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Title: The Setup / Neale Pickett
After reading [Russ Cox's setup](http://russ.cox.usesthis.com/)
I thought it might be interesting to write up my own.
29 December, 2015
Who are you, and what do you do?
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I am a system administrater at Canonical (the people who make Ubuntu).
Mostly I hack around the periphery of free software projects,
occasionally tossing patches to projects that capture my interest.
A partial portfolio is on my [source code page](src/).
I also do computer security training for middle and high school kids,
college students, and professionals.
You can read about that at [dirtbags](http://dirtbags.net/).
My hobbies include being a (laid back) disc jockey,
and fiddling around with microcontrollers.
Hardware
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I've decided to be very energy conscious.
This means my hardware is low-power and not high-performance.
I use a Thinkpad X220.
My wife uses a Chromebook from 2011, which she loves,
and my daughter has an X220 that she doesn't turn on much.
We have a brother printer that connects wirelessly and speakes Google Cloud Print.
I can no longer print natively from Linux,
which has mattered exactly once in the last two years.
The family shares a Nexus 7 tablet,
my wife and daughter have Nexus 5x phones,
and I have a Nexus 6.
We also have a Chromecast that's mostly used for Netflix,
and a Wii.
Software
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I run Ubuntu with the Gnome 3 desktop,
which is the first Linux desktop environment I actually like.
I think this is mostly because it doesn't try to do many tricks.
Inside Emacs I run Gnus for work email,
and a comint-mode derivative I created for bouncing around work machines with SSH.
I don't run any sort of terminal emulator:
everything is `TERM=dumb` inside my emacs SSH sessions.
My other main program is Google Chrome.
Occasionally I will run Gimp and Inkscape, too.
What would be your dream setup?
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I'm pretty happy with what I have now,
although I wish I had time to get Acme working for me as nicely as Emacs,
since I am not an Emacs fan.
It bothers me that X11 is such a horrible mess,
but now that I'm not maintaining my own window manager,
it's less of an issue.
I'd like to get my daughter off her X220 and onto a Chromebook,
because I feel like desktop system administration is a skill she will never need as an adult.
But it's not enough of a concern to make me actually do anything about it.