About

Software and tools I use daily

Hardware

At my home office, I use a HP notebook 540 with windows 7 installed. I use PowerShell with 1 monitor connected

Keyboard

I use a standard HP keyboard.It's fine, works great; only annoyance is it'snot mechanical, I'm a big fan of HP like the way most geeks prefer Thinkpads There is something I like about it that I can't really explain though.

OS / Desktop

I use AlphineLinux booted on my disc drive. All the tools I need to do my job run on Windows 7 I don't think I could do my job running on Linux, I probably could on a mac but then I would have to use a mac.

Software

Enough about hardware, let's talk software.

Terminal

I use Minsgw-terminal for my terminal.

Text editor

I use Vscodium as my text editor, not to much going on here as well but I write all my notes, code and basically anything else that requires writing something in Vscodium and programs related to C/C++ in TurboC++.

SSH

To connect to servers I use Putty. love it, it's an amazing tool for more then just connecting to servers. I also use it to port forward and all sorts. It's amazing just how far you can get by punching holes in ssh servers and chaining all those connections together to get into (or out off) somewhere you should not be

VPN

I don't use a VPN for now but I do have a firewall enabled on my laptop and a random Mac address changer

Programming things

Languages

My favourite programming language is C but sometimes Python. I use Python mainly to scrape websites and apis with the Flask or Django framework and also to automate a lot of things. I use C/C++ also mostly I prefer to use C only

I use Lua for my mini game or server side projects

Currently learning JavaScript along with SQL.

Apparently my friends on Reddit lured me into learning Go which I'm quite enjoying

Started learning Haskell as the only fuunctional programming language l knew but I dropped it due to I keep thinking about what a Monad is

Saying that I write most of my systems administration scripts in shell because it just makes sense. Whenever I try and write the same scripts in python they tend to just look like a shell script written in python. Although I do sometimes miss the data structures that python provides.

DevOps

For virtual machines my preferred method is using Qemu. It's already there on Linux servers (basically) and really easy to configure and start using. There is also a terraform provider so it ties in with devops tools very well. Proxmox is a good choice for enterprise use here, or just a fancy homelab. It gives a really powerful GUI to the KVM and many advanced features, it also just handles storage and also lets you spin up LXC containers which is very cool.

I use ansible for config management and deployment. I don't have to many reasons for or against this software, It's the one I chose, it does the job well and works for me. That said it can be a pain sometimes and I find myself wishing I was just using python instead, but that almost certainly means that I am writing my ansible playbooks wrong or that it's not the right tool for the job - A failure on my part, not ansibles.

I mentioned terraform above, this is a really powerful IaC tool. It's pretty much platform agnostic and will work with any hypervisor. In fact it can work with anything you can write your own providers for terraform. You can even manage spotify playlists with them (not that I recommend that).

I use packer to create golden images of virtual machines.

However in my homelab I tend to just clone a "golden VM" with preinstalled software. I use virt-sysprephere which basically removes any custom config (ip addresses, hostnames, etc) from the machine to be cloned so that there won't be any collisions. It works great for small scale operations. It might even work just fine for large scale ones as well, I just have not used it this way.

I use a few other devops tools like Jenkins, Nomad, Vault, Consul but I don't have much to say about them. Jenkins will probably be replaced by gitlab pipelines soon.

Graphical Software

As far as desktop software goes, I use the Librewolf browser, I used Firefox for years but I have never got on with the latest versions.

I use summtra pdf to view pdfs

Occasionaly, when the utility column won't suffice I will open up a csv in Vscodium.

I use gimp for photo editing (mainly documents and photos) I dislike the software a lot. It makes no sense and is not very intuitive. I really like krita and have used it for animations but it is not really a photo editing program.

I use davinci resolve for video editing, I really rate this software. A lot of people complain that it crashes a lot but it's never happened to me. It does everything I want it to.

For screen recording and occasional streaming I will use OBS, I went through a phase of trying to use pure ffmpeg but it was to much effort for literally 0 gain. I will occasionally use audacity to just record audio.

I use Nextcloud to sync files between laptops, I also use it as a sort of phone backup as all my photos automatically get synced there. It's great software and just works™.

My preferred file manager is Windows manager .

I use VLC as a music player, it's fine, it plays music.

To manage passwords I use Bitwarden. It's the GOAT of password managers. I have a few extensions with it to use it with Dmenu and also have it support OTP passwords. It's so simple to use whilst also being pretty much fully featured, I even have it on my phone (exporting/importing the GPG keys is kind of a pain but it's worth it!)

Other software that I can think off whilst writing this:

Published on Oct 2nd 2022 4:41 p.m.