As you - the participatory public at large - consistently fail to recommend me as an interview subject for waferbaby’s The Setup, I’ve reached the point where I’m driven to write one myself. In waferbaby’s own words, here are the tools and techniques I’m using to get things done.

I have been meaning to lay all this out in unwelcome detail for some time. I don’t mean to be solipsistic to say that I know there are plenty of people who would be interested to read this, because their interest will have little to do with who I am and what I do. I myself will happily check The Setup once a week to see if a sysadmin, astrologer or mycologist that I have never heard of has offered their strong opinions on which laptop, telescope or centrifuge makes their toes tingle. I, myself, don’t want a centrifuge: at least, I don’t think I want a centrifuge. It’s the useless, voyeuristic pleasure of it all that relies, in part, on the distance from the subject: like peeking inside the lunchbox, bookshelf or monthly outgoings of somebody on the other side of the world.

Having spent most of my adult life jerry-rigging a new ‘setup’, incrementally and constantly, rather than fully face the dull pain of life’s professional disappointments, I feel that here at the age of 36 both my toolset and my mindset is settling into something approaching comfort, or maybe exhaustion. This owes partly to shifting priorities (my small-child-induced sleep pattern resembles, in diagram, a cruise ship jazz score), and partly to a bulging moral disquiet about the way I (we) have been using computers. Most simply, though, I’m getting bored with the materiality of the hardware and software I use, and the commerce of it all. I no longer want to seasonally rebuild my gaming PC myself, instead leaving it to the bluff, expensive men at Titan Computers. I’m even growing the good grace to be embarrassed by the rainbow LEDs on the CPU cooler.

I’ll copy the format of waferbaby’s interviews, and forlornly pretend that he is editing it, even now.

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Rob Sherman, a writer, digital artist, narrative experience designer and researcher. I work both creatively and critically with a range of technologies to create story-driven experiences: increasingly, those which involve historical and heritage contexts where fictionality and ‘authenticity’ intermix.

My past projects include large works of interactive transmedia fiction that proved financially inadvisable for their publisher, bots, multimodal installations and exhibitions, very short videogames, narrative-driven psychotherapy apps, fictional murder mysteries in factual places and (during the pandemic) a set of printable street names for the spiders that live in the corners of my living room.

Most recently I have joined the University Of Exeter as a lecturer and researcher in interactive storytelling and digital cultures. Exeter’s campus once boasted the highest student-to-tree ratio in the UK, but given the rate at which they are throwing up new buildings (with no discernible improvement in the availability of teaching space), I’m not sure this is true anymore.

What hardware do you use?

My main machine is a HP Spectre X360, purchased on very thin grounds through a university-funded project. It is technically the university’s property, but the asset tag has spontaneously peeled off and dissolved, and the mandated install of Windows 11 has been removed and replaced with one, terabyte-thick partition of Manjaro Linux. I’ve been toying with Linux for years, mostly on a small litter of Raspberry Pis; but making the leap to using it as my main OS, with no real corporate alternative, took a bit of a run-up. So far, barring a few WiFi driver issues and a lazy screen wake-up function, it’s working perfectly. KDE Plasma mirrors my beloved, decade-old Windows 10 install, offseting Arch’s reputation for a steep learning curve.

The laptop spends most of its time being driven, along with its drover, between my university office and my home desk. At home, the desk is an IKEA cranked standing base with a nicely waxed piece of birch ply, left over from a previous project, balanced on top. I sit on a generic draughtsmans chair, which I unsuccessfully tried to upholster with rude French embroidery to give our spare bedroom a bit of elan. As well as being boring, the chair gives me terrible calf ache because the seat is slightly higher from the ground than a normal office chair: a recent solution has been an even more boring footrest from IKEA which both takes the strain and pleasantly grates my bare feet like those tanks of poor, poor fish in the shopfronts of unlicensed beauticians.

On the desk, the laptop plugs into a Lenovo dock, connected to a Dell 27” 4K monitor, a very old 1920x1200 24-incher in portrait mode (the best configuration for anybody doing a lot of reading and writing), and a pair of Mackie CR-X monitors. I use a Logitech G915 mechanical keyboard and a Logitech M720 Triathlon mouse, but I have very few opinions on either of these and have resolutely failed to keep up with my friends’ obsessions with switches and cherries. The mechanical keyboard world all sounds a bit… frottagey for my liking.

These gubbins are also connected to a fairly generic KVM switch which allows me to move the peripherals between the laptop and my gaming PC with a button press.

For a long time, this PC was my only machine for work and play; the original version was built in 2007 with a scrupulously wasted student loan as part of a pact with three of my housemates. Recently, however, I realised:

1) The absurdity of using a 1000W machine for editing 18th century satirical prints and writing CSS; 2) How much our domestic energy bills had increased; 3) That my leg hair was being gently air-fried in the fan outflow.

So I pared down the PSU, swapped the GPU for a second-hand Nvidia whose model number I now refuse to double-check, and crammed it all into a much smaller, neater and better-ventilated case The machine is still named FARORE though: one of those three student-built originals, each christened for one of the three gods from the Legend Of Zelda imaginarium. 2007, to me, is Hyrule green and the screams of a Left4Dead LAN on Tuesday nights.

Now, I only switch the PC on for gaming sessions, and with a three-year-old and a non-gaming partner this rarely takes place sequestered in the spare bedroom. Instead, I use a Raspberry Pi with RetroPie and the Steam Link software to stream the PC to the living room telly. I’m finally starting to lose that strange, dysmorphic unease with playing on a sofa, actual feet away from the screen, after a lifetime as a PC gamer.

I did try gaming on the Spectre when I first installed Manjaro, and from what I have heard Linux gaming has improved a lot in recent years: but it was never a smooth experience, especially with the added complication of needing a very loud and very hot eGPU enclosure to shore up the laptop’s poor onboard graphics.

In addition to the two main machines:

• There’s a Raspberry Pi Zero, connected directly to our Nighthawk router, running PiHole for DNS-level ad-blocking, Headscale for accessing the LAN when travelling or at my office, and (starting next month) Mullvad VPN for hiding my PDF torrents from JStor’s lawyers.

• A Roku 3 for streaming, which I may replace with a dedicated Kodi box now that the ‘smart’ remote has broken and a replacement costs fifty pounds. Kodi struggles with some DRM-protected streaming, but these days we only really watch BBC and other British terrestrial services.

• A Synology NAS which I use for laptop backups, sharing stored media and a Card/CalDAV server as part of my continued, delicate undocking from Google.

• My mobile is a Moto G34 which I’m slowly divesting of almost any app that isn’t functional. Day to day, my goal is forget that the phone exists entirely, mostly by making it as boring, if not unpleasant, to use as possible. I’ve tried minimalist launchers, grayscale mode and even briefly joined the ‘dumbphone’ community. No matter how uncomfortable it was to admit, in the end I can’t deny that smartphones are very useful objects in certain circumstances (the camera, WhatsApp, the inability to unlock a rented car at Glasgow train station without one), and instead I’ve settled on a regime of a completely empty homescreen and a designed lack of charging cables around the house as a deterrant. It’s mostly working.

• I’ve owned tablets of various sorts over the years, both Android and Apple, mostly as devices for reading. However, their weight and the LED bluelight made them tiring to use for long periods of time, and left my eyes feeling like public toilet light bulbs: flickering and full of flies. Last week however I bought a secondhand BOOX Note Air 2, an underpowered Android tablet with a capacitative e-ink display. For now, it’s proving the best piece of kit I’ve bought in some years. I can read my ripped PDFS of David Foster Wallace’s Harpers dispatches from state fairs and Caribbean cruises until I nod off in bed and the thing crashes into my frenulum. It also makes my time with the born-digital texts I read for work and pleasure feel much more like reading itself, in a way that’s hard to elaborate on: I can only say that it feels less like interacting with a computer. I can also annotate everything with handwritten notes using the included pen, and with a nifty little batch script on my laptop I can sync those notes, run them through Google’s Cloud Vision API and OCR them into nice, formatted Markdown text. This is my only positive relationship with a Google product as most other handwriting OCR, even the mighty, undersung Tesseract, is flummoxed by my long descenders.

• I still use a lot of paper notebooks. I like Leuchtturm black hardback A5s, and black Pilot V5s. I’ll take a refillable V7, though I have never successfully held onto one long enough to reach that first caretridge swap. Often in a hurry I’ll end up using one of the pens from the precious metals company my father-in-law worked for, and which still mysteriously appear, full and box-fresh, ten years after he retired.

And what software?

Most of my deliberate opinions on software now only involve web services and Linux desktop apps. My phone runs Android, and any Google apps that I can’t directly do without (mostly the Play Store at this point, though I do sometimes sideload F-Droid) are hidden and disabled. The only apps for ‘consumption’ are BBC Sounds, Media Monkey for my mp3s and Pocket Casts, though the number of podcasts I listen to steadily shrinks every month. At the moment, it’s really down to Uncanny and Search Engine, and a bit of The Kitchen Cabinet if I’m cooking.

The Cornell University Merlin bird identification app has become almost the only form of augmented reality that I’ll tolerate: the machine learning for birdsong ID has improved massively in the last couple of years; and while I don’t like having my phone out when I’m walking, it can turn a flat, disposably pleasant and familiar backdrop into a three-dimensional stage of territories, intrigues and personalities. One day, with enough training, I’ll do without it and augment my own reality.

Most of the other apps on the phone are for parking payments, as every UK local authority insists on contracting with a different company. Some of these apps were only used in one, particular car park, and seeing their logos on my app screen gives a very dull spurt of reverie: a memory of the bark of particular dogs, particular graffiti, particular bags of shopping, the particular child I nearly ran over.

The only installs on the gaming PC are Steam, GOG Galaxy, Epic Games and the Vortex Mod Manager for endlessly tweaking Cyberpunk 2077 and, for a very short time before the anti-sublime set in, Starfield.

Otherwise:

• As somebody whose work involves a lot of writing, I primarily use various flavours of Markdown, and have barely opened a full document suite in a decade. It’s flexible, extensible, translatable between almost any two systems, and can be converted to many other formats with only a single installed library. This blog is now mostly written in Markdown and then converted to a static site using Jekyll. For work and other speaking engagements markdown is converted with Marp into Powerpoints; and almost every other piece of writing I do lives as a .md file in Obsidian.

• While Obsidian began as a straightforward ‘knowledge database’, it’s essentially come to replace my underlying file system for almost everything content-related. It holds drafts of articles, blog posts, the little letters to myself that become articles and blogposts, papers, notes, to-do lists, design documents, diagrams, budgets, lists of potential collaborators, and all my annotations from Zotero (see below). Obsidian purists would probably be repelled by my anaemic graph, but I’m happy with my imperfect, overchunked, underlinked excuse for a zettelkasten.

• If I need to worry about the finer points of typography, layout or things that Markdown tries to handwave out of the process for me, it’s Scribus or OpenOffice.

• Thunderbird for my email accounts, tied to my bonfiredog.co.uk domain and administered through UK-based, carbon-neutral provider Krystal.

• I only use Firefox day to day, unless I’m testing something web-based (with Chromium and Edge in backup). I’m not convinced that there is much front-end difference between most of the major browsers these days (even Edge has its fans), and my main reason for favouring Mozilla is ideological. However, there seems to be plenty of dark hints amongst Setup interviewees about Mozilla’s moral failings, which thankfully I don’t have the energy to follow up.

• On Firefox, extensions include privacy-related plugins such as ClearURLs and Decentraleyes, the Obsidian Web Clipper and uBlock Origin; alongside the PiHole, this may be the data security equivalent of double-rubbering, but superstitions persist.

• VS Code is bloody good at what it does, and I use it for basically every form of writing that isn’t straightforward prose, alongside a bunch of specific extensions for handling languages and libraries including Twee, Markdown, C#, HTML/CSS etc.

• For work I am required to use OneDrive and Teams, though often I just handroll something for students and host it on my own domain, such as the ‘interactive essays’ for my English Lit module Introduction To Digital Cultures.

• Elisa for playing MP3s. Spotify is gone: back to my Frankensteinian collection of Isoburned CDs and Napster torrents, slowly grown through more-recent Bandcamp purchases.

• I’m not on much social media, though LinkedIn remains annoyingly useful for finding work, and so I deal with the thought leaders in my timeline. I maintain Discord mostly to speak to one special little American.

• Audacity is absolutely fine for the mostly voice-based audio production that my work sometimes demands.

• Without the requisite parent in the creative industries, I have no long-cherished CD rip of 2004-era Photoshop, and have instead used GIMP for as long as I can remember.

• I take screenshots of everything: when the majority of your livelihood is tied to funding the need to constantly justify the funder’s decision to give you a couple of hundred quid drills good documentation practice into you like a tattoo. Spectacle makes this almost seamless on Linux, as well as adding extra functionality that comes in handy occasionally; yesterday, for example, I had to heavily pixellate Hokusai’s The Dream Of The Fisherman’s Wife for a student pub quiz, AND Spectacle obliged without blushing.

• Transmission for torrents of academic papers that my very wealthy university, inexplicably, cannot access.

• Syncthing keeps the laptop, my phone, Boox and Synology NAS in relative harmony: mostly my Obsidian vault, reading and music, admin documents and current projects. Syncing, like networking, remains a bit eldritch to me, and I try to not even look at my Syncthing configuration in case some quantum wrinkle breaks it again. Its unreliability was one of the main reasons to simplify things down to, in essence, one machine.

• Since entering academia full-time, I’ve finally and properly worked Zotero into my workflow. As well as centralised storage for citations, it is a fantastic tool for note-taking and interlinking sources. I happily pay £120 a year for the unlimited web storage (useful for those 3,500+ annotated PDFs and web snapshots), and the Obsidian Integration plugin allows me to pull my Markdown annotations for each source into my wider text database. The Boox flavour of Android also allows direct access to a online Zotero library, though there seems to be issues with syncing and accessing attachments.

• Filezilla is a slow but highly-customisable way of moving project stuff between my web server and my machine, though I’m starting to instead run live servers and automate FTP transfer through VS Code.

• Timeshift is a good backup/system restore tool for Arch Linux.

• Unity, Godot Twine, Gamemaker Studio, Construct and Bitsy are always kept ready for various projects, though at the moment most of my work seems to be done in raw HTML/CSS/Javascript. There are also plenty of smaller tools (Downpour, Echoes, Telescopic Text) that I’m keen to try for both my own projects and as potential student prototyping tools.

• I’ve recently and quite deliberately aimed, for reasons that I shouldn’t need to state, to reduce the role of algorithmic influence over the way I spend my time, and what I pay attention to. I’ve never been an avid user of any social media site, so removing these entirely was not difficult. Music, as I explained, is hosted locally and desocialised. Film and television likewise, other than ongoing faith in the BBC’s curation. For reading online material, I struggled until I made a fairly stark decision: to only read sources that I was willing to pay for, either through subscription or donation rather than through some aggregator. So far, my RSS feed is a small, manageable mixture of personal blogs, a handful of Substacks (Max Read’s and Lynn Cherney’s, in particular), some Patreons and those larger publications that I feel I can trust. As a knowledge worker, that Portlandia sketch is already discomforting, but now it feels that being less informed than your peers is not only a lifestyle choice, but a radical one. Rather than a read-later app, I use a Firefox extension to turn articles into cleaned-up PDFs that are synced to my Boox tablet for reading (and annotation).

• I recently had to use Blender for a project, and it did exactly what Claude said it would do if I pressed certain buttons in a certain order.

Yes, Claude. I know, I’m conflicted about it too. I’m plugged into the major tributaries of AI skepticism, and a mature and measured response to these technologies is an increasing part of my teaching, at a university where a digital artist is the closest thing to an ‘AI expert’ going. I’m as wary of uninformed histrionics as I am triumphalism (or, in the case of students, defensive fatalism) and this has nudged me in an unexpected direction. Rather than railing against AI tools, I try as hard as I can to find even-handed ways to consider them as components of modern knowledge work.

I don’t have any good, informed reason for choosing Anthropic over OpenAI. I’ve been an arachnophobe since childhood, and this does make it difficult to even see pictures of Sam Altman, but Dario Amodei is also quite unappealing in his own way, mostly for his smug, lesser-of-two-evils marketing strategy. A self-satisfied, entirely virtual shrug follows him around, unshrugged, like an invisible balloon.

I don’t find that I have to self-consciously restrict my use of Claude, as most of the breathless use cases for AI that people suggest seem to be about automating elements of my work and leisure that I enjoy - even the repetitive and boring parts, which are valuable precisely because of those qualities. My main use is to help me construct very specific code functions and scripts both for my work and for coralling Linux’s intimidating intricacies. While the replacement of human support communities online in favour of AI ‘services’ is concerning, sometimes I feel that we are too nostalgic for a technocratic web that was frequently snooty, if not openly hostile or obstructive, towards lost beginners. My own experiences in the depths of Reddit and Stack Overflow in the past decade show me that there is a place for a tool that is, despite all its faults, non-human very agreeable and entirely without its own opinions.

What would be your dream setup?

As already mentioned, I think I’m close already, for this season of life. ‘Dream’ is now less of a maximalist fantasy and more a desire to incarnate my morals and values in the way that I use technology. I’ve never been somebody whose work has depending on cutting-edge hardware, or expensive SaaS, but at this point in my career I am starting to think deliberately about how my work relates to the material circumstances in which it is produced.

I don’t want to stop working with these technologies: and without self-combusting out of life entirely, no individual can work without costing the earth some small outlay. My teaching and research, however, continue to convince me that to use corporatised web tools is not a neutral process but an ideological choice, and that autonomy from these tools, despite the inconveniences that might imply, sits alongside other autonomies that are becoming increasingly important to me as I get older.

Most of my setup now has been chosen for its second-hand nature, its ability to host FOSS software, and now - in an age of where the rain in the clouds seems like so much ‘standing reserve’, so much greywater, for cooling servers and GPUs - its ongoing sustainability. When planning projects, I now try and avoid reliance on for-profit software, to use low-powered hardware and (this usually comes naturally from the former) to ensure that the result is accessible to as many audiences, on as many machines, as possible. I’ve been trying this in piecemeal for some time, but it’s starting to coalesce into a practice now that I am in stable, long-term(?) employment at the university: a practice driven by the question, what does a sustainable digital art career look like?

For example, building on ideas from Kris De Decker and the low/no tech movement, I’m keen to explore the possibility of both personal and student projects powered by renewable energy. My south-facing office window, facing Dartmoor and the clean-faced Atlantic on the fourth floor, would suit a solar-powered server.

On a personal level, like most Setup respondents my remaining wants are more fundamental, more physical and ultimately more expensive: a bigger desk, and the space for a bigger desk; a separate desk without screens or keyboards for work on paper; a window in front of me instead of ten feet behind; a kilometre or so closer to the moors.

More prosaically, I am probably going to sell the Synology NAS because of its limitations beyond networked storage; I’ve used Raspberry Pis before as content servers but some self-hosted software seems to baulk at the ARM architecture, and Nextcloud, which I want to use to replace the G-Suite, slows to a crawl on these machines.

There are plenty of cheap, office-resale micro-PCs that would do the job, as long as they were low-wattage enough to work off a solar-powered battery. Along with networked storage and basic Card/CalDAV functionality, such a machine would serve most of my personal and professional needs that otherwise would rely on corporate ‘solutions’: RAID backup, password management, self-hosted RSS (rather than relying on Inoreader, as I do now), self-hosted federated social media and hosting space for students, as well as my own websites and services.

I’d also like to try something like LineageOS on my phone, though I think that completely divesting from Google becomes harder in the mobile space because of the ubiquity of Android. As I hope I’ve shown, I aim for practicality rather than fundamentalism; picking battles. It leads to fewer neckaches, and less time speaking to Claude.