About Me
About Me
Hi, my name is Lewis (as you may have guessed from the URL), welcome to my website! Here I publish information I've found to be useful, primarly so that I can access it anywhere, without having to log in and without 100MB of external JavaScript and trackers. This approach also has the added advantage of allowing people requiring said information to access it freely in the process of sort of "open-sourcing" knowledge that the internet does best. The site also operates as a hub for accessing all the services I run although this function won't be terribly useful to you unless you know me in person.
I use Manjaro on all my devices. I use the fresh repos to maintain parity with Arch without the fine-tuning you need to maintain a pure Arch system.
I use MATE for my desktop environment on my desktop and use KDE Plasma on my laptop.
I use the Matrix protocol via Element client for all my messaging and calling needs. Prior to this I used Pisscord but switched over due to Discord being proprietry, spying on users and paywalling features
I use Firefox on all my devices, with the only exception being when I'm SSHed into my servers, in which case, I use Lynx. I've been using Firefox for years, in fact, I can't even remember a time in which I didn't use Firefox. I use the following extension:
For years I used DuckDuckGo as my search engine however after they began to censor search results I switched to SearXNG. I briefly ran my own instance, however, shortly after I launched my Matrix Homeserver and found that operating the two simulatenously used up too much system resources, so I switched to the searx.be public instance. It is actually significantly quicker than my own instance was and I have found using it to be a very pleasent experience.
I use NeoVim, prior to this I was using Vim but switched over as I wanted to test out GitHub Co-Pilot and haven't switch back since. For long documents I use LibreOffice Writer.
Betterbird is my primary RSS reader, I also use it for accessing some of my email accounts
Most of the time I spend browsing files is done through issuing the Unix ls command in my terminal. On the few occasions that I need a GUI, I use Dolphin which pretty much does everything I need it to (tabs, good search function etc.).
I use MPV as my audio and video player, prior to this I was using VLC. Switched to MPV as it was less buggy and more lightweight.
I use nomacs as my image viewer.
I use GIMP for image editing, it's great for the basic image editing tasks I need to do. Unfortunately photoshop still remains unmatched for anything complex.
I use Konsole as my terminal emulator. It does the job but I will probably switch to something more lightweight in the future.
I use Mullvad as my VPN provider and use their desktop and mobile app to connect. I've used PIA, ExpressVPN and Mozilla VPN and I can confidently say that Mullvad gets you the best bang for your buck out there. I pay only £3 per month for it, they have a no-logs policy and you can pay with anonymous methods such as cash-in-mail and XMR
My PC is custom built and this is the approach I would recommened for anyone doing anything more intensive than text editing and web browsing. I has the following specs:
I use a refurbished 2014 Thinkpad t440p. It's Corebooted to remove the proprietary BIOS and to neutralise glowie spyware such as Intel Management Engine.
I've upgraded the RAM with 2x8GB of HyperX DDR3 and I've upgraded the SSD to a 1TB Samsung SSD. It works perfect for web browsing, text editing, programming (even in bloated spyware IDEs, such as Visual Studio) and can even run some light-ish games like EU4 and Minecraft.
I use an iPhone 13 Pro. Given my stance on spyware and open-source software, this is slightly hypocritical but my logic is that Apple has a better track record than Google and Samsung in terms of privacy so I went with them. I may, one day, switch back to Android via GrapheneOS however I still am relient on a couple of proprietary, Google Play Services enabled, apps.
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