Yan ZhuInterview
Staff Technologist (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
Adapted from Yan Zhu's interview on Uses This, published 24 June 2014. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
My work laptop is a ThinkPad X1 Carbon.
My other laptop is a memory-starved, glacierlike ThinkPad X220 from college, which I still love for its delightfully percussive keyboard and resilience to physical brutality.
Then the pressures of ambulatory navigation in unfamiliar geography convinced me to purchase a secondhand Galaxy Nexus from a friend.
About a year ago, someone convinced me to buy a Kindle Paperwhite.
Communication
Productivity
For years, I refused to use any window manager except xmonad.
A few months ago, after 45 minutes of failure to achieve a usable state with it on Debian Testing, I switched over to Awesome with custom keybindings to make it behave like vanilla xmonad.
Browser
Lately I've also been writing a Firefox extension called Privacy Badger to block invisible third-party trackers on the web.
Adblock Plus for hiding annoying ads.
Security
Coding & Development
I do all my coding and text editing in Vim; if you're curious, you can find my configurations in https://github.com/diracdeltas/dotfiles.
I like looking at colors, and the Solarized theme for urxvt and vim has some nice ones.
Other
Sometimes I push code to SecureDrop, an anonymous document submission platform for whistleblowers.
My main laptop runs Debian Testing ("Jessie"); as a result, I have gotten really good at ignoring lack of functionality that laptops generally have.
My phone runs CyanogenMod without any Google applications, including the Google Play Store.
NoScript for making XSS and malicious code execution from untrusted sites less likely.
Vimperator so that Firefox behaves like Vim, of course.