Tools & organizations
Some are projects I rely on every day. Others document or challenge practices that make technology harder to repair, understand, or keep using. This is a personal list of work I appreciate and want more people to know about.
Organizations
Organizations working on digital ownership, repair, consumer rights, and sustainable free software.
Digital ownership and right to repair
FULU works on digital ownership and right to repair, including the legal and technical restrictions that can prevent people from repairing or modifying hardware they own. I appreciate that it treats ownership as more than permission to use a product on the manufacturer's terms.
Documenting anti-consumer practices
A FULU Foundation project
Consumer Rights Wiki collects sourced examples of disabled devices, repair barriers, and features removed after purchase. I like having these cases documented in one place, where recurring patterns are easier to see and reference.
Supporting software freedom
Software Freedom Conservancy supports free-software projects and helps enforce copyleft licenses. I value the less visible work behind keeping community software independent and making sure the rights promised by a license are respected.
Software
These projects fit how I like to run my systems: understandable, configurable, and useful without giving up control.
A clean base for my main system
I chose Arch because I wanted current kernels, KDE Plasma, and a system I could assemble myself. My host is a minimal manual Arch installation on Btrfs with snapshots. Development and other isolated work run in virtual machines, which keeps the base system small, predictable, and easier to recover.
Fast, reliable, and built to adapt
Plasma gives me the speed and reliability I want without limiting how I arrange the desktop. Its settings, built-in tools, and configurability let me shape the environment around my workflow instead of working around it. Being open source and community-developed matters to me as well.
Local automation across different devices
Home Assistant brings commercial devices and DIY hardware into one system running in my home. Its broad integration support lets me connect everything from off-the-shelf sensors to Arduino and ESP-based projects. I deliberately choose devices that can operate locally without depending on a vendor's servers for basic features or sending household data elsewhere.
From an ESP32 to a useful local device
ESPHome makes it remarkably easy to turn an ESP32 (and more) into a sensor, controller, or camera and connect it locally to Home Assistant. Its community has already built support for a wide range of hardware, including ESP cameras and Midea air conditioners, so I can start from working components and still change the behavior when a project needs something specific.
Flexible virtual machines on Linux
QEMU and virt-manager let me keep development environments in virtual machines while the Arch host stays clean. I like how much control the stack exposes over processors, memory, storage, networking, snapshots, and device passthrough. Support for GPU passthrough makes it useful far beyond disposable development machines, while virt-manager keeps the setup practical to manage.