The tools of my trade

BY
Pranav Karawale

Devices

I currently own a Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 PHN16-71 which I daily drive. Hardware specifications:

  • 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-13700HX
  • NVIDIA RTX 4050 GPU 6GB VRAM
  • 16 GB DDR5 RAM
  • 1TB NVMe SSD storage

On the laptop, I run a dual-boot setup of Windows 11 and Omarchy. I keep around Windows 11 for any work related to Microsoft Office, and to play games. I do almost all of the development on Pop OS.

In the future want to switch to Linux entirely, and find some solution which makes Windows apps seamlessly work.

My current phone is Motorola g82 5G. Its the 6GB/128GB variant and is running the stock Android 13 that comes out of the box. Its a pretty decent phone with a camera that works according to the price point, not too bad but not too good either, the experience is snappy enough but recently has started to slow down, maybe because the storage is chock full of photos, videos, documents. I might start looking for new use cases or a custom ROM for the phone as it starts slowing down a lot.

Other hardware

I have a Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB RAM variant) which I want to use as a mini homelab but right now the thing is sitting and eating dust because I do not have a spare SD card and new ones suddenly too expensive (literally twice the price!)

I also have a ESP32 microcontroller which I recently repurposed, put on a small OLED display and made it a fun little table clock to look at. It connects to my WiFi, syncs time, and also shows the ambient temperature and humidity.

My little table clock. Yes thats a power bank which was lying around and now powers the whole setup.

Software

I use a ton of software in my daily life for various tasks. Here are most of them in a list.

Cross-platform

  • Syncthing : Love this thing. Helps me sync my passwords and files across my devices and the VPS
  • KeepassXC, KeepassDX : Password manager. Been using it since 2021. Open source, works the best.
  • Obsidian : Notes

Omarchy

  • Zen Browser : I like the tab organization of Zen, works better for me than standard horizontal tabs.
  • IDEs : Visual Studio Code, Zed, WebStorm. Although I like VS Code, but I am trying to move away from it and try other different editors, searching for a different experience that suits me more. Right now Zed is the one I use.
  • Alacritty : Terminal. Been using it for years, still using it, works as intended.

Windows 11

  • Zen Browser
  • Word, Excel, Powerpoint; the day I am able to run these reliably on Linux is the day I am switching over entirely.