computers
last touched: 2026-09-10
This is the "I will spend six hours configuring something for a five-minute payoff" section of the site. No apologies. This includes the parts of the hobby that touch security, because understanding how things break is part of understanding how they work - not because I want to look like a movie hacker. There is no Matrix rain here. I promise.
desk & desktop
Daily driver runs Linux with Hyprland as the window manager, tiled and customized well past the point of reasonable return. Config is version-controlled, obviously - an unversioned dotfiles setup is just a disaster with extra steps.
| component | choice |
|---|---|
| window manager | Hyprland |
| shell | fish |
| terminal | kitty |
| editor | VSCodium |
| distro | Arch Linux |
Currently running the illogical-impulse dots on top of Hyprland, which comes with its own notification daemon, an "antiFlashbang" trap so switching workspaces at 2am doesn't nuke my retinas, and a Do Not Disturb setup I've rebound at least four different ways. Config lives in a repo, obviously - nothing here survives without version control.
homelab
I run a small homelab because self-hosting things is more interesting to me than trusting someone else's server with my data, and because it's a good excuse to buy hardware I "need."
- Hardware: one repurposed Dell Latitude laptop doing 24/7 duty as a server (SSH alias:
latitude). Not glamorous. Works fine. - Running on it: Uptime Kuma, Vaultwarden, Tailscale, AdGuard Home, Syncthing, changedetection.io, PrivateBin, a Discord bot, and a couple of dashboards I built to keep an eye on all of the above.
- Incident I'll admit to: I audited the Vaultwarden setup one night and discovered it had exactly zero backup coverage. Zero. It had been running like that the whole time. Fixed same night.
security & tinkering
I like pulling things apart to see how they work, which naturally bleeds into an interest in security: how systems fail, how they get hardened, why "just patch it" is never actually just anything.
- Found a hardcoded Discord bot token sitting in plaintext while building a stats dashboard for my own bot. Nobody else was going to catch that one, so that's now a permanent reminder to check my own code like it's someone else's.
- Lost a weekend proving that Upscayl silently corrupts its output to a solid black image on my AMD iGPU when you use the standard model with auto tiling - the fix was the lite model plus a manually forced tile size. No error message, no warning, just a black square where an upscaled image should be.
hardware graveyard
Every tinkerer has a box of things that used to work. Mine contains:
- an old laptop that lost a fight with a botched partition resize and never fully recovered
- a USB drive labeled "IMPORTANT BACKUP" that I'm now too afraid to plug in and check
- a Raspberry Pi that is "just about to be repurposed" for going on two years now
uses page
The classic personal-site staple. A living list, will drift out of date immediately.
- OS: Arch Linux, Hyprland on top
- Terminal: kitty
- Editor: VSCodium