About Me | Max's Webpage

My name’s Max and I’m an Orthodox Christian living in New England. I’m an economics master’s student at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an avid lover of the outdoors. In my free time I go kayaking, sailing, and bouldering with my friends. I’m also a certified kayaking and sailing instructor. I post a handful of updates and personal projects here, so welcome to my corner of the internet!

Now

This section is based off the now page concept by Derek Sivers.

Working through my first semester of my master’s program
Taking a Typikon course through my archdiocese
Reading “The Way of the Spirit” by Elder Aimilianos

My Interests

Touring kayaks, sailboats, and bouldering
Free bios firmware, GNU/Linux, and OpenBSD
Farming, simple living, and personal libraries
Patristics, liturgics, and theology

What I Use

I carry around an old Lenovo Thinkpad X220 I bought off eBay in 2021 for about ~$100. I’ve used several computers over the years, but this one has been consistently the most reliable. It has a 1TB SSD in it and another 2TB HDD in its ultrabase that I store miscellaneous files, backups, and movies on. My machine has been librebooted and I run Artix GNU/Linux+LARBS on it.

If you have a newer machine or just one that you can’t libreboot, I recommend installing OpenBSD on it (this is also my recommendation for servers). OpenBSD is awesome and has a better design and security philosophy than Linux, but for daily computing on my X220 I’m sticking with Artix. I’ve used it for years and I’m content with the setup I have.

My cellphone is a Google Pixel 7a running GrapheneOS with as few apps on it as possible. Everything I do with it can also be done over XMPP with my laptop, so it’s basically a glorified landline/GPS. I have a number with JMP.chat which makes this possible.

I used to have a litany of virtual private servers hosting my sites, but have since consolidated down to two. This site, and a handful of others, are powered by OpenBSD at obsda.ms via httpd. My personal “platform” Canoe Mail is on an OpenBSD server with full disk encryption hosted by Vultr.