SIGUSR2

The Setup

May 23, 2012 #

Perhaps you are familiar with The Setup—this is my setup.

Who are you and what do you do?

I'm Andrew Gwozdziewycz, creator and co-organizer of the original Hack and Tell in NYC, and lead engineer at OkCupid Labs, East.

What hardware are you using?

On my first day at Labs, I was given a bunch of boxes, and tasked with building a new machine. It's much more computer than I've ever had before—3.6Ghz Core i7, 16GB of RAM, a 120GB Intel SSD and a 27" HP monitor which probably needs to go back, as it randomly brings up the OSD and cycles through options from time to time. We've been working too hard for me to take the time and get on the phone to complain about it, and it seems to stop after my yelling at it for 5 minutes or so. I've used a Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite 2 for as long as I can remember. I guess at some point I should have opted for the true Happy Hacking Keyboard, but I could never get over the price tag.

At home, my setup is much less interesting. Until a few weeks ago, I was using a 13" unibody Macbook (the last model before the 13" went "Pro"), with 8GB of RAM, running Debian Sid. Some bad luck, and a recent backup caused me to reinstall, but I haven't been able to get grub to boot a Linux kernel again after several attempts and have sort of given up for now.

Instead, I've been using my Asus EeePC 1101HA, which is basically the perfect size, but falls totally short in terms of hardware and compatibility with GNU/Linux systems. It doesn't sleep or hibernate, getting even satisfactory video performance has been a chore (due mostly to the Poulsbo chipset, though Intel has been more helpful since it released the EMGD drivers), and in general is just underpowered. I do get about 5 hours of battery life out of it, which is super nice.

I haven't touched my Nikon D70s in a long while, so most of my photos recently have been taken on my Nexus S (Sprint), which is now running Ice Cream Sandwich. My intentions have been to replace the D70s with something a little more compact (probably a micro 4/3rds), but I haven't found quite what I'm looking for yet.

For reading on the subway, I recently got a Kindle Fire, which replaced my rooted Nook Color running Cyanogen Mod. When Cyanogen becomes a bit more stable on the Fire, I'll probably switch to that.

And what software?

Most of my day is spent in GNU/Emacs running full-screen, with dwm arranging windows, an 80 character wide xterm doing terminal emulation, running GNU screen with bash sessions, all on Debian Sid. I use Iceweasel for browsing, and fire up Chromium on occasion.

For almost everything else not in a web browser, I use Emacs. I listen to music via mplayer controlled through EMMS, interact with MySQL using sql-mode, connect to Guile using Geiser-mode, connect to Clojure via SLIME, and carry on conversations on freenode in rcirc. I'd love to make the switch to reading mail in GNUS, or rmail, but I haven't made the jump yet. I used to use bitlebee, but haven't really signed on to any of the instant messaging networks in a while.

A few years ago, I got used to using GMail, which has been an extremely difficult habit to break (have you noticed that no Free Software webmail system is nearly as slick or usable?). For easy syncing between work and home, I use two different Dropbox accounts with a shared folder. Organization of Hack and Tell, wouldn't be possible without Meetup. We've been using Google Docs to share monthly spreadsheets, but I'm unconvinced it offers us anything over sharing via Dropbox. I use GitHub quite a bit, but am secretly hoping and rooting for Gitorious to take over.

On the previously mentioned Kindle Fire, I pretty much only use Readability and the built in PDF reader. I fire up Firefox now and again, but I'd rather browse the web with a proper keyboard and trackpad. I miss having a Dropbox client on the Fire—syncing papers to read on the Nook Color was such a breeze.

What would be your dream setup?

I'd love to have a very powerful 11" laptop, with at least 16GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD, and a day of battery life, which runs perfectly under entirely Free Software. Of course it should be perfectly quiet and never get hot even under load. Since I'm dreaming, I'd love to have a large monitor at home to plug it into now and then, and a gigabit pipe in my living room.

My mobile reading experience would be almost perfect if I had a decent Dropbox client, and would be perfect if the screen was color EInk.

Last, but certainly not least, I'd love to have a nice digital rangefinder, or "rangefinder like" camera that has an optical viewfinder, is weather proof, and provides completely noise free photos at ISO 6400. Oh, and it should have a line of really fast prime lenses that don't require a second mortgage to purchase (or a first mortgage for that matter).

Tagged: setup , personal