What I use

Last updated: 2024-05-30

Home Office

My home office is equipped with a MTi Fauteuil 36X and a Louis XV transition style desk. It has two drawers and two tablets, one on each side, which I do not use as the desk is very large. The surface is embossed with dark red leather decorated with faint traces of gold ink.

Both my personal and work laptops sit on the desk at all time, the last one on an adjustable stand to be at eye level and reduce shoulder strain.

Network connectivity is provided by a Netgear AirCard 810S as I do not have Internet at home.

On the right side of my desk sits a sound system comprising a Primare I15 analog amplifier, Primare CD15 CD player, Nakamichi BX-125E tape player (yes, I listen to tapes. Yes, new tapes are regularly published). My speakers are a pair of black Triangle Comète Ez.

Personal laptop

My personal workstation is a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (5th) laptop with an Intel i7-7600U processor, 16 GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD. I purchased it in early 2018 and it is still in good condition.

I never got to use the TrackPoint and prefer a real mouse, in this case a Logitech MX Anywhere 3. It is currently paired with three Logitech USB Unifying Receiver of various size to use with all of my laptops. The pairing itself was made under Windows and Ubuntu (using Solaar).

Operating System: OpenBSD-current

I have been using OpenBSD since 2010 at school and then carried it in my personnal life.
Editor: vim

I don't use any plugins and only tweaks a few options.
Web Browser: Firefox

Being firmly against Google I always favored the competition. I used Opera a long time ago and then switched to Firefox. Here I do use a lot of plugins:
- Awesome RSS to notice when a blog publishes a feed.
- Dark Reader
- Decentraleyes
- Don't track me Google I use DuckDuckGo but sometimes it is necessary to send Google result links and this addon cleans them up.
- KeePassXC-Browser
- Privacy Badger belt...
- uBlock origin and braces.
Email Client: Thunderbird
X11 Window Manager: cwm

Installed by default on OpenBSD, I have been using it for the last decade with nearly no change to its configuration file. I was using i3 before.
Terminal Emulator: xterm

Other terminal emulators tends to brag about all the cool features they have but they are generaly not capable of rendering NetHack. I don't need to cat videos in my terminal but I like to kill orcs in the Dungeon of Doom from time to time.
Shell: ksh, with vi editing mode.

After a few years using zsh I switched to a much simpler shell when I got annoyed by the increasingly slow startup time. Never looked back. Plus I like my prompt as simple as possible.
Other stuff:
- xclock: always in a corner of the screen.
- xscreensaver with the bat animation, it kept a troublesome nephew occupied a few years ago and I kept it.
- xbanish to hide the mouse cursor automatically.

Work laptop

For work I use a Lenovo ThinkPad T14 with an Intel i7-1255U processor, 32GB of RAM and a 512GB NVMe drive.

It is connected to a Kraken Pro 60 keyboard with a default black keycap on all keys excepts for h, j, k and l which are equipped with the Stealth keycaps.

Operating System: Ubuntu LTS
Editor: JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate Edition

Can't say I like it. Any task I can do with vim is done with vim.
Terminal Emulator: gnome-terminal

Installed by default. I never got out of the way to change it.
Shell: mksh

This is MirBSD's fork of OpenBSD ksh, available as a package on Ubuntu. No one is ever going to make me use bash.
Other stuff:
- signal-desktop to chat directly with a real keyboard. I wish WhatsApp had the same thing.
- remmina to remote-desktop on my Windows servers.
- network-manager-fortisslvpn to get rid of the official (and awful) FortiNet client.

Phone

I picked the Fairphone 3 for the appeal of repairability as I my previous phones all ended badly damaged after falling on hard surfaces or in the sea. Sadly corrosion is not repairable, not even on a fairphone. Mine is slowly dying ever since a baby bathing incident.

Other hardware

I own other pieces of hardware for leisure:

Amazon Kindle Touch
I install my ebooks with Calibre, mostly old stuff from Project Gutenberg.
Nintendo DSLite:
I bought this model on a whim while shoping with a friend. We were supposed to play Pokemon together but never did because I actualy don't like this game enough. Oh well.
Analog Pocket:
Very nice FPGA replica of the whole Game Boy line.