Uses

A living document of the stuff I use day-to-day.

🤔 What’s Up With Uses?

It’s a convenient way to list the gear you have, keep track of what you’re using, and make it shareable with others, all in one place.

Check out everybody elses “/uses” page on uses.tech as well

📚 Desk Setup

This is where the large majority of my day-to-day gear lives.

• Desk: old door strapped to some generic sit/stand legs.
• Keyboards:
  • Ducky One 2 SF: 65% wired board with Cherry MX browns, RGB + a few artisan caps. Lives on my desk at home.
  • Nuphy Air60 + NuFolio: a 60% wireless board, Gateron low-profile browns with a fancy carrying case. I use this on the go and at the office.
• Mouse: Logitech G502 gaming mouse
• Monitors: some older Dell monitors I got for free from my last job. I’m not sure what the model is but they’re 1080p and good enough!
• Google Home Display: I use the display to show photos, and as a convenient way to use my smart home controls.

🖥 Desktop Computer

• CPU: Intel I7 10700K @ 3.8GHz.
• CPU Cooler: Corsair H60i AIO.
• RAM: 32 GB (4 x 8GB) Corsair Vengeance RAM @ 3600MHz.
• GPU: GTX 1660 Ti.
• SSD: 256 GB ADATA SATA III.
• HDD: 2TB Hard Drive (not sure of brand).
• PSU: Corsair CX750F RGB 750 watt.
• Case: Corsair iCUE 5000X RGB Mid-Tower ATX.

💻 Laptops

I somehow ended up with a stack of laptops over time.

• 2 x Dell Latitude 7440: One from the current job, one from the previous job that I got to keep. They’re both i7’s, with 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage.

💽 Software

I use a whole bunch of software on the day-to-day, here’s a summary of specifically the dev tools I use:

• Operating system: Windows 10/11 with WSL 2 (Ubuntu LTS).
• Terminal: Windows Terminal + a custom ubuntu profile.
• Shell: oh my zsh + the PowerLevel10k theme.
• Version control: git + GitHub but exploring self-hosted options like Gitea
• Diagraming: draw.io for finished diagrams + excalidraw for whiteboarding
• Code editor: Visual Studio Code for personal or PyCharm by JetBrains for work at UFV.
• Database viewer: TablePlus for personal, or DataGrip by JetBrains for work at UFV.
• Data manipulation: Jupyter Notebooks or Excel if there’s no other option.
• Notes: Obsidian backed up to my NAS, and synced to GitHub.

I’m sure there’s more, but as of writing this is what I use daily to get my job done.

💿 Servers & Hardware

I have an ever-growing homelab in my office as well. The lab has a few servers, but not much else.

🐢 NAS Server (a.k.a MoonTurtle)

My NAS is used for data storage and a bunch of dockerized applications (like NextCloud, Trillium notes, some dev environments, and databases). It’s mostly just a Frankenstein of my first PC build from 2012. The specs are:

• CPU: Intel I7 3770 @ 3.2GHz.
• CPU Cooler: Stock Intel cooler.
• RAM: 16GB of Kingston HyperX @ 1600MHz.
• GPU: Intel Integrated Graphics.
• SSD: 256 GB Samsung EVO Black: used as a cache drive.
• HDD: 2 x 4TB Seagate IronWolf NAS drives: one parity drive, total 4TB of storage.
• PSU: XFX 500 watt.
• UPS: APC 850VA Battery Backup (backs up the router, switch, and NAS).
• Operating system: unraid makes managing VMs, Docker Images, and VPN access to my house really easy.

🍓 Raspberry Pi Cluster

I have 3 Raspberry Pi 4Bs w/ 8gb of RAM I use for a Micro K8s cluster. They’re all setup with the exact same hardware:

• Storage: 64GB SD card
• Case: Argon One case for Raspberry Pi.

🤘🏻 Misc

• Sony WH-1000xm4: Awesome wireless noise-cancelling headphones. I have the black ones 🎧
• Lots of books: I have a huge stack of unread books on my desk that I’m slowly working through.
• Forestry.io: a CMS that I use for this site. I’ve just recently set it up, and the text you’re reading right now is the first content change I’m making in the CMS.