Tools and tech I like

Free applications I use daily:

Brave Browser -- a privacy-focused browser that just works. I've tried others like LibreWolf, DuckDuckGo Browser, and Ungoogled Chromium, and I always go back to Brave. It has built in ad blocking (including for YouTube!) which makes browsing the web a much nicer experience. It is built on Chromium, so it has the same profiles system as Chrome to separate bookmarks, browsing activity, etc. that I prefer to Firefox style containers. My only complaint is that I have to disable the crypto and AI features on each new profile (but it is easy and straightforward).
Obsidian -- simple and highly customizable notetaking using markdown. Free and works offline on all operating systems. There's a plug in for everything you could ever need and a way to disable everything you don't.
Zotero -- an open source all-in-one tool for collecting, organizing, and taking notes on digital texts. I use it to collect and organize the readings I run across, annotate pdfs, and generate citations.
iBroadcast -- a great music player that just works with any audio files you own. No ads, no algorithm, just the music you want to listen to. Syncs between a mobile app and web application and has a generous free tier.
Actual Budget -- a privacy-focused, open source budgeting app. It does what it advertises, works on Linux, and keeps all my data locally.
Super Productivity -- an open source all-in-one productivit tool for tracking, scheduling, and timing out tasks, habits, and events. Has built in focus mode, pomodoro timer, Eisenhower matrix, tag systec, Kanban boards and more; but the interface keeps everything quite simple. Also syncs with Google Calendar.

Programming specific:

VSCode -- the basic IDE for general coding tasks in Python, C, and HTML/CSS/JS. I use profiles to separate extentions, keymaps, and other setting between the different languages I develop in.
zsh -- my shell of choice, it just feels nicer compared to Bash.
Alacritty -- a cross platform terminal emulator that feels fast and works great with tmux.
tmux -- a terminal multiplexer, essential for working in the terminal. Makes for easy system configuring and troubleshooting.
Neovim (btw) -- for when I want to work on configuring my development environment instead of actually doing work. But in all seriousness, learning Vim motions has completely changed the way I program and generally interact with computers.

Hardware:

OnePlus Buds 3 -- bluetooth earbuds that have a long battery life, noise cancelling/ambient passthrough, no sound leakage, and can pair with two devices (phone and laptop) at once for less than half the price of airpods.
Dell Precision 7760 -- this is a workstation pretending to be a laptop at almost 7lbs and boasting a 17in screen. It's comically big but the fans are quiet and having an i7 and A3000 GPU on the go is amazing for mid-sized data tasks. I got mine refurbished for half the price of a MacBook Air. I am emotionally attached it despite its 4 hour battery life.
Casio Watch -- a reliable, stylish, and affordable watch. It's Casio, need I say more?

Tools and such I use to create this website

I get all icons from iconoir and ascii emojis from emojidb.

The icons for the cusor were made by dakotaatokad, on Cursors-4U

I use the JetBrains Mono font for the window headers, the Noto Sans font for regular text like this, and Orbitron for the titles. They can all be found on Google Fonts

The site's wallpaper is from WallpaperAccess, I put a pixel filter over it.

In my day job, I build and evaluate generative AI systems. But for this website, everything here is human-created and I deliberately avoid AI for both generating code and learning concepts. This is just for fun, so I can afford taking the time to learn HTML/CSS/JS as I go.