Uses

I suppose making one of these pages is a right of passage.
In general I find that older, simpler stuff tends to be more usable in practice than newer “better” kit.

I’ve written way more than you could possible want to read about this topic.

I buy almost everything used, and have explicitly marked things I bought new.

When I say way more, I mean it, you have been warned.

Analogue Stuff

I carry a notebook and pencil with me everywhere I go, and its probably the best habit I ever picked up. I would wholeheartedly encourage you to do the same. My wallet fits a small notebook and pencil that I use for notes, grocery lists, phone numbers etc. and I generally also have an a5 workbook in my bag for actually writing.

Nothing fancy or notable, just generic stuff you can pick up anywhere, I’m partial to regular pencils over mechanical ones.

I keep a paper diary.

I do not like waste, as much as possible I avoid using disposable cups and packaging and do not buy bottled water or soft drinks when out and about.
One of the best gifts I’ve ever received was a stainless steel insulated water bottle, again nothing notable or fancy, but used constantly.
I generally also carry a glass bottle filled with juice or flavoured water that I bring from home, and/or a small flask of black coffee.

Carrying all this stuff around is probably a bit weird but I’ve used the same kit for ages and it works well. I was halfway through writing a diatribe about clothing and hiking kit but its too spergy even for this kind of page so I’ve cut it.

Technology

My approach to the technology I use has changed markedly over the last few years.
When I was younger I was quite invested in following the latest hardware and software trends, tinkering with things to push performance, making stuff pretty.

Now I just like things that work, with a minimum of fuss and maintenance, I tend not to change things unless I absolutely need to, or it will make life simpler.

I’ve written a bit elsewhere about my attitude towards buying new stuff and “upgrade” culture, I don’t think I’ve made a hardware change I haven’t regretted in the last decade.

Hardware

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Laptop:

  • Lenovo Thinkpad T490
  • i5-8265u
  • 16GB DDR4 2400MHZ

The worst laptop I’ve ever owned, lazily put together, poorly designed, thoroughly enshittified compared to the same series even 5 years ago. I got it for £100 on ebay, which should have been a steal.
The factory didn’t apply any thermal paste to the GPU, the previous owner never noticed, and as a result there is a scorch mark clean through the copper plating on the heatspreader over the GPU that no amount of thermal paste will ever make up for.
In all ways save weight a worse machine than the T410 I bought when I was 16 for the same money.
Despite my hatred, it does everything I actually need a computer for.
Then again, that T410 did as well, and I didn’t want to shoot that machine.

Slowly but surely dying as a result of both charging ports being poorly supported and soldered to the mainboard, both are now malfunctioning, I could have a go at soldering new ones on when they finally crap out but I really don’t want to, even if that’s ideologically inconsistent of me, I hate this goddamn laptop.

Phone:

  • Pixel 4a 5G
  • Earphones: Moondrop Chu 2 (bought new)

Its fine I guess, no more evil than any other smartphone, actually slightly less so, as its degoogled and debloated. I really dislike having a smartphone, but my life is spread across 3 countries and everything needs an app now so w/e.

I’m pretty happy with the Chu’s, they are comfortable, sound good, and have held up well so far.
One of the things I bought new, as I have to stick them into my ears and there were no trustworthy used listings when I looked.

Watch(es):

  • Casio W-86-1VQES (bought new)
  • Citizen BM8180-03E
  • Watra mechanical (model number unknown)

Three watches?, >1?, bloat, absolute bloat.

The Casio was bought new as I wanted an actual genuine casio which meant buying it in person from an actual honest to God shop. Bought to replace my previous W86 that nobly sacrified itself saving my wrist from a barbed wire fence I fell headfirst over in 2015 (It still works, but there’s a hole in the crystal and its no longer waterproof)

The Citizen was bought because I liked it, and I wanted something that wasn’t ostentatious, that could be worn in regular life with normal clothes and also with a suit for the couple days a year I can’t get out of wearing one. I wish it didn’t have a day/date complication, it muddies the watch face and I don’t find it all that useful.

The Watra is a mechanical dress watch.

A small (~17mm) steel body watch with black leather band, grey face, gold hands and hour marks, the seconds are on their own complication, a sub dial at the 6 O’clock position. Likely Swiss movement inside, from the golden era of Swiss watches between the War and the Quartz crisis, Watra seems to have been a French company, they went under long ago. I got it for £10 off of Ebay because I thought it was interesting, and it is. I usually regretted these kinds of special interesty impulse purchases1 but not this one.

I never really wear this watch, its tiny, even on my skinny wrists it looks too small.
But its pretty, and unusual, and from a bygone era, it checks my boxes.

  1. I try not to make them anymore, just ride them out, or divert the impulse into research and rabbit holes. Suffering is the badge of all my tribe. ↩︎

Software

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Computers:

  • OS: Debian 12, It works, it doesn’t break, I don’t use anything new enough to give me issues
  • DE: KDE Plasma 5.27, I don’t particularly like KDE, its a kluttered kollection of kruft and kludgy krap, but I haven’t found anything worth switching to, particularly as its the only DE with decent fractional scaling
  • Go to software

    • Text Editor: Kate, its included, it works well, its featureful enough, the annoying settings are easily turned off, no reason to look for anything else yet.

    • Browser: Librewolf (firefox fork), its fine I guess, lack of vertical tabs is annoying as hell but its coming soon(tm). I use it because I’ve always used firefox, I use the following extensions:

      • uBlock Origin
      • I don’t care about cookies
      • Onetab
      • Consent-O-Matic
      • Dark Reader (default this to off and switch it on as needed, it ruins many sites)
      • Block Site

    • Video: Haruna, one of the other actually good KDE programs, a nice, easy to use MPV frontend

    • Music Player: I bounce between Strawberry and ncmpc

    • Media acquisition: Bandcamp, Ebay, Nicotine+, Qbittorent, Stremio, Freetube.

    • Email: Betterbird (Thunderbird fork), w/mailbox.org. I was using Tuta but the service and apps were poor. Free email isn’t free, get a decent email provider. I did briefly self host, but it was a pain in the ass and not something I had fun doing, so I stopped.

    • IRC: Konversation

    • RSS: Newsboat, a very nice terminal program that displays text only. I like it because its dead simple to manage, its very legible on my terrible laptop screen, and it only updates the feeds when I open the program and manually refresh, no rudely bombarding people’s websites with requests, no getting blocked for spamming.

    • Synchronisation: Syncthing

  • Search engine: None, they’re all unusable dogshit, I sometimes geek when I’m trying to drill into a topic, but even that is getting less worthwhile as time goes on.

Phone:

  • Graphene OS:

    • Probably the best mobile experience you can get, very well put together, runs quick, very clean install, banking apps work, no google, no bullshit out of the gate.

  • Apps:

    • I use F-Droid (with the IzzyOnDroid repo) for most things, and Aurora Store for the play store apps I need

    • From F-Droid:

      • Goodtime - Minimalist Pomodoro Timer - A simple productivity timer
      • OSMAnd~ - OpenStreet Maps based navigation, works extremely well, supports downloading offline maps
      • Breezy Weather - A very good weather app
      • Transistor - A nice internet radio app
      • mLauncher - A simple text based launcher
      • Sobriety - For tracking bad habits
      • Syncthing - As above, but on mobile
      • K9 Mail - Mail client

    • Direct Install:

      • Poweramp - The best android music player
      • Grayjay - A decent youtube frontend, has plugins for a bunch of other sites I don’t use, used mostly to listen to music mixes. I no longer use this as I don’t like using my phone more than I have to, but kept it on here because its worth mentioning