What's In Your Dock, Terence?

Terence: Hello, the Internet. My name's Terence Eden. I'm an open source hacker and tinkerer, and I work in civic tech, and this is what's in my dock. This is my hardware setup. I use a cheap generic Linux laptop, which works beautifully, but I pair it with a very big vertical monitor because I spend a lot of my time reading very long documents, and so I just like that nice big vertical screen.

I use an ergonomic keyboard to keep my hands like that, a nice rollerball. I'm also, if you see me standing around it's because, I use a standing desk, very good for the back, and somewhere under there I've got a treadmill so that while I'm working I can, get my steps in. In in terms of other hardware, well my phone is it's like a 6 and a half year old Android, it's a OnePlus. But what I do is I pair all of my hardware with magnetic charging devices. So I can plug something into the socket, and then I just have a magnetic cable, which charges all of them.

And that just means that I really only need to carry 1 cable around, 1 battery around. So my day to day work involves reading and writing lots of code, lots of documents, so, I rely heavily on a clipboard manager. I use Pop!OS, which is a Linux distro, and the the great thing about the clipboard manager I find is that it just it stores all of my brains. If I've copied something from somewhere it is there in the history, whether it's a web address or a bit of text that I was using in one document, I want something else. I don't have to go hunting for it, it's just there in history.

The other shortcut I make far too much use of is emoji shortcut. I just love peppering everything that I do with emojis. I don't care if that makes me a tweenager, I think it's cool, and being able to to one click type, what I'm looking for and have sparkle hearts just appear absolute magic. Because I work with lots of very secure systems, I'm constantly typing in usernames and passwords, so I use Bitwarden. Bitwarden is a free and open source password manager, password generator, it's on my phone, it's on my laptop, it's I I use it everywhere and it's just fantastic knowing that I've got super strong passwords for every service, and if I ever need to change 1 or create a new one, it's immediately synced between my devices.

I don't have to remember 100 of complex passwords, and that's a a real time saver and and a lifesaver for me. The other tool I which I'm using right now is called droidcam, which is, a little gadget which turns my old Android phone up there into a high quality webcam, and there's a little Linux client running on my laptop, which enables me to speak to you in high def, which is very exciting because most laptops have rubbish webcams, so now I've got a big multi megapixel sensor, so you can really see how tired I look. And then, finally, one of the tools I find myself using a great deal is home assistant. I have far too much smart home gadgetry, so I've got my lights are all smart lights, and my fridge is a smart fridge, and I've got sensors and alarms and everything else, and it's great just to be able to see the state of my house, on on the dash, and to be able to turn lights on and off to set the alarm, to set up schedules. So I think when when you're living in a house with lots of technology, you need ways to manage that technology.

Home assistant is, a brilliant open source bit of kit. It runs on a Raspberry Pi which is somewhere in my room, probably. I can ping it so it must exist. I find music incredibly distracting when I'm working. I if someone is singing, I find myself typing what they're singing.

So I either use, you know, the, the lofi hip hop beats, you know, the, the girl in the in the cafe, or instrumental songs, or sometimes I will just pick a language that I do not know and, just say play me songs in this language, and it it just becomes noise to block everything out. I use lots of weird and wonderful hardware. One of the ones which I'm using quite a lot at the moment are these which are bone conducting headphones. So rather than going in the ear, they sort of rest there and they rattle your head when they put the sound in, which is fantastic because it means that your ears are free, and you can hear what's going on around you. The other piece of hardware which I use quite a lot are are these, which are just typing gloves.

So you put them on, stops you from getting RSI. If you're working a lot with computers, you you cannot look after your hands too much. So the the other thing that I've got, I'll see if I can get that up on camera here, is a, a trackball, so I can mouse like that rather than gripping a mouse. And then down here, I I love this keyboard so much I've got like 5 of them down there. This is a Microsoft ergonomic keyboard, other brands are available.

But but again it just means that my hands are spread out, so that I'm not, constantly cramping. And, I'm currently on a standing desk. I really can recommend like a cheap standing desk adapter, if you've already got a desk. It's it's not very expensive and it just means that get your posture right, get a nice foot mat as well. I I spent a bit too much money on a walking desk thing, so it's a it's a little treadmill that goes under there, but anything that keeps you active while you are at a computer is good, because otherwise you'll end up punched over like that, and you'll you'll mess your body up.

And then the final piece of hardware, that I use is this, which is, an Oculus Quest sorry, they like to be called Meta now, don't they? Meta Quest 2, and I I like this because every time I put it on it reminds me that some tech is just rubbish. You know, the the metaverse is absolute nonsense, but you can go in there and go, this looks so pretty, but it's useless for work, and every time a client says, oh, should we do something in the metaverse? I put this on and go, no, no, that's a bad idea. All all of the gear that I have around me is USB C connected.

We live in the future now, so microphone is USB C, I've got a little label printer, which is USB C, phone and headphones and just just everything. There there is no point getting a gadget and go, oh, I need to get another proprietary cable. So whenever I get something I always check is this gonna plug in to to my USB C dock, if it doesn't doesn't make the cut. And you know what? My my room is just filled with clutter of various raspberry pies and solar panels and, yeah.

Solar tech is really cool. Just being able to charge stuff from the sun. I love it. So the the final thing, bit of hardware that I use is a, a wine crate, because it's got the the holes in a crate, which hold a bottle, are exactly the right size for shoving lots of cables in. So rather than having my cables all in a messy box, I've got a couple of wine crates, and I've got USB cables there and Ethernet cables there and so on and so forth.

So that's my my tip to you is don't get a metaverse headset, buy a crate of wine, you will have a lot more use for it. I travel around the world a lot, which is a a great joy and privilege, and so I like to update OpenStreetMap, which is sort of like the the Wikipedia of Atlas', and there's a wonderful app called Street Complete, so you don't need to know anything about cartography. It presents like a sort of Pokemon Go interface, so as you're wandering around it will say what are the hours of this shop over here? Or what's the name of this street, how many stairs are there here, is this place wheelchair accessible. So you get all these little quests, and you go along on street complete as you're wandering around the city, and you just sort of tickmock.

I think that's great fun, and they have leaderboards, and you get trophies and stuff like that, but the the real joy is contributing to to global mapping. The other hobby that I have, my wife and I run a website called openbenches.org. If you're ever around and you see a memorial bench, you know, one of those benches, a little pack, and it says, in loving memory of so and so who used to love coming here, take a geotagged photo, upload it to to our website. We've now got, I think, over 30,000 benches from around the world that that people have contributed. And it's wonderful just seeing where memorials to to everyday people are.

And and, yeah, it's all free and open source, so come and have a play with that. And then finally, my I suppose my last hobby is watching Doctor Who. Absolutely love a bit of Doctor Who. There's no real technology needed other than a Blu ray player or a DVD player, but what I find absolutely fascinating is tracing how the ideas from early stories make it into modern stories, and how some of the filming techniques are completely outdated, but you can see what they're trying to do. And yet, even when the special effects are a bit ropey, what you can see is the idea of something interesting, and that gives me hope for all the things that we built.

So when I look back at my old websites that I built back in the late nineties, they were rubbish, but I can see exactly what I was trying to do. And that gives me hope that when people look at what we're doing now, they'll go cool, that that looks a bit rubbish, but we can see we can see the path that was taken from the olden days into the future. So I would definitely recommend finding an old TV show that that you like and watching it through from the beginning. So I don't keep many things analog. I think the only thing I do is I I fidget a lot.

So I've got lots of fidget toys like this which are just little things and bits that I have hanging around so that when I'm talking on calls like this, my hands can be busy fidgeting and hopefully not clicking too much near the microphone. But I I've been looking around my house to see what I've got that's analog, and other than me and my wife, I don't think there is anything. And that's it. That's all the gear that I use, the the hardware, the software, all the music I listen to. Everything is USB C powered, even the headphones that I listen to to music through.

I I've had so much fun talking to you today. If you'd like to follow me on social media, you can find me on mastodon or you can visit my blog, and that's at schukspert.mobiblog or contact me other ways edent dot tel. Thanks for having me. Bye.