Computing

Home Server

I run a home server I call nousowl—a small, headless Fedora box for the parts of my work that belong on my own hardware. In quarters when I’m teaching logic it tilts heavily toward curriculum development: a private Carnap instance where I stage assignments before students see them. I write the Carnap files in my editor, deploy them with one command, and watch them render in the browser as the interactive, self-checking problems students actually meet—something like an Overleaf for developing Carnap files. The rest of what it does runs year-round: Sylloge – a journal-tracking tool of my own – a small private Zulip chatroom, and the static site it serves. All of it doubles as my testbed for self-hosting. The server keeps its own page, which says far more than I would here: nousowl.net.

Configs & Automation

Many of my configuration files and scripts live in my public configs repository. The idea is to keep my whole working environment – shell, editor, window manager, terminal, even my LaTeX macros – as version-controlled text in one place, rather than hand-tuning each machine. GNU Stow handles the install, symlinking each piece into the spot its program expects, so a freshly set-up machine becomes “mine” with a clone and a few commands. Some of it is Linux- or Fedora-specific, and the READMEs try to flag what’s what—as much for my own future reference as for anyone else.

Linux

The approximate story of my Linux journey, as seen on and saved from Twitter years ago: Linux Dunning-Kruger I began experimenting with Linux before Pop was a thing, and although Manjaro existed I never heard of it until much later; 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, a title I think has since passed to 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 used to have dreams of making my own personalized Arch distribution—but no. Lots of scripts and total distribution-independence is the way. I think this is what most fascination with Arch is, really: the desire for total distribution-independence.

Preferred Applications

Honorable Mentions: I occasionally use LibreOffice applications – especially Calc (which is like Google Sheets or Excel) – which actually is fairly good software. I can’t imagine anything Microsoft Word or Google Docs has over LibreOffice other than cloud integration—and since Proton added a spreadsheet of its own, there is less and less reason for it. Although I’m not big into editing photos, I do end up in GIMP from time to time. It might feel lacking next to editors with AI integration, but for my purposes it’s entirely adequate; in fact, I’ve never found a limitation in GIMP.

Of My Own: Sonnerie, a GNOME Shell extension that is a metronome for hours rather than minutes: a click at an interval through the waking day and a woodblock on the hour—a grandfather clock for the top bar. I wrote it because I love metronomes. I am a percussionist of some sort, a kind of time-keeper, and I like a metronome that counts not only beats per minute but beats per hour and per day, to be cute. It keeps me connected to the passage of time, which matters to me; it is easy to forget to look at clocks, and I suspect the same reasoning stands behind grandfather clocks. It is not in GNOME’s extension catalogue, by choice, but it works, I use it constantly, and I love it.