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Break on Through I used to be pretty good with tiny fake guitars. Not "Through the Fire and Flames" good but still "Satch Boogie" good.1 Many an evening was spent with friends and family over a copy of Rock Band or Guitar Hero: World Tour, but we as a civilization collectively decided after Lego Rock Band and Guitar Hero: Van Halen that the fake instrument rhythm games had gone too far, leaving sales dwindling and relegating our Fisher-Price instruments to the attic. ...

I use KDE on the desktop. Although most of my userland operations are done in Emacs and Firefox, I tend to appreciate the choice when handling tasks more complex than text-based processes. KWin, the default window manager, features a superb set of per-application rules that come in handy while playing games, like forcing borderless fullscreen or always keeping a window on top. Plasma is stuffed to the brim with features and hooks, and I've exploited them before when writing my first Emacs package to ease certain operations between Emacs and my mobile devices. But one feature I've always missed has been desktop search. KDE offers the excellent Baloo, a file indexer that handles both metadata and content, and its integration with Krunner is the main reason I use the latter. As a matter of fact, despite Krunner's many features, like arithmetic and dictionary lookups, I only ever use it for finding files and launching applications. I can improve this workflow. ...

I've used Emacs since I was an impressionable sophomore in college hearing about this weird old program's ability to integrate with everything a social scientist needs: R, LaTeX, Bash, and just about anything else you can do with text on a computer. Though I started using GNU/Linux casually in middle school1, I never really learned about how any of it worked or the culture around free software until I played with Arch Linux for the first time.2 While Arch started it, Emacs is the piece of software that has stayed with me the most. For just about any computing task that isn't browsing the web or playing games,3 Emacs is front and center. I am heavily indebted to the Emacs community for writing extensions such as Emacs Speaks Statistics, AUCTeX, and org-mode that are integral to my workflow. ...