What’s this page?

A colophon is definied as a brief description of publication or production notes relevant to the edition, in modern books usually located at the verso of the title-leaf, but also sometimes located at the end of the book. I first saw this used by John Saddington when he had a web site of his own (he now redirects john.do to his Twitter/𝕏 account), wherein he provided a listing of the products he uses in his day-to-day life in addition to how his web site was put together.

You can find a short listing of other users’ colophons at https://indieweb.org/colophon.

So this is mine.

This site uses the Jekyll engine and is hosted on Github Pages. Pages can be written in Markdown or HTML with Liquid markup, and Jekyll takes care of the rest. The site template is called Minima and is standard with Github Pages.

I originally chose Cormorant as my site’s font, which is what I use for everything else, but it renders thin and proved uneasy on the eyes when on a screen, so I switched to the EB Garamond family, which is close in style while being easier to read. Both families are available via Google Fonts. Monospaced type is rendered in Fira Mono. Disqus is used as the post comment manager.

My daily hardware.

I switched back to Windows from MacOS back in 2022 after Apple switched their machines to run on their own in-house Apple Silicon—not because Intel was superior but because the use of integrated memory means upgrading a Mac’s RAM requires buying a whole new machine. Given the choice I would prefer to use Linux, but some of my software and games run poorly, if at all, under WINE. I may eventually go back to a Mac if the pricing is right. (EDIT: I’m on a Mac mini again, and I blame Taylor.)

My personal laptop is a Victus by HP 15″ Gaming Laptop running on an Intel Core i7-12650H CPU and Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti Notebook GPU. I’ve upgraded it since purchase to 64 GB of G.Skill RAM and a 2 TB Samsung EVO 900 m.2 SSD.

My work laptop is an HP ZBook Firefly 15″ G8 provided by my employer.

For document scanning (because I try to go as paperless as possible), I use a Brother DSMobile 920DW wireless portable page scanner and use ocrmypdf on the command line to OCR and otherwise process scans. I have an HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e on my desktop that does the same thing.

Mobile hardware.

When out and about I can always be found with my Samsung Galaxy Z Fold4 smartphone and Fold Edition S Pen, and often also with my Samsung Galaxy Tab S8+ 5G. I almost dare to say that the Galaxy Tab could replace my laptop for most of the things I do, especially since it has a 1 TB microSD Card installed for storage. I have Termux installed on both devices so I have access to a usable Linux environment on all of my devices (in addition to Windows Services for Linux on the laptops).

Software tools.

  • Quicken Classic Premier for my finances, after using other console-based tools like ledger, hledger, beancount, and even .org files.
  • Visual Studio Code and ol’ fashioned Emacs for text editing.
  • Chrome and Microsoft Edge for web browsing (the latter is required for work).
  • Gmail for email (combining both Google and Outlook accounts in one place).
  • I pay for both Google One and Microsoft 365, although I am leaning more these days toward the Microsoft product and less on Google. If only Microsoft hadn’t abandoned Windows Phone; I’d still be using it.