r0n1n was an experimental Linux desktop.

a0i

r0n1n is a computer running OpenWRT (Linux) and bridging my internal network of devices with the outside world.

Unlike the majority of reviews online by people who struggled to properly set up and run the Linksys, I have experienced no issues with it whatsoever. That said, I’m only running the 5 GHz band for WiFi and all devices that have a NIC are using a wired connection. For more information, check out my post on running an open source home area network.

k3yb0w

This Raspberry Pi Zero W has a Pimoroni Keybow attached to it and runs the Kiwi firmware that allows it to connect to any 2.4 GHz WiFi and act as a wireless controller for all sorts of things.

I’m using this device to control everything that has an API (like IoT lights) as well as OBS Studio, which it can interface with since Kiwi 1.0.2.