This page contains things about Linux, servers, and at the bottom, some answers to questions about my homepage.
Linux Desktop
The approximate story of my Linux journey, as seen on and saved from Twitter years ago:
I began using Linux before Pop! was a thing, and although Manjaro existed I never heard of it until a few years ago; and there are some others there that I couldn't identify by the logo. But it's true that I began with Ubuntu, which at the time was the premier desktop distribution; these days I think it's Fedora. For me, the peak of Mount Stupid was indeed Kali and Qubes, and the Valley of Despair was indeed Arch. I ultimately made my way back through Lubuntu – which I loved before LXQt replaced LXDE – and then Debian – which is still too bare and backwards for many nice features – finally converging back on Fedora, the greatest balance of all the things you could ever ask for in a desktop distribution. When people tell me they're interested in using Linux, I tell them to use Fedora and never stop using Fedora.
Although I do continue to have nagging thoughts that Arch is the Way. It probably is. It's certainly the most fun. But it's a time-sink. I have dreams of making my own Arch distribution—but no. Maybe just lots of scripts is the way.
This is a public repository where I host all the configuration files I share across my machines. A certain amount of it is Linux-specific, and a certain amount of it is Fedora-specific, but I try to make it clear in the READMEs what's what. The READMEs are as much for my own records as they are for others, but I try to write them with others in mind. Obviously, my configurations are optimized for me, an academic philosopher working mainly in areas that require extensive LaTeX use. I try to be optimal in my process, and this repository, I think, reflects that.
Home Server Ideas
I do, in fact, long to host my homepage from home – if for no other reason then to learn more about maintaining certain kinds of servers. Beyond hosting my homepage, there are a few tools it would be nice to be able to serve from home:
- Carnap: The idea here is twofold. First, this would be a good way to get a grip on managing a Carnap server, if ever my university were willing to host one locally. Second, editing assignment files in Carnap is typically "blind" in the sense that in order to preview the files you already have to install and run Carnap locally, and even then it's a complex process. I have ideas about a remote Carnap assignment compiler, which displays assignment files much the same way Overleaf does, but without all the garb.
- Isabelle/HOL: Isabelle/HOL is one of many theorem-provers, but which is attractive to me because of work that's already been done with it in deontic logic, e.g., here. Like Carnap, it takes a bit of configuration on any machine you want to use it on (although it is definitely more straightforward), and it doesn't work on things like iPads, phones, etc. A dedicated server for this would allow quite a bit of personal freedom on this front.
- Zulip: Zulip is like Slack but with LaTeX syntax support and better asynchronous threading. For example, a working group like LLEMMMa could benefit from having a dedicated chat server on a UC Davis domain: llemmma dot ucdavis dot edu slash chat.
- Git hub: Yes, lowercase "h". Why not make a single machine my everything? I could use RAID to back everything up.
I am always happy to talk about these things, although I do not get to very often.
About my Homepage
Why plain HTML? —
It's fast and clean. I hate being on slow WiFi and a website I'm trying to load lags. I refuse to participate in making people wait. I'm a punctual person. Even the extent to which these pages lag as they are, it annoys me.
What fonts are these? —
For serif, I use a webfont version of Computer Modern, the default font in LaTeX. I converted the Unicode TTF files into WOFF2 format using Google's woff2-tools package and used all the Roman ones. For monospace, I use Source Code Pro. These are my preferred serif and monospace fonts; when I work, Source Code Pro is often on the left side of the screen while Computer Modern (or, indeed, Latin Modern) is on the right.
Why no menus? —
I understand books having tables of contents, and even long articles, but not short articles with four sections. Maybe as my homepage expands I'll add menus, but for now use back/forward and follow the links that interest you. Menus are actually annoying to maintain.
What is this link color scheme? —
Blue navigates away from my homepage, except my own GitHub pages are linked in green; links that stay inside my homepage use a brown.
Why CV so hyperlinked? —
I tried creating a simple LaTeX CV template that I could losslessly convert back and forth between LaTeX and HTML with Pandoc. For some reason this was the requirement I had for making Pandoc such an important feature of my workflow. If I'd succeeded, I might have had both a webpage with the contents of my CV and a PDF download available. But I actually ended up finding the concept a bit redundant – just an excuse to mess around with Pandoc – and anyway, in that case Pandoc would become a bottleneck on the aesthetics of the document. I opted to just go wild with my CV as a PDF.
Where do you host? —
This website started out as my GitHub Pages site. In a way it still is, but I've configured it to use my own domain. The GitHub user site experience is fantastic – it's a simple matter of using Git – and GitHub Pro is cheaper and faster than most hosting services. People who have homepages often stop maintaining them because the workflow is too disjoint; this way my homepage just lives in another one of my (now private) repositories, and updating it works the same as, e.g., pushing changes to an article I'm writing. If at some point I can manage to maintain as integrated a workflow as this while hosting elsewhere, I might. My mind often wanders to the notion of hosting from home.