13 May, 2019

Setup

My daily drivers — hardware and software

Hardware

The only computer I have with me is my HP Envy 13 (2018) (my model looks a little different). It’s a 13” ultrabook, with an i5 8250u, 8 gigs of RAM and a 256 GB NVMe SSD. It’s a very comfy machine that does everything I need it to.

For my phone, I use a OnePlus 6T, running stock OxygenOS. As of this writing, its bootloader hasn’t been unlocked and nor has the device been rooted. I’m also a proud owner of a Nexus 5, which I really wish Google rebooted. It’s surprisingly still usable and runs Android Pie, although the SIM slot is ruined and the battery backup is abysmal.

My watch is a Samsung Gear S3 Frontier. Tizen is definitely better than Android Wear.

My keyboard, although not with me in college, is a very old Dell SK-8110. For the little bit of gaming that I do, I use a HP m150 gaming mouse. It’s the perfect size (and color).

For my music, I use the Bose SoundLink II. Great pair of headphones, although the ear cups need replacing.

And the software

My distro of choice for the past ~1 year has been elementary OS. I used to be an Arch Linux elitist, complete with an esoteric window manager, all riced. I now use whatever JustWorks™. If you want, you can dig through my old configs at my dotfiles repo.

Here’s a screenshot of my desktop. It’s stock Pantheon with my cool terminal tweaks, which I’ll talk about below.

Most of my work is done in either the browser, or the terminal. My shell is pure zsh, as in no plugin frameworks. It’s customized using built-in zsh functions. Yes, you don’t actually need a framework. It’s useless bloat. The prompt itself is generated using a framework I built in Nim — nicy. My primary text editor is nvim. Again, all configs in my dotfiles repo linked above. I manage all my passwords using pass(1).

I use a DigitalOcean droplet (BLR1) as a public filehost, found at x.icyphox.sh. The UI is the wonderful serve, by ZEIT. The same box also serves as my IRC bouncer and OpenVPN (TCP), which I tunnel via SSH running on 443. Campus firewall woes.

I plan on converting my desktop back at home into a homeserver setup. Soon™.