We all have many ways of procrastinating. Some forms of procrastination are better than others. This page is about some of the better ways I spend my time when there are more important things I should be doing. Some have called this structured procrastination.
Linux
As a Desktop OS
The approximate story of my Linux journey, as seen on and saved from Twitter years ago:
I began experimenting with 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 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 to achieve distribution-independence.
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
I keep a small home server, which I call nousowl, to run experiments and services that belong on my own hardware. Details can be found on the site I host from the server, here.
Preferred Applications
- Editor: Neovim. My configuration can be found here. I’ve done a bit configuring Emacs, too, but I honestly got addicted to the keystrokes when I started using Neovim. See here for more details. I use VimTeX for LaTeX, but I’m extremely partial to my own snippets over the automatically-generated ones. I have some other nice plugins for other purposes, too.
- Desktop Environment: I’ve been partial to GNOME for years; the out-of-the-box Fedora Workstation experience is too good. But lately I’m using Sway (the Wayland successor to i3) on my laptop a lot.
- Terminal Emulator: I’ve lately been using both WezTerm and Alacritty, although I am partial to WezTerm.
- Diff and Merge GUI: Meld. This is useful to me not so much for managing code but for managing article drafts that were forked for various reasons.
- Email, cloud storage, VPN, password manager: Proton. I pay the $100/year or whatever. Proton is awesome. You get what you pay for. Read about its history here.
- Image Editor: Although I’m not big into editing photos, I do end up using GIMP quite a bit. These days it might feel lacking compared to editors that have AI-integration, but for my purposes it’s entirely adequate. In fact, I’ve never found a limitation in GIMP.
Honorable Mentions: I do use Thunderbird for email, although less because Thunderbird is so great and more because it’s the best there is in Linux. I also 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. I suppose I might also mention Okular here—KDE’s PDF viewer. I use it only because it’s the best Linux has to offer, but it is quite good.
About my Homepage
Why plain HTML? —
Mainly because 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 annoys me. But also, I actually like the way old guys’ homepages look—the old guys who’ve had the same homepages since the 1990s. They’re horrible, but they’re so fast … and they must have spent so much time on them. I love it. In fact, let’s start a list of them:
These are just some quick ones. I could eventually see this list becoming an “Old Guy Plain HTML Hall of Fame” page. If you want to suggest additions, email me.
What fonts are these? —
For serif, I use a webfont version of Latin Modern, the Computer Modern successor that ships with LaTeX. I converted the official OpenType files into WOFF2 using Google’s woff2-tools package and pulled in the Roman weights and italics. 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 Latin Modern (or sometimes old-school Computer 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 site? —
This website started out as my GitHub Pages site and still lives there, just under 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.
Why no “About me” section? —
Fine, here. It’s a work in progress, so be kind to me. Composing that page is certainly a form of procrastination – a philosopher’s foray into what might be called “veridical autofiction” – albeit not exactly the structured kind. It certainly requires a lot of thought and self-reflection, but neither is exactly “structured.”