My 2020 setup

This post is part of the my setup series.


Update 2023 - updated links to the most current code store - git.cyplo.dev instead of sr.ht

Hello and welcome to the second edition of me doing a summary of the year of using tech tools.

Here’s a list of software and some hardware I find useful, either things that I use daily or things that make an unusual task pleasant instead of incredibly difficult. This is constantly evolving, so please mind the publish date of this post, please also check the last year’s installment as this article will make references to the previous setup.

Laptop, OS and other work hardware

  • Thinkpad T480, the device-specific config lives here.
  • CalDigit TS3 Plus usb-c hub
  • Iiyama ProLite 27" 4K monitor
  • IKEA BEKANT motorised standing desk

No dramatic changes here since the last year, I’m still on NixOS on the T480. Thinkpad got a RAM upgrade to 48GiB and is handling it well, despite it being above it stated memory limit. I’ve also managed to get my home-manager config called from the main system configuration, so now I just need to do sudo nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade once and it does my home-manager setup as well. This allowed me to split the config into modules a bit better.

I’m really happy with the standing desk as it allows me to switch from sitting to standing and back very quickly.

For the USB-C hub, I switched from the StarTech one I had before and this one is much more stable now.

TODOs for 2021:

  • to look into flakes and see if I want to port my config over to that style.

Networking

While I stopped having WiFi speed problems with the purchase of the Netgear R7800 router, it started dropping packets in the summer. I suspect it started overheating, whether it was solely a problem with the hardware itself or was also influenced by where the router was placed and the airflow avaiable I don’t know. As I needed this solved quickly I bought Turris Omnia as a replacement and am quite happy with it.

TODOs for 2021:

  • debug the overheating problem
  • try to port NixWRT to run on R7800

Graphical interface

Running grobi now instead of autorandr but otherwise the config seems to be stabilising.

Secrets management

I have a veracrypt encrypted container, where my secrets reside, with a small set of scripts to mount and unmount it. The container is synced between different machines using syncthing. Inside the container, among other things, there is a password store directory, which I use from either command line or from Firefox.

For when I need to share a secret I use bitwarden as it allows for that in a quite an easy way.

Sync

Syncthing just keeps working, no matter how many devices I attach and what is their configuration. I run it on all my machines, including mobile devices and it just works. This is how I keep all my documents, photos and other data always fresh between all devices. Just make sure to encrypt the data at rest when using it, you don’t want to sync to a device which someone else can take from you and read all the data off of. Sync is also not a replacement for backup, as file deletions and corruption can spread easily across your fleet.

Backups

Here is where I am not that happy with the overall setup, and not that much has changed from 2019. Currently I use restic to package and encrypt the backup and then ship it off of individual machines to my central NAS storage. Then from there it is being copied to Backblaze’s b2 for off-site storage.

I made some progress on bakare, a small backup engine in Rust, but it’s not ready for production use yet. Let me know if you would be interested in collaborating with me on it.

TODOs for 2021:

  • finish bakare ?

Editors

Not much of a change here.

Fonts

I settled on Fira Code Retina for most of my programming and terminal needs.

Terminal

While I still like termite and alacritty, I have switched to kitty lately as it is still quite fast while providing for some fancy shenanigans like graphics in the terminal. I’m not fully happy with my setup yet, as, for example, kitty sometimes requires restart for the graphics feature to work.

Here’s a small collection of other tools I found help a lot when on the terminal:

  • newsboat - a new one on the list, I find it providing a cool and relaxing way of reading RSS in the terminal, see here for my config, including my subscriptions list
  • ripgrep - it is just so much faster than grep
  • fd - same but for find
  • bat - a cooler cat
  • genpass for generating passwords
  • z.lua for faster navigation

TODOs for 2021:

  • make kitty’s image mode always work out of the box

Code hosting

I’m trying to migrate off of GitHub, I’m trying out sr.ht now. I like its simplicity and ease of setup, especially when it comes to the built-in CI.

The end

And that’s it !

I hope you’ll find this list useful and do not hesitate to contact me on blog@cyplo.net if you would have any questions or comments. Happy hacking !

tools 

See also