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My Hardware Setup

A summarization of the hardware I use

Karl Voit asked to hear from other peoples Hardware setups, so I decided to write mine down, also as a reminder for myself. Sometimes people ask me, what I use at home and I do not know, because I buy my hardware whenever some old equipment dies which it seldom does, and often enough its just what my local computer dealer has at stock at that time, if its suitable. So its hard enough to find out whats on my desk at that time

At home

At home, I am working on an Acer Aspire XC-885 (Intel i3-8100 (4) @ 3.600GHz,) with an 500 GB SSD for system and daily work files and an 1TB HDD, running Debian GNU/Linux buster with a qtile desktop manager.

[nil][A small desktop computer]]

My keyboard is a WASD Keyboard V2 with blue Cherry MX switches and a slightly customized US layout (it has super-, hyper-, and meta-keys as well as penguins instead of windows). As you may guess by this keys I'm a heavy Emacs user. So it may be no surprise, that more keys are always better, and I also use an Elgato Streamdeck XL for all kind of tasks, mostly for emacs.

A mechanical keyboard with colorful special keys

An Elgato streamdeck with symbols reading OPS, Mail, Links, Ledger, etc.

18 keys more are on my mouse, a Lioncast LM30, oh and the Samsung SSD T5 in tha picture is my everyday backup device.

A mouse with many buttons sitting on a desk

As a Monitor I chose a Samsung 4K UHD Monitor (3840x2160) mostly because, when I stream video, I can stream just a quarter of my screen and have exact HD resolution without the need to scale, and I use 3 quarters of my monitor for three different scenes in the stream.

A hanging monitor mount, clearly self-made with a wood board, looking like the mount for sliding doors on a sleepingroom closet

It has a quite unusual mount as you see on the picture, because it is to wide for the doors on my secretary style desk to open, an I decided to mount it horizontally movable, to be able to move it away from the door I want to open. On top of it sits an Ausdom HD webcam.

A monitor showing the article I just write

My sound is processed via a Behringer U-Control UCA202 external soundcard. Attached to it is my sound equipment, and an old radio receiver as my main speaker. The sound equipment consists of two t.bone SC400 condenser mics, a Boss RC-505 Loop Station, a VOX Mini 5 Rhythm guitar amplifier for my Klampfinator and an AKAI MPK miniplay as a keyboard, all connected to the Soundcard input via a Yamaha MG82cx Mixer.

For printing, and scanning documents, I use a HP Photosmart Premium m309g.

A printer on standby

My main router is a FritzBox, directly connected to the fiber endpoint. It serves the WiFi and also LAN for my and my daughters computer, as well as for the D-LINK SAN Box, which holds another copy of long term data in our household.

For taking photos I use my Fairphone 3 running e as its OS. The is also Canon DSLR of some kind in this household, but it is mostly used by my daughter.

My yoga tab 3 with a bluetooth keyboard in front of it

For surfing & reading on the couch I mostly use either my Lenovo Yoga Tablet runnig LineageOS, or the Kindle 4 Reader which has now entered the state of everlasting flight mode, as I have no Amazon account anymore. So I use it to read all the ePubs I buy at my local bookshop as I try to read paperless where possible. I like it for its "reading-device-only" approach. No backlight, no music player, no gadgets, lots of battery lifetime.

My old but loved kindle eBook reader showing a page of 'A Closed and Common Crbit'

On the road

When being away from home, I do have my Lenovo ThinkPad L560 notebook also running Debian X. I try to share most of the config and directory layout between this and my main machine. Both sync via my phone being the central Hub, which has the advantage that I dont have to turn on the laptop when I enter home, just to sync my work back to the computer on my desk. All that data I worked on are already synced to my phone when I am away, and the phone hands it to my main machine as soon as I am back in my home wifi area.

Business

My business notebook is a Dell Latitude 5511 with 32 GB RAM and 500GB HDD running windows 10, but most of the day I spend in a Windows8 32 bit virtual machine as I have to deal with a pretty old IDE. For now I use it with a DREVO Calibur Keyboard, but that does mean there are 4 Keyboards on my Desk when I work So I decided to share mouse and keyboard via a KVM Switch in the future.

The mentioned 4th Keyboard is an ActiveKey UVB/35 POS keyboard, which has once been the predecessor of my streamdeck. Since then I use it for the work task I do the most everyday: Debugging Visual Basic Code. It has all the frequently used key combinations coded to its 35 keys, like Start, Step into, Step Over, Set Breakpoint, Goto Definition etc. It's debugging heaven.

A POS keyboard labeld with colorful symbols. All for debugging

2021-07-04