tedtriv.co.uk

About Me

General Information

My PGP public key is on keys.openpgp.org.

Fingerprint: B635 3E23 8A7B 4779 28BF 87BE 936C 63A0 7DE4 A920

I also exist on:

What I do

I study Electronic Engineering at the University of York, United Kingdom.

Most of my “useful” programming experience has been in C# to write Windows applications for myself (WPF and Windows Forms), as well as Python with Django for web apps and scripting purposes with NumPy and SymPy. I have also written C++ code using the OpenGL API in my spare time as well as C for ARM Cortex and ATmega MCUs just to play around with them.

Other things which this blog might get used for:

Computer Hardware

I used to run Fedora Linux on my laptop, but installed Windows on it only because I can guarantee that the rest of the world is compatible with it. I try really hard to stop Windows working against me, but that is becoming more difficult…

Other hardware I own:

The Pi 5 is currently being used as a Forgejo instance for my own projects. I don’t want to use GitHub as it’s been run into the ground and Codeberg is only for open source projects.

So far I haven’t found a permanent use for the others…

My main camera is a Nikon Z50II, which I own a few of the DX lenses for.

Computer Software

A lot of software I use is open source for many reasons:

I still use Firefox as a browser because I don’t really see the point of using one of its derivatives, even though I don’t like Mozilla as a company.

To read code and write things I have been using Emacs recently, but I have used Vim in the past. I don’t really have a preference other, but I prefer Emacs’s policy on LLMs. I quite like using these to view code because I can read them without the IDE giving me a million warnings/errors.

My vimrc is stored on this site, it doesnt do much and it’s mainly here to download it onto other machines.

To write code I use Visual Studio 2026 a lot and PyCharm and CLion. I am not really a fan of Visual Studio Code because Microsoft made it an “AI code editor” for “multi-agent development” (their words not mine). I find the refactoring, static analysis and code generation features in VS2026 with the ReSharper extension much better for C++. If I used another language, it might be a different story, but it’s just not the same experience.

I don’t use any “AI”/LLM tools, and I don’t think you should either.

About My Site

Content gets written by myself in Markdown files, which get converted to HTML based on the templates I set in Hugo. I keep a copy of my site on GitHub, where I use an action to automatically pull it onto the server and build it with Hugo. I used to self host on a Raspberry Pi, but it was easier in the long term to keep it on a VPS.

My email server used to run off the same VPS, however because of changes to Dovecot in Debian 13, I moved it to my domain provider. From there I was able to copy in the Dovecot IMAP files. Blog post about it

Using Social Media

I check my email most often, so I would prefer to be contacted through that. The only “social” platforms I check is Mastodon (@tedtriv@mastodon.social) - I don’t really post anything though.

I have accounts created elsewhere but they’ve been unused for several years - they will be deleted eventually. To keep up to date with other peoples’ sites, I follow their RSS feeds, some of which can be found on the links page.