What I Use

A place to show off my attack surface.

Laptop

My laptop is a ThinkPad T495 with a Ryzen 5 and 16GB of RAM that I got off Ebay for $150. I run OpenBSD 7.9 on it. For the most part I just stick to the programs in base with the following exceptions:

~$ pkg_info -m | grep -v \\-firmware     
ImageMagick-6.9.13.43 image processing tools
go-1.26.2           Go programming language
got-0.125           game of trees version control system
lowdown-3.0.1       simple markdown translator
mblaze-1.4          set of Maildir utilities
mpv-0.41.0p0        movie player based on MPlayer/mplayer2
mupdf-1.27.2        graphic library, pdf parser, viewer and utilities
nsxiv-33            neo simple X Image Viewer
quirks-7.194        exceptions to pkg_add rules
sfeed-2.4           RSS/Atom newsreader and formatting programs
ungoogled-chromium-147.0.7727.101p0 Chromium browser sans integration with Google

And some programs that are not yet packaged:

• webdump - HTML to plain-text converter for webpages
• drv - Read the Word of God from your terminal

Cell Phone

I use a Google Pixel 8a that I paid $400 for during a Black Friday sale. On it I run GrapheneOS along with the following apps:

• Web Browser: Brave
  Has built-in ad blocking (my block list) and supports swipe gestures to go both forward and backward in history, Firefox and Chromite could only go backward.
• Bible: De Fide
• Keyboard: Futo Keyboard
• App Store: Obtainium
  F-Droid lacks many popular apps like Brave, WireGuard, Firefox, and Signal.
• Maps: Organic Maps
  I like that it is offline but I miss out on live traffic updates and detours. The donation nagging can be a bit much, still better than Wikipedia’s.
• Media Player: VLC
  
• Messaging: Quik
  The default SMS app didn’t have the ability to search through old messages.
• Terminal Emulator: Termux
• Notes: Textpad
• VPN: WireGuard

Router

My router is a Silver Peak FWA-ASP1012 Unity Edge Connect running OpenBSD. It features six 1GbE ports and 8GB of ECC memory. It was a steal at just $65, and all of the cables and mounting hardware were included too. Unfortunately the supply on eBay seems to have dried up since then.

Both of its USB ports are occupied. Just for fun, I plugged in a G-Star IV GPS receiver (nmea) to grab the time from satellites, and then share it with the rest of the network via ntpd. The other is taken by the data cable of my GoldenMate UPS (upd), so sensorsd can power the machine down during a power outage and avoid a fsck.

I also use WireGuard on this box to access my internal stuff when I am out and about. But since I don’t have a static IP, I need to use Dynamic DNS. I chose myaddr.tools for that because it works with just the ftp command and a cron job.