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# Copyright (C) 2013-2023 Yuchen Pei.
# Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
# document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License,
# Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software
# Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and
# no Back-Cover Texts. You should have received a copy of the GNU
# Free Documentation License. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
# This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
# Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of
# this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
# or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA
# 94042, USA.
#+title: How I do my computing
* How I do my computing
:PROPERTIES:
:UPDATED: [2023-08-14 Mon 13:17]
:END:
/Note on 2023-08-14: this was written in early 2022 and is outdated./
The way I do my computing is evolving and in flux, but here it is.
I try to avoid nonfree programs, including nonfree javascript. I
interact with many proprietary platforms in a read-only fashion
without logged in, like watching videos on invidious, reading issues
in a github repo, or checking out local events on meetup, with [[https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/][LibreJS]]
on 99% of the time.
Unfortunately I have not achieved 100% free software use in that
respect, as sometimes I have to for example log in to github for
communication purposes like opening an issue or do online banking. I
look forward to tech meetup groups resuming in person events, so that
I can join AFK without having to log in and RSVP.
That said, I currently don't have an active facebook, linkedin or
google account. I also don't have Google services on my lineage os.
Being a relatively late adopter of free software, the journey of
slowly shaking off these malware was rather fun. For example, once I
discovered my firefox was actually infested with nonfree extensions
and purged them all.
In terms of communication, I use xmpp, frequent IRC, and lurk on
mailing lists. These days I read and write emails on gnus, and I sign
and encrypt emails when needed. I also use Signal and (regrettably)
some proprietary communications application which I'm in the process
of getting rid of.
I like both command line and emacs interface for getting things done,
and given that most of my screen time is spent in emacs, I find myself
writing elisp scripts to retrieve information from the web, or process
data calling command line utilities, so that I can get things into
Emacs (mainly org mode). I also use org-protocol somewhat heavily for
that purpose with custom dispatchers.
For low level or latency sensitive tasks, like rsync scripts for
backups, cron jobs for retrieving emails and ssh into very remote
servers I use command line, as it is more reliable than the emacs
interface in this case.
Though I like minimalistic tools like i3 and zathura, I'm not in the
suckless camp, and do believe GUI has values. I use firefox and enjoy
beautifully designed webpages (with nonfree javascript disabled of
course), but take measures to improve my privacy. My websurfing is
split about 30-70 between EWW and Firefox. I use EWW when I need to
closely process the information in the surfing session in Emacs, when
the webpage does not work with nonfree javascript, or when the
colorscheme of the webpage is dark (yeah, my eyes can't take dark
theme).
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