My computing experience

These are the things I use in my day-to-day computing experience at home. As I enjoy working from my computers and tweaking them, I recommend them all.

My configuration files for some of these softwares can be found on my dotfiles repo on GitJoe. My wallapers can be found on this page.

mother

mother is my main computer. It's a desktop I bought a long time ago and that I have improved over time. To the day of writing, only the motherboard, CPU, and I guess the box are original from the day of the purchase. Nearly everthing else has been replaced/added over time. I like this box, but even the motherboard and CPU are expected to be changed at some point because it is ancient, if not antique.

Its name, mother, is a reference to the on-board computer in the first Alien movie. It's a great film, go take a look.

Hardware

Here is the hardware specs:

• Intel i7-4790 - 3.60GHz, 8 threads
• 28GB RAM - DDR3, 1600MHz
• 500GB NVMe SSD - PCIe card
• 500GB SATA SSD
• 2TB SATA HDD
• 6TB SATA HDD
• MSI GeForce RTX 3070 Ti 8G
• 750W - Mars Gaming MPVU750 power supply
• 2.5G Ethernet PCIe card - RTL8125B

Software

mars

mars, formerly fbsd-tp, has now become my fallback/just-in-case machine. It used to be my main computer over mother, my more beefier machine. As I found myself making music and playing games more frequently, I ditched this low-spec BSD machine over a more high-spec Linux machine.

Hardware

This computer is a ThinkPad T530 and I love it. Unfortunately I bought it used and the previous owner forgot to tell me there was an ugly turtle tattooed on the rear side. This is my only complain. It's not too visible but it's there. The deal was quick, there was not much lighting and the seller opened the screen right away, so I didn't see that ugly turtle until I was home with my new computer.

Here is the hardware specs:

• Intel i5-3320M - 2.60GHz, 4 threads
• 8GB RAM
• 500GB SATA SSD
• 1TB SATA HDD

I know it's not crazy good but I can do all my work and my media consumption with it so I consider myself a tech-happy guy.

Software

Software on this computer is all about minimalism. Well, except for GNU Emacs.

• Text editing

  Custom configured GNU Emacs to be used with vim key bindings. It is not the most lightweight editor out there but I love my config for all kind of coding or text editing. I use the GUI version.

• OS

  FreeBSD 13 is my OS of choice. I left GNU/Linux for BSD about 1 year ago and I never felt the need to go back!

• Window manager

  dwm is my favorite tiling window manager and the only one I use for it is very light and highly extensible.

• Terminal emulator

  st is my favorite terminal emulator. Just like dwm, it's very light and highly extensible.

• Shell

  I use zsh as my only interactive shell.

• Other software

  Here is a small list of programs I use frequently. Most are terminal-based.
  • web browser: Mozilla Firefox for most web browsing. I also use w3m and lynx quite a lot.
  • file manager: lf
  • image viewer: nsxiv
  • video player: mpv
  • music player: mpd + ncmpc
  • pdf viewer: zathura
  • RSS feed reader: newsboat
  • email client: neomutt running with isync and msmtp
  • address book: abook
  • calendar: calcurse
  • IRC client: irssi

• Games

  I haven't played much video games in recent times but here's what I used to play a lot:
  • Kerbal Space Program on my Linux machine, I loved this game!
  • Classic DOOM and Hexen through gzdoom, it runs very smooth on BSD.

athena

Other notable hardware

I have a RaspberryPi 4 I received from a friend as a christmas gift. It runs FreeBSD of course. I use it to learn I2C/GPIO programming with a bit of electronics. I am looking for some projects for it.

I later got into microcontrollers. I own a development Arduino Uno and an ESP32, which is a very interesting chip. I will share projects I have with these things in the future if I find myself finishing a project.

I have a Casio F-91W watch gifted by a friend too so I never loose time. Adult people tend to show more respect towards people wearing watches too, just like they do with people with wives or kids, so there's that. I later bought a Casio A100WEGG-1AVT and a A100WE-1AVT because they're super cool-looking.

Last piece of hardware worth noting is my keyboard: a Leopold FC900R PD with Cherry MX Brown switches. It is so good I plan on buying maybe 5 of them in the future so I don't need to worry and I can just use it the same model for all my life. I might check some of the Unicomp Model M remakes when they are available again.