Uses

$ uname -a
FreeBSD gw.lan 14.2-RELEASE FreeBSD 14.2-RELEASE amd64
$ cat ~/.workflow
edit:    nvim
shell:   zsh
mux:     tmux
term:    wezterm
keys:    glove80

Hardware

Keyboards

• Glove80 (MoErgo) — primary daily driver. Split, columnar, contoured. My layout is on GitHub.
• Advantage360 Professional (Kinesis) — travel keyboard with ZMK firmware. Config is here.

Workstation

• A reasonably-spec'd desktop for heavier work and a 14-inch laptop for travel.
• Two displays. Vertical arrangement, not horizontal.
• Wired ethernet wherever practical. Wifi is for visitors.

Audio

• Closed-back headphones for focus work.
• A small XLR mic on a boom arm for calls and the rare YouTube recording.

Operating Systems

• FreeBSD 14.x on the edge router and on a small fleet of long-uptime hosts. ZFS root, base-system everything.
• NixOS 24.11 on workstations and Kubernetes nodes. Declarative, reproducible, and the closest thing to "it just works" once you've climbed the learning curve. (See why.)
• Proxmox VE as the hypervisor under most of it.

Editor & Terminal

• Neovim with a small Lua config. LSPs for the languages I touch most, telescope for fuzzy navigation, treesitter for highlighting, nothing exotic.
• Wezterm as the terminal — GPU-accelerated, scriptable in Lua, sensible defaults.
• tmux for persistent sessions on remote hosts. SSH disconnects shouldn't take work with them.

Shell & CLI

• Zsh with a thin .zshrc. Whatever fancy plugin system you're using, you almost certainly don't need it.
• Starship for the prompt — fast, written in Rust, minimal config.
• ripgrep, fd, fzf, bat, jq, sd, delta. The boring-modern stack of grep/find/sed/diff replacements.
• direnv for per-project environments.
• git, of course. Plus lazygit for the moments my hands want a TUI.
• htop, btop, and iftop for "what is this box doing right now" — see also the TUI apps post.

Network & Homelab

• FreeBSD pf router at the edge — the heart of the network. Tour the setup.
• unbound for recursive DNS, with DNSSEC validation and a small blocklist.
• WireGuard for road-warrior VPN back into the LAN. (Setup post.)
• Real, native IPv6 via DHCPv6-PD from the ISP. (How.)
• Managed L2 switch for VLANs to the IoT and quarantine networks.

Servers & Storage

• Proxmox VE on a single homelab box hosting most of the VMs.
• NixOS VMs for everything that runs more than a handful of services.
• kubeadm + Cilium for the Kubernetes cluster, on bare-metal-ish VMs. (Build notes.)
• ZFS everywhere — for the boot environments alone.
• ZFS send/recv to a remote pool for offsite backups. (Replication script.)
• Prometheus + Grafana + Alertmanager for monitoring.

Languages I Reach For

• Bash / Shell — for glue, ops scripts, and "just enough automation".
• Python — for anything past 50 lines of shell.
• Go — for tools that need to be a single static binary.
• Nix expressions — for the configuration that defines everything else.

Browser & Day-to-Day

• Firefox with a handful of containers and uBlock Origin.
• Plain Markdown in a git repo for notes, journal, and drafts.
• An RSS reader for keeping up with people; not algorithmic feeds.
• A password manager that doesn't sync through anyone else's cloud.

Things I've Stopped Using

• Heavyweight router GUIs (OPNsense, pfSense). Both fine, both more abstraction than I want.
• Most Electron apps. The ones I keep are kept reluctantly.
• Managed cloud Kubernetes for personal projects. Bare metal teaches more.
• Trying to learn ten things at once. Pick one and go deep.

Influences

• Ted Unangst's writing — clear thinking about systems.
• The FreeBSD Handbook — what good documentation looks like.
• Brendan Gregg's performance work — methodologies that survive vendor cycles.
• Derek Sivers' /now movement — the inspiration for my /now page.

$ echo "Boring tools, sharp habits, written down."