My Current Hardware
My Current Software
Good Reads
Tools

My Current Hardware

Hardware is my forte; things with finite dimensions and clear purposes. I've worked my way up from destroying modifying my parents' Power Macintosh as a child, through several bizarre eras of mobile phones, copious laptops of various qualities, to the current era of custom-built PCs and trusty Thinkpads.

Current PC build:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 - Great value for money, scaleable and damn powerful. Still a great buy today.
• CPU cooler: Corsair Hydro Series H100x - Not silent at max speeds, but respectable at holding temperatures down.
• Motherboard: MSI B450 Gaming Plus - BIOS is good, has plenty of features, can't complain.
• GPU: Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB - Still a great workhorse if you don't play modern games at max graphics.
• RAM: 2 x 8GB DDR4 2166MHz - Could be upgraded soon, but I don't need any more right now. Speed is fine but not great.
• Case: Corsair 275R White - A dream to work with. Excellent layout and easy to modify.
• PSU: Corsair 750W RGB - The most glorious waste of RGB lights ever conceived. Also it transmits power most respectably.
• SSD: Samsung 980 NVMe M2 1TB
• HDD: 2 x 4TB - For my ever-growing Formula 1 collection and other things I hoard/seed. Due an upgrade soon...
• Monitor: AOC 24" 144Hz - Not great. Way too bright even at the lowest settings, cuts out on rare occasions.

Current laptops:

• Lenovo Thinkpad T410 - The hardy Soviet tank of the electronic world. Magnesium alloy chassis means it can take whatever you throw at it, literally and figuratively. Internal specs are ageing but can be propped up with a lightweight Linux distro. Unfortunately, it also weighs about the same as a Soviet tank.
• Lenovo Thinkpad T460 - A straight tradeoff between more modern specs and more modern business practices from Lenovo. Tech specs are good, but the build quality just isn't as good as it used to be. Still wins smug points though.

My Current Software

The primary achievement of software is the elimination of all exponential gains made by hardware over the last few decades. Software is unseen and therefore not to be trusted. Bloat is the enemy, to be culled at every corner possible.

What I use:

• Operating System: Windows 10 LTSC when I have to, Linux Mint otherwise. Any mainstream Linux distro will do the job these days, but Mint is straightforward and simple with a large userbase to fall back on in case of issues. LTSC makes Windows 10 much more bearable.
• Web Browser: Librewolf, a security-hardened fork of Firefox. Removes the pointless bloat of mainstream Firefox while retaining useability on nearly all sites.
• Browser add-ons:
  • Bitwarden - For password management
  • ClearURLs - Remove tracking elements from URLs
  • Facebook Container - Isolates Facebook activity (including sites where Facebook tracks you, ie. far too many) from the rest of your web activity
  • I don't care about cookies - Removes the cookie banner from most websites, but breaks some
  • LocalCDN - An improvement over Decentraleyes when it comes to CDN protection
  • Minimal theme for Twitter - Making the hellsite more bearable if you have to go on it
  • Return YouTube Dislike - Accuracy may not be perfect but it does the job
  • Save webP as PNG or JPEG (Converter) - Another option for dealing with webp images
  • Search by Image - Reverse image searching on multiple engines at once
  • SponsorBlock for YouTube - Incredibly useful tool for navigating YouTube. Skips crap you don't need and gets straight to the point of videos
  • Tampermonkey - Script manager for various tasks
  • uBlock Origin - The classic adblocker, still unbeaten after a few years of dominance
  • XKit Rewritten - Enhancement suite for Tumblr
  
  
• Torrents :qBittorrent

Good Reads

A list of interesting articles, wikis, and other information relating to anything technology that caught my fancy.

• Privacy Guides - Why to care about internet privacy, and what to do about it
• Web3 Is Going Great - Showing the lies, nonsense and greed of the blockchain/NFT/crypto crowd
• Advertising is a Cancer on Society - A self-explanatory article
• The Website Obesity Crisis - Written in 2015 but more relevant than ever
• Major Linux Problems on the Desktop - Objective and honest criticism of the Linux ecosystem
• Motherfucking Website - A classic
• Better Motherfucking Website - A classic response to the classic
• Perfect Motherfucking Website - A classic response to a classic response to the classic
• Netiquette Guidelines - Written in 1995, and times have certainly changed
• Library of Babel - Every novel, song, and piece of art ever made is in this library...
• ArchWiki - The legendary Arch Linux wiki, as well maintained as ever. Not exactly bedtime reading though
• Text Files - A huge collection of text files from the early days of the internet
• Gwern - Too many good articles here to go into detail, but he's articulate and detailed, far more so than 99% of all sites. Even the About page is a trip

Tools

Beyond the programs and applications we use daily, here's my collection of things for more focused use...

• IntelligenceX - OSINT search engine
• List of Arch Applications - Anything you could ever want
• OSINT Framework - Compilation of OSINT resources
• More to be added here...

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