My Setup

My Laptop

In terms of other primary hardware at my desk, I've got a generic mechanical keyboard. It's one of the ones without a numpad, but full layout otherwise. It fits on my desk quite nicely, though it could maybe be a little smaller. I've finally gotten myself a wireless mouse. It's a Logitech MX Master 3, and, well, as a mouse, it's quite nice. I like the horizontal scroll wheel. The main wheel and it's magnetic whatever is fairly nice, though it's especially nice as a fidget toy. (Listen, I once spend a solid 50 minutes just spinning a fidget spinner. I like spinny things, okay?) The nicest bit is that it's wireless. I was reluctant to go wireless, given my experience with wireless mice in the past, but it's amazing what a difference a quality rechargable mouse makes. It works wonderfully and I never really need to worry about batteries. It's nice. Finally, there's my second monitor. It's an older Dell panel running at 1440 by 900. It's okay, but I would like to move up to a bigger 1080p monitor at some point.

I've got my laptop running Arch Linux, as I stated on the homepage. Here's a screenshot:

I'm running i3wm. I'd run Sway, but Wacom tablets were still broken the last time I checked. I use bumblebee-status for the status bar with the following modules:

• deadbeef
• battery
• arandr
• pasink
• weather
• date
• time

Up in the tray, I have Discord (ugh), a feed reader, KeePassXC, Blueman redshift-gtk, Steam, Transmission, nm-applet, and the ibus daemon. I use Network Manager, rather than netctl just for ease of use, both in configuration and in working with VPNs. In ibus, I primarily use the US International keyboard set up, so I can type special characters, including accented characters. I've also got a Japanese IME, a Greek keyboard, and a custom runic keyboard.

Theming wise, I use the Arc theme (specifically Arc Dark) with the Papirus icon set and El Capitaine cursors. My default font is set to Atkinson Hyperlegible, with i3bar using Noto Sans Mono and my terminal using Fira Mono.

I'm once again back on Firefox. I've got the following addons:

• Awesome RSS — the RSS button Mozilla stole(external link)
• BetterTTV — Twitch tweaks and emotes (external link)
• Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans — For when I can't be assed to do free ML work for Google (external link)
• Consent-O-Matic — Automates those GDPR consent forms, so I don't have to keep saying "No." (external link)
• Cookie AutoDelete — I didn't need those cookies anyways! (external link)
• Decentraleyes — Why load from another server when I've already got it? (external link)
• Disconnect — Tracker blocker (external link)
• Don't "Accept" image/webp — Fuck webp. This addons makes properly configured servers give you a fucking PNG. (external link)
• Enhancer for YouTube — YouTube tweaks(external link)
• HTTPS Everywhere — Makes sites use HTTPS instead if available (external link)
• KeePassXC-Browser — So I don't need to open KeePass and copy-paste (external link)
• Nitter Redirect — Make Twitter redirect to a Nitter instance of your choice (external link)
• Privacy Badger — More tracker blocking (external link)
• Redirector — I use it to redirect Fandom links to BreezeWiki (external link)
• TTV LOL — Twitch adblock! (external link)
• Twitch Chat Pronouns — Set your pronouns and see those of others! (external link)
• uBlock Origin — Ad and content blocker (external link)
• WAVE Evaluation Tool — Accessibility testing; Yes, I try. (external link)
• Wayback Machine — Automates the process of going to Archive.org and punching a URL into the Wayback Machine (external link)
• WhatCampaign — Replace all those utm bits with "FuckOff" (external link)
• Wii Shop Channel Music — RIP Wii Shop. You may be gone, but you'll be in our hearts forever. Anyways, here's an extension that plays the Wii Shop theme on shopping sites (external link)

I also use the Rainbow Blur theme an old acquaintance of mine made. My search engines, as usual, cover a wide range of things, like DuckDuckGo, Wikipedia, shopping sites, Arch Linux related searches, YouTube, some game wikis, and, of course, RationalWiki, who continue to be awesome.

My laptop happens to have the ability to exchange its DVD drive for a second hard drive. Since the DVD drive in it was busted anyways and I had a second hard drive (my old 1 TB WD Blue SSD), I opted to do so. On my second drive, I have a Windows Server 2016 Standard installation. Before you ask, yes, I do actually own a Windows Server 2016 product key. Multiple, in fact, including a Windows Server 2016 Datacenter product key. I almost entirely use that Windows install for games that I can't get working on Linux. That generally means Genshin Impact, though I have spent some time in some other games over there.

Creative Work and the Like

I draw on my laptop. For that I have a Wacom Intuos Pro S. One of these days, I'm hoping to get myself a Cintiq. I'd switch to some other brand, but I'm not aware of any other brands that have pens that don't need batteries, and I really, really love that about Wacom tablets. It's also something I like about the stylus on my first gen Surface Pro, compared to later generations, and the stylus on my Thinkpad X41 Tablet. On the software front, I use Krita. I used to use Photoshop CS 5, then, while running Elementary OS a few years back, I discovered Krita and just never went back. I recently played around with newer versions of Photoshop, but, just, Krita is so much better. So, yeah. If you think free software drawing programs aren't any good because you've only used a certain piece of FOSS drawing software with an ableist name (*cough* GNU Image Manipulation Program *cough*), give Krita a try. I think you'll like it.

I also do some music production. For that, I use LMMS mostly. I used to work on scores in Musescore, but I'm still waiting to see how the Muse Group situation works out after that whole fiasco a while back. After that, I replaced Audacity with a fork called Tenacity and exported everything I was working on in Musescore either to MIDI (where the score wasn't important) or to MusicXML (where the score is what I was after). I've still not gone back to MuseScore, though, admittedly, I've gotten tired of compiling new versions of Tenacity from scratch and have gone back to using Audacity.

Finally, when it comes to coding, I've switched over to Visual Studio Code. I still use emacs here and there, mostly for configuration files and single source files, but VS Code has proven so much nicer for working on FENIX. I like the interface. I like the theme I use. I like the integrated terminal. And, I like the Git repository management tools built-in to the sidebar. I do use emacs keybinds, since I'm used to them. And, for compiling stuff, it's all C compiled on the command line with GCC.

My Phone

Finally, unrelated to my computer, my phone is a white Pixel 3a running LineageOS 19, I think? It's running whichever version of Lineage corresponds to AOSP 12. I liked my old Nexus 5X, but, unfortunately, it finally died for good. I'm still using Nova Launcher. And I'm still with Ting. Like, I've said before, they're pretty cheap if you go light on data. My bill's only about 18 USD a month. So, you know.