This is a “Uses” page, detailing some of the tools and other things I use.

Technical

Daily Drive

Hardware

  • Laptop: MacBook Pro 15-inch (2018), MacOS Monterey 12.7.1. A gift from my partner (when she in turn was gifted a laptop by her sister) when I quit my job in 2022. I’d like to experiment with a Linux-based daily driver (especially a Framework, or I’ve heard good things about Linux on Thinkpads), but you can’t beat free!
  • Keyboard: Kinesis Advantage 2. It took me about a month to get back up to my usual typing speed after buying this, but the benefits in terms of (lack of) wrist pain are incalculable. And I don’t even use the super-leet foot-pedal to switch configuration layouts!
  • Mouse: Some kind of Razer something that I was gifted by an old housemate.
  • Screens: Dell 34" Superwide Curved Monitor, plus a LG 32" rotated 90 degrees. I use the latter solely for Slack, Music, and Calendar, whereas the former (in central view) rotates between browser, IDE, terminal, and whatever else (using Rectangle).
  • AV Access KVM. I only acquired this recently. It’s…fine. Unfortunately Macs don’t seem to support two external monitors on a single USB-C, so I have to have one of my external monitors directly wired to my work laptop - but that’s ok, personal work rarely needs more than my main screen anyway.

Software

  • IDE: Visual Studio Code. I used to be a devotee of IntelliJ, but VS Code is the norm at work and it’s been easier just to switch than to deal with differing configuration standards, and I don’t want to have different IDEs for personal and professional work. I will say that it seems to have lower memory consumption so I can still have it open in the background when I play Factorio!
  • Browser: Firefox. Continuing to use Chrome in 2024 is just plain baffling. I’ve yet to hear a compelling case for Edge or IE, or any of the smaller browsers.
  • Terminal: Kitty. I ditched iTerm 2 on principle when they started introducing AI1. So far they have seemed pretty much equivalent tbh.
    • Honourable mention to Warp, which I would definitely pick as a terminal if I was starting out today (if they took out the AI nonsense). It provides out-of-the-box a lot of the customization and usability that I’ve spent years building up in my own dotfiles.
  • Bitwarden for password management. I’d be interested in moving to self-hosted, but I’d want my backups to be way better-tested before doing so - this is a real central point of failure for life!
  • Rectangle is a super-useful tool to rearrange windows on Mac.
  • fzf (direct GitHub link, but that article does a better job of explaining the value) for Fuzzy Find in the terminal.
  • Tailscale for VPN. Believe the hype - it’s magical.

Homelab

Hardware

  • Three Raspberries Pi, and a PowerEdge R430 that I got cheap and refurbished thanks to a tip from a friend.
  • iX Systems TrueNAS R-Series, 64GB RAM, 1x1.9TB SSD, 7x6TB HDD, 4xEmpty for expansion. Probably overkill, but I’d rather give myself some room to grow than have to deal with data migrationd and repooling regularly!
  • Sysracks 12U 35" Rack.
  • Quotom Mini PC w/ 8GB RAM, 64GB SSD, running OPNSense as Firewall and Router
  • Ubiquiti UniFi AP AC Pro. I set this up about 4 years ago, and I remember it being a real arse to get working with multiple false starts, but since then it’s been pretty much flawless. I briefly experimented with an Eero mesh but that dropped out and needed a restart about every couple of weeks.

Software

  • k3s is a super-simple way to install a Kubernetes cluster on “something as small as a Raspberry Pi”. I’m sure it’s probably missing some of the bells-and-whistles of the more fully-featured installations, but I’ve never hit any limitations that mattered to me. You can see the setup in the pi-tools2 repo that I use to configure my homeserver. Configuration and installation is just these two lines, though there are another 70 or so lines of installing convenience resources (which I should really migrate to a full GitOps location, but eh, who has the time?)
    • Helm and ArgoCD are invaluable for defining and deploying Kubernetes applications, respectively.
    • I have really enjoyed what tinkering I’ve done with cdk8s for Infrastructure-As-Code, but haven’t used it in earnest yet. I have been able to use some jsonnet to achieve some pretty terse application definitions, though.

More detail to follow! TL;DR - Gitea, Vault, Drone CI (would love to drop that), Grafana, OpenProject, Jellyfin, Crossplane, democratic-csi, KeyCloak, HomeAssistant.

  1. Yes, I know it was opt-in. It still indicates decision-making that I don’t want to support. ↩︎

  2. the naming is somewhat out-of-date, since I’ve added a non-Pi PowerEdge to the cluster - but hey, all engineers know there’s nothing to permanent as a temporary name! ↩︎