Uses

Haven’t written anything here this year yet. Here’s my uses page!

Hardware

My desktop is a custom build that I put together about a year ago (Jan 2023). Here’s the part list on pcpartpicker. It’s super beefy and runs any- and everything with no complaints. Getting to this point was a little painful as the graphics card I bought was open box from Micro Center. After two RMAs, MSI ended up sending me a brand new card.

Important Specs:

• i9-13900k
• RTX 4080
• 64 GB RAM

For a laptop I have a Framework 13. I’ve been super happy with that as an on-the-go device.

My phone is a Pixel 6a. It does the trick, but I’m still angry they removed the headphone jack.

I have a random collection of old laptops and desktops that I’m using as a home proxmox cluster. This site is hosted on one of the computers on that rack.

any homelab folks out there? feeling glad that electricity is relatively cheap here

[image or embed]

— ben (@benharr.is) May 15, 2023 at 2:13 PM

For servers, I’m not even sure at this point. I think my wikipage is up to date.

Software

You can find my dotfiles here.

I use Firefox as my browser on all my devices.

I do email in Thunderbird on desktop, and Aqua Mail on my phone.

Most days, I’ll boot into windows 11 on my desktop to remote into my $dayjob development VM (the VMware remote client runs better on windows). I also have a linux dual-boot setup but I hardly bother rebooting to switch. I’ve been playing videogames quite a bit lately and haven’t taken the time to set up linux gaming on the other drive.

My laptop is running Fedora and I’m currently running KDE. GNOME is also fine. Use what you like 🙂

Text editor is vim and/or sublime text. I use Visual Studio and Jetbrains Rider for the C# I do at work.

I use fish shell as my main interactive shell, and some of the most common tools I use are ripgrep, fzf, and a bunch of aliases and shell scripts I’ve built up over the years.

For IRC, I use weechat. I’ve written previously about my setup. I use weechat-android on my phone to keep up to date.

Password manager is KeepassXC, and keepassdx on android. I use Syncthing for my files, including my keepass db file, and all the associated files in my pubdir (separate synced dirs).

My phone number is on jmp.chat, so I use XMPP to send and receive SMS. I run the cheogram client on my phone to integrate with the system dialer. On desktop, I tend to SMS from my weechat via bitlbee.

My font of choice is Berkeley Mono, an absolutely fantastic font. Runners up are Input Mono and Jetbrains Mono.

This site is WordPress, but it was previously in several different incarnations, starting from a very old WordPress site, then I switched at some point to bashblog. That grew tiring to deal with once you have more than a handful of posts. I switched to hugo, which I also wrote about. I guess I’m more of a GUI guy than I thought because I ended up going back to WordPress at some point last year.

Since I got deep into pinball over the last couple years, I use Match Play to run the two weekly tournaments here in TC. The tcpinball.org site is also WordPress, and I use the Jetpack plugin to publish new posts on the various social media pages we have for that.