127 lines
4.8 KiB
Markdown
127 lines
4.8 KiB
Markdown
Title: The Setup / Neale Pickett
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Time-stamp: <2016-06-03 10:47:45 neale>
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After reading [Russ Cox's setup](http://russ.cox.usesthis.com/)
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I thought it might be interesting to write up my own.
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Who are you, and what do you do?
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--------------------------------
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I am a system programmer and computer forensics researcher at Los
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Alamos National Laboratory.
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Mostly I hack around the periphery of free software projects,
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occasionally tossing patches to projects that capture my interest.
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A partial portfolio is on my [source code page](http://woozle.org/neale/src/).
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I also do computer security training for middle and high school kids,
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college students, and professionals.
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You can read about that at [dirtbags](http://dirtbags.net/).
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My hobbies include being a (laid back) disc jockey,
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and fiddling around with microcontrollers.
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I'm active in the local maker community.
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I try to minimize energy use,
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and to minimize how many mysterious devices are in the house.
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These goals used to be at odds with one another,
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but recently the two seem to go hand in hand.
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My Home Computer
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--------
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I use a Thinkpad X220 that is usually hooked up to a docking station
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and external monitor. Connected to the dock is a Happy Hacking Lite 2
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keyboard and Logitech M310 mouse, a Logitech webcam, some old
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Sennheiser headphones, and a pair of inexpensive Amazon speakers.
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I run Arch Linux with the Gnome 3 desktop,
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which is the first Linux desktop environment I actually like.
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I think this is mostly because it doesn't try to do many tricks.
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I use emacs shell-mode for most command-line work, and
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a comint-mode derivative I created for SSH.
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I don't usually run any sort of terminal emulator:
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everything is `TERM=dumb` inside my emacs SSH sessions.
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My other main program is Google Chrome,
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with the Flash plugin disabled.
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Occasionally I will run Gimp, Inkscape, or Mixxx.
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The Family's Computers
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-----------------
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My wife uses a Chromebook from 2016, which she loves, and my daughter
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mostly uses her mobile phone and our 7-inch tablet. There's a 2011
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Chromebook in the house that gets used occasionally, too,
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mostly for Google Docs.
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Sometimes my wife logs into my laptop, to run Chrome on a bigger screen.
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My daughter has an X220 that she used to play Minecraft on,
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but it doesn't get much use since Minecraft PE added most of the features she liked.
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Other Home Network-Connected Devices
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-------------------
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I brought in a Google OnHub wireless router in an effort to demystify
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the router for my family. It worked.
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We also got a couple of Nest thermostats to test the claim that they
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pay for themselves. This would probably be true if we had air
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conditioning in the house, but we haven't saved enough on heating yet.
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But it is handy that they turn the heat off when you leave the house,
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and several times we have twiddled the temperature while out of town,
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usually to pre-heat the house when we're arriving late on a cold night.
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We have a Brother laser printer that connects wirelessly and speakes Google Cloud Print.
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I can no longer print natively from Linux,
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but it turns out I don't really want to print things from Linux much anymore.
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Google Cloud Print lets you submit a PDF through a web form,
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so it's not a big problem.
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We also have a Chromecast that's mostly used for Netflix,
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and a hacked Wii with a few movies on a connect USB hard drive.
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Our television is *not* a "smart TV" and I really hope we can avoid ever having to bring such a thing in to the house, they seem slow and buggy, not to mention the ads.
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Our car is an all-electric Tesla Model S, which is offset by a small
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solar array on the roof. The car has an ext4-formatted USB flash
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drive plugged in, with our entire music collection.
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Mobile Computing
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-----------------------
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The family shares a Nexus 7 tablet.
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My wife and daughter use Nexus 5x phones,
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and I use a Nexus 6.
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My wife and I wear Pebble smartwatches.
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What would be your dream setup?
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-------------------------------
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I'm pretty happy with what I have now,
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although I wish I had time to get Acme working for me as nicely as Emacs,
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since I am not an Emacs fan.
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The thing holding me back is Acme's reliance on special fonts that have not kept pace with Unicode's expansion,
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although I need to take another look at the "use system fonts" setup it can do.
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It bothers me that X11 is such a horrible mess,
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but now that I'm not maintaining my own window manager,
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it's less of a concern.
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I'm looking forward to Gnome working under Wayland:
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Wayland's compositing architecture is the Right Thing,
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especially in light of the fact that modern desktops like Gnome
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already hack around X11 to get (slow) compositing.
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I'd like to get my daughter off her X220 and onto a Chromebook,
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because I feel like desktop system administration is a skill she will never need as an adult.
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But it's not enough of a concern to make me actually do anything about it.
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