dope awesome nintendo pictures
My main PC, a mid-tower desktop "designed" and built by me, boasting a Ryzen 5700G, 32 gigs of DDR4, something like 6 terabytes of storage, a comically overbuilt PSU, and a graphics card. It runs arch, btw.
Servy 586A home-built TrueNAS box assembled from used gaming parts that could pass for a high-end, if a little dated, gaming rig if not for the preponderance of hard drives I put in it in place of a competent GPU. Much more stable than the old one.
Read about its conception and construction here.
A Raspberry Pi clone that I use to run Pi-hole, and that's it. I wanted a machine that was isolated from my incessant tinkering with the big boy server.
cumulonimbusThe cloud server that runs this website and almost everything else I self-host that's accessible from the public internet, because paying two Imperial Netflix Subscriptions is better than dealing with the endless maze of headaches that is pointing your DNS records to a machine on a residential connection at a shared dwelling.
This counts as a personal computer.
Chosen solely because it was the most recent Pixel at a sane price, I was pushed to upgrade to this from my old 4a by the impending end of software support for 5th generation and older Pixels. Turns out, buying a used Android is a good way to not get security updates for most of the device's useful life, and if I'm gonna bother with GrapheneOS it would behoove me to make sure I'm up to date on those.
Seeing for myself the difference that four years of iteration has made to the a-series Pixels has only solidified my perception that smartphones are as good as they'll ever need to be and have been for quite some time. The faster processor, nicer screen, and better camera in this year's model don't make a difference for the things I do with my phone, and the lack of a headphone jack has already proven inconvenient.
That said, the loss of the headphone jack did not come without its benefits in exchange. The 8a is broadly a nicer and more premium-feeling device than the 4a, and I specifically appreciate the wireless charging and faster cellular data connection more than I was expecting to. Bizarrely, even my 4G LTE speeds in areas without 5G service seem to be drastically improved.
I also like some of the new features in newer versions of Android that never released for the 4a, chief among them the "Charging Optimization" switch that limits the battery to 80% charge to preserve its health long-term, which I'll be needing since I plan to keep this sucker for the entire seven years that it's slated to keep getting security updates. Extraordinarily rare Google W.
Did you know it's surprisingly easy to hack your 3DS? Do it now!
I also used to have a Switch, but I've sold it on account of I never really use the thing anyway. I still wanna show off the dope clear shell mod I did to it though, so here's that:
I bought a Prusa because their printers have a reputation for quality, which this unit has certainly lived up to. It's been quite reliable, and when it fails, it's usually my fault in a really obvious way. It automates a lot of features that I suspect would have been pain points on a cheaper printer, up to and including uploading gcode to it directly over the network. This thing's easier to use than a regular 2D printer!
My one major issue is that the cantilevered gantry results in a slight inaccuracy in the Z axis, meaning the first layer is too high on one side of the bed and too low on the other. I suspect that this is why they didn't make it bigger, although it could also just be my fault for going and ordering the un-assembled kit version to save money on assembly.
I run mine with Prusa's satin textured bed plate for easier removal of PETG parts (I managed to damage the included smooth plate printing big stuff in PETG) and a 0.6mm Diamondback nozzle for printing with filaments with abrasive additives. It's expensive for a nozzle, but I think for the last nozzle I'll ever need to buy on an already 700 Canadian Victory Point printer it makes sense. I used to run an E3D Nozzle X, but I think I wrecked the coating trying to clean it with a brass wire brush.
A UPS that powers my computer, server, and related paraphernalia. I got it for all the normal reasons you get a UPS (power outage protection and such-like) and it has thus far performed as advertised. I wouldn't try to game off of the thing, but it's proven more than sufficient to keep my machines on long enough for a graceful shutdown in the event of a power outage. Highly recommend getting one.
It's a gigabit network switch. It has 8 ports. It performs as advertised. What else is there to say?
I used to be the kind of unconditional tech enthusiast who thought smartwatches as a premise were really cool, but that was when I was like 13, and the novelty of my Moto 360 and its adorable little WearOS videogames honestly wore off pretty quick. I'm not so Tiktok-brained that grabbing my phone out of my pocket to check the time or my notifications or whatever registers as an inconvenience, let alone to the extent that I would want to buy a smartwatch about it.
So why'd I buy this then? For me, it's about the biometric sensors. Primarily I just wanted some hard data to assuage some anxiety I was having about the state of my heart, and a device that costs as much as a dedicated heart monitor while doing all the other smartwatch stuff and not making me feel like a paranoid weirdo for owning it seemed like a pretty damn good deal to me.
The smartwatch itself is fine. The custom OS it runs is a little more basic than even circa-2016 WearOS in terms of software features, but I honestly don't care about any of that stuff anyway, and it's actually really nice for the hundred Canadian Zero-Calorie Sugar-Free Diet Dollars and free shipping that they're charging, although I wish the app reported more detailed biometric data, said the undisputed queen of run-on sentences.
The one problem I'm having so far is that after like a month the included pleather wristband is starting to discolor and flake off and generally do Pleather Things™, but frankly this is a very cheap smartwatch and I'd rather them cut costs on the one part I can easily replace than on, like, the battery or the CPU or some shit. Hopefully this isn't indicative of the long-term endurance of the actual device.
My main computer runs EndeavourOS with the GNOME desktop environment. I chose it mostly to get the AUR, which has occasionally proved useful, but at this point I'm kind of stuck here because all the config files for my programs are in standard locations, god forbid, and everyone else is on flatpaks now, which fuck that all up for no good reason. I once failed to switch to Fedora because of this.
I have a long history with Linux, dating back to 2015 with the first computer I ever owned: a Chromebook that I put Linux on to play Minecraft, which ChromeOS couldn't do in any meaningful capacity at the time. It took me all of nine months to blow it up doing that because it was passively cooled with a plastic shell and not designed to ever go above ~30% usage on the dinky little Celeron that was its excuse for a CPU. After that I got a real PC running Windows, which solved the Minecraft problem so I mostly stuck to that for the next six years, although I did make intermittent attempts to switch to Linux again.
I pulled it off for real in 2021, when I took a combination of upsetting news about the upcoming Windows 11 and an SSD upgrade to my laptop as an opportunity to swap out my operating system as well. It went pretty well, all told; I wasn't using much Windows-exclusive software other than Paint.NET and some games, the latter of which now run great on Linux anyway thanks to Valve's efforts with Proton. Shame I can't play all my Epic Games Store freebies anymore, though.
My current desktop environment of choice, as previously mentioned, is GNOME. I used to run XFCE, and KDE before that, but I got sick of all my stuff occasionally breaking on me and wanted to see if GNOME would be sufficiently UX-designed that it would Just Work™ and Not Get In My Way™ and all that. So far so mostly good. I was worried about how well Wayland would work, but it's basically fine, with the exception of Discord not playing nice with regards to screensharing.
On top of the bordering on iPhone-grade support lifetime, this here is the other reason I'm so brand-loyal to Google's first-party hardware.
GrapheneOS is a fork of Android that's been security-hardened and de-googled, two of my favourite things for an operating system to be. It's dedicated to privacy and security above all else, almost to a fault. I'm told it's only available on the Pixel line because those phones have security hardware in them no other OEM on the planet can be bothered with.
GrapheneOS provides a few user-facing privacy features that I quite like, such as the ability to deny network and sensor access to apps in the permission settings, and a bunch of under-the-hood security improvements I'm woefully underqualified to explain short of just pasting stuff wholesale from their website.
Do I need this level of security? Probably not. Would I enjoy some of the features GrapheneOS strips out in the name of security? Possibly. But I like the peace of mind knowing that if cops ever get a hold of my phone they'll at least be kind of frustrated trying to access it.
I quite like Firefox. It's extremely customizable (especially if you know where to look), the devtools are better, and there's a wealth of privacy tools available that just kind of don't exist in Chrome (including adblockers as of late). It can also edit PDFs now!
On top of being generally superior, I also use Firefox on principle. It's currently the only major browser outside of the Apple-exclusive Safari that isn't built atop Google's Chromium, and I don't like the idea of Google having total monopolistic control over all web browsers.
Firefox is one of the only pieces of software I'll actively advocate switching to, so go do it. Do it now. It, like essentially all other browsers, can import your data from its competition, and I'd also recommend using this profile generator to fortify it for maximum privacy while you're at it.
All that said, Mozilla is under questionable management at the moment and kind of in Google's pocket anyway, so maybe we shouldn't be relying completely on them to champion the free web. Maybe throw some money in the general direction of the Servo project.
I use the Fennec fork of Firefox on mobile, and Ungoogled Chromium for the occasional poorly-built website (usually streaming services, work stuff, or banks) that doesn't want to run in my weird paranoid Firefox config.
Microsoft's Visual Studio Code is, loathe though I may be to admit it, my favourite IDE I've ever used, which is why I use VSCodium, an open-source build of VSCode with all the telemetry and shit stripped out.
Lucky that the only 3D graphics program available on Linux just so happens to also be the best one. I use this sucker for just about everything it can theoretically do, from CAD to video editing, and even some things that it's actually good at!
Honestly, what were you expecting? If you want to edit raster graphics on Linux, GIMP is more or less the be-all-end-all, unless you want to do everything in the terminal with ImageMagick. I'd prefer to use Paint.NET or even my Legally Obtained DRM-free copy of Photoshop CS6, but somehow photo editors are one of the only things that are consistently incompatible with WINE. I've been meaning to give Photopea a shot.
My primary motivation for choosing REAPER is that it's available for Linux. My secondary motivation is that it has a lot less of the bizarre idiosyncracies and feature omissions that I found limiting when I was using LMMS. It's also cheaper for a perpetual license than even the shittiest most artificially-limited versions of most of the other major DAWs, although it's not like I can run any of them anyway.
I use Rhythmbox for music, MPV for video, and VLC for anything that doesn't open one of the other two when I click on it. All three are very boringly good at what they do, and all three are varying levels of fugly.
This is the program I use to download my, uh, Linux ISOs. And local copies of Wikipedia. At least one of those is actually true. I've got it configured to only work through my VPN. I don't know if my ISP would actually get on my case if I torrented anything... unscrupulous without it, but I'd rather not risk it.
Syncthing is a peer-to-peer automatic file syncing program that I use to automatically sync files between my various devices, peer-to-peer style. It works really well and I really like it. Among other things, I use it to get photos from my phone onto my PC, my music library from my PC onto my phone, and for automatic backups of both to my server.
The best user experience I've seen in a notes program since the Notes app on my iPhone 4S. The thing that sold me on it is that it saves your notes as markdown files in a user-defined folder, so I can point Syncthing to it. This beats out my previous solution of Whatever Nextcloud Has™ by a country mile. Let me know if you know of an RSS reader that works like this.
I switched to zsh largely due to ambient peer pressure from the wider Linux community, and I doubt I'm taking full advantage of its many advanced features, whatever those are, but I do quite like how conducive it is to customization with such programs as Oh My Zsh and Powerlevel10k, and I miss its improved tab completion and command history functionality whenever I'm ssh'd into one of my servers.