Software
Core Operating System Stack (CCE)
- NixOS is used to declare a Linux desktop and Wobserver
- Emacs is a programmable application environment with a text editor built in
- i3wm is simple enough. I used EXWM but it might be Software Too Powerful for Mortals.
- Evil Mode gives me text-interaction powers that are tough to beat, modal standard which is flexible and applicable to spaces outside of text editing.
- Syncthing makes sure that important data is in-sync and in-place.
- A Basic Firefox Installation with some customisation is nearly a suitable user agent.
Feeds and Mail reader
- Syncing Maildirs with mbsync is hard and brittle, but better than anything else
- Gnus (with evil-mode bindings) is powerful and easy to use
- Universal Aggregator
provides a way to feed information in to Gnus, be it RSS or twitter
feeds, or whatever. Extending it is as trivial as writing a program
which emits
JSON
objects and manages to keep its state enough to not repeat object IDs. - Adaptive Scoring is important. user-transparent machine learning and a pattern that more systems can use. This is only implemented in Gnus but I have a sketch of Decoupled Adaptive Scoring that I would love to see exist some day.
- Wallabag captures articles and makes them available on mobile and KOreader Tablet where KOReader Notes can be extracted in to my Knowledge Base.
Org-Mode as Knowledge Base
- It's a blogging platform
- It's a computational notebook
- It's a task-tracking app which can notify you and inform you of what work is pending and important.
- It's a text format with a powerful API
- It's an eco-system of simple applications which all operate on the same text format.
- It's a programmable Hypermedia document format
Mobile Software
Hardware
Current State
- Dell R410 server hosted at the Westin building exchange by Wobscale
- Home-built desktop running Windows for Gameing
- NixOS on the Framework Laptop
- Cosmo Communicator (bricked) -> Moto G -> Astro Slide by Planet Computers (soon)
In-flight and aspirational
- 3d-printed Trackpoint Corne or atreus with trackball – some custom Mechanical Keyboard
- Linux mobile handheld with a hardware keyboard addon1
- Dual-screen laptop like Yoga Book or Surface Neo as the perfect
e-reader for textbooks and PDF papers
- simple to use a usb mechanical keyboard in this context!
Footnotes
a Psion-style keyboard which uses the standard extension header interface: https://www.pine64.org/2020/07/29/invitation-to-play-along/
they ended up building a simple clamshell design at the end of it, which is fine enough but no where near the sort of thing the Astro Slide by Planet Computers will supposedly bring. I'll tolerate Android and impurity and run Nix on Android somehow.↩︎