I like reading about the hardware and software various people use so here’s my version.

Introduction

I work for Oracle as a technical consultant based in the UK (fully remote). I’m old and evolved from a Unix/C developer to PL/SQL, Oracle DBA and now work on database migrations and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Hardware

Lenovo ThinkCentre M900.

  • Intel i7-6700
  • Memory 48GB (upgraded from 16GB)
  • Disk 1TB

Samsung Galaxy S24

Expensive phone kindly provided by my employer. I don’t use many apps (Gmail, WhatsApp, BBC Sport, Tusky).

MacBook Pro

Expensive laptop kindly provided by my employer. I use it on the rare occasions I need to attend an office or customer site.

Huawei Android tablet

I don’t have a personal laptop so I use this for idly wasting time.

Synology

Years ago, I acquired a FreeNAS unit after almost losing an essay (and my marriage) my wife had written for a Masters course. I subsequently replaced the FreeNAS with a Synology DS420+ which works fine (file backups, Jellyfin music server). The NAS has saved my bacon on more than one occasion and now I can’t imagine being without it.

Software

Arch Linux

Former serial distro hopper. Now happy with Arch and Gnome desktop. Arch just works, has great documentation and provides a brilliant development environment (comprehensive range of latest packages).

GNU Emacs

I have used GNU Emacs for many years but am still learning about its power daily. I try to use core packages and keep my configuration minimal although I build the latest bleeding edge version (30.x).

  • Theme - Used ‘monokai’ for ages and now adopted Prot’s excellent ‘modus-vivendi-tinted’.
  • Orgmode
  • Org Roam
  • Vertico, Consult, Maginalia, Orderless
  • Magit
  • Jinx (spell checker)
  • Dashboard
  • Undo Tree
  • Pass

Thunderbird

My employer uses Outlook but we can run any email client so I run a local Dovecot IMAP server and Thunderbird.

I use Thunderbird to automatically fetch messages from Outlook and filters in a vain attempt to try to reduce the size of INBOX.

VirtualBox

I use VirtualBox a lot for demo environments, testing new Oracle features and experimenting.

I’ve also used Docker/Podman but struggle to fully embrace it as I prefer full control (and don’t really understand Docker compose files).

Corporate

Standard list of tedious corporate applications I have to use. Most of these work on Arch.

  • Zoom
  • Teams
  • Slack
  • Confluence
  • Jira
  • VS-Code/SQL Developer (Oracle database client).