uses

I often get asked about my computing setup—my computers, the software I run on them, how I host my services, and other choices of personal technology. This is a relatively up-to-date list detailing what I’m currently using.

personal laptop (lapis)

My primary laptop that I use for everything non-work is my Asus ROG Flow X13 (2021). It’s got a Ryzen 9 5900HS, Nvidia GTX 1650 Max-Q, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. I bought this machine in early 2022, when I was working remotely as a contractor. The 4K display doesn’t help with its battery life (about 7 hours) but it looks absolutely fantastic.

flow x13 at oodi

This laptop currently runs NixOS. I would ideally like to run OpenBSD, but I figured I’d make use of its GPU for the occasional game and run Linux instead; NixOS just seemed like the least-shit choice. I like its declarative approach to system configuration, but I won’t pretend—I’d have much preferred a more sane language like Lua.

Other software I use on this machine:

work laptop (kvothe)

For work, I use a 14” M1 MacBook Pro. I use nix-darwin to configure most of my basic applications (neovim, tmux, bash, …). Software of note:

home server (denna)

denna under the table

My latest addition. I bought this HP EliteDesk on Tori.fi for a princely sum of 60 EUR. It has an i5 6500, 8GB of RAM and a 500GB HDD. I installed OpenBSD on it at work by wiring it up to a monitor using DisplayPort (it does not have HDMI). It now runs very quitely under my table, plugged into the router.

I didn’t feel like paying my ISP for a static IP and since I work for a cloud provider, I spun up a VPS with a public IP and setup a quick Nginx TCP proxy to forward traffic to my home server.

stream {
        server {
                listen 80;
                listen [::]:80;
                proxy_pass denna:80;
        }
        server {
                listen 443;
                listen [::]:443;
                proxy_pass denna:443;
        }
}

Then, using httpd(8) and relayd(8) I run a few services (with more to come):

other technology

Some hardware and software that are in frequent use across all my devices: