Here are the list of some of the stuff that I used for my daily computing (as of February 2024). Note that not all of the stuff in this list are free and/or open source. There are some proprietary things I do use for compatibility reasons, but around 80% of what I am presenting here are mostly free and open source software.
I'm still using the same MSI GP62 computer which I have done a few upgrades to including more RAM, repaste of the thermal liquid and more storage. However, I have recently wiped the drive clean and put Debian 12 with the GNOME environment, which I have familiarized myself with since Fedora 38, on it. It's been a great year with Fedora but it's time I come back home. I have also been looking to upgrade this old thing to something more modern and planning to give this beast to someone else because this computer, with all its upgraded guts, is still a very capable machine - it's just that I'm not a fan of big, bulky laptops and the fact that it revs up everytime I'm doing something intensive is unacceptable. I need something more portable and light to work with, in which one of the upgrade contenders is a (gasps) MacBook Air M1. Unbelievable. I'm also considering trying out BSD-based operating systems for a change.
I do not self-host a website as I do not have time to maintain any equipment and/or software. Instead, I hosted this website using Neocities which is an open source fork of the old Geocities (you know, the place where they used to have lots of this Space Jam-esque websites). I edit individual pages by hand using my preferred text editor - Emacs. Sometimes when I want to do quick and dirty editing i.e. grammatical errors that I didn't spot while writing blog entries I do it online through Neocities' own editing page. However, I mostly prefer editing offline.
This website was handled by pure HTML as stated in this entry. I do not use any JavaScript on this website in order to maintain near backwards compatibility with most devices on this planet, to avoid the "modern web bloat" as much as possible, and also to avoid using any non-free scripts at all costs. As a result, you should be able to access this website using an old Unix terminal, your old Windows 98 laptop or your old mobile devices that are still capable of going on the Internet. I also do not use CSS because I wish to retain simplicity on this website.
I have tried to incorporate an RSS feed into this website, but because I update things manually the RSS feed acts quite wonky so I don't use it.
The browsers that I use right now in 2024 consists of:
I've been using both ProtonMail and Tutanota as my email providers. In my opinion both providers gave me an almost equal amount of privacy, with Tutanota having a slight edge of having the ability to turn off and on encryption. However, I much prefer ProtonMail's interface just for ease of use alone, and I still use Thunderbird as my mail client.
I have not used any email service from major tech companies for more than 10 years, with an exception being Gmail which I still used to access some legacy Google services. However as of 2024 those services are beginning to get killed off by Google so my regular usage of Gmail begins to phase out entirely.
I actually recommend you to switch from any email service linked to big tech companies e.g. Gmail, Outlook.com or Yahoo Mail and switch to a more privacy-based email service instead - ProtonMail is (still) the easiest to set up and get into, or better yet, host your own e-mail server as a more futureproof alternative.
I use Emacs + markdown-mode + Org mode for every writing work since 2023. I'm too comfortable within this environment that I don't really see the need to switch to other applications. I even stopped using word processors entirely as I no longer see the need for my own cases. That came with a side effect of me accidentally using Emacs keybindings inside other applications e.g. Ctrl+N for moving to the next line completely out of habit and totally unaware that they don't do the same thing as Emacs does. A long time before I commit myself to Emacs I have been using Vim and its modern fork Neovim for some years before moving to KDE Kate briefly. I'll probably continue to use Emacs until any unforeseen future comes which again, I doubt.
I use kitty as my terminal emulator inside GNOME, and most of the time I ran Emacs inside it. I used to use st from suckless, but I don't like the fact that each configuration change means a recompile each time. Something like kitty is more efficient in terms of configuration, and the fact that it offloads to your GPU means less latency between my finger and the actions that happened on screen. Before that I use GNOME's own Terminal and Konsole + Yakuake (KDE's drop-down terminal) but I decided in the end that I like kitty best. I also occasionally switch to tty - my shell is zsh.
I use either Nautilus built in to GNOME or Dired within Emacs. Within Emacs I have installed OpenWith which allows me to look at PDFs or video files using evince/okular or mpv instead of Dired's garbled output. I used to use lf but I much prefer Dired now just because of a simpler syntax.
I use mpv as my primary media player for a long time. In my opinion no media player allows you so much freedom to customize its inner workings to the point that the application immediately borked at launch, so I like it. In terms of online consumption I'm using Piped.video to watch content from YouTube. The reason I use it is because it has the greatest feature that should be an ability with every video streaming site: the ability to skip sponsorship or unrelated segments in the video, which you cannot do with a typical video streaming player. It also doesn't have ads at all. I have also been using Invidious through the yewtu.be instance in conjunction with Piped.video.
I mainly listen to music from my personal music library using ncmpcpp or streaming off YouTube via piped.video. I encoded all my music files using either FLAC or Opus for freedom's sake.
I used to own a Spotify account for a few years but I have since disconnected my association with it, in favor of listening to public radio or listening to music from my own music file. That way I do not give support to DRM-based services. However, if people around me stream music from Spotify (or any other streaming services) and I am not the person who's controlling or using that particular service directly, then I have no problem listening to music coming from those services.
I do not use any streaming service to watch films. I still own a stack of films on physical media or I could torrent the film I want to watch on my computer as well. Personally I just find paying an amount of money you could use to buy a copy of a certain film on physical media to a streaming service where you don't even own that film kind of stupid, plus there is a DRM issue which I do not tolerate in any way. Moreover I do not watch movies that regularly anymore, so there is no need for me to pay for a streaming service.
I have some experiences (read: wrote a few small programs in my free time or just straight up modifying other people's code) with Python and Lisp but I have almost never spent prolonged time programming with those two languages as my main work have always been editing text, creating documents and reading/sending e-mails, so most of my time were spent writing markdown languages. Other than that I've skimmed through C a while back, learned a few bits of PHP but never really took it seriously and I've never learned JavaScript.
As for speaking languages (they are as important as programming languages) I speak, write and read in both Thai and English. I have attempted to learn Chinese, Polish, German and Spanish in the past but the efforts all fell through. I do know a few words in Chinese however, as that is the third language I learned in high school.
Copyright (C) 2023, 2024 Po Kamnuandej under CC BY-SA.
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