Nour Agha

Note · 14 Oct 2026, 20:54

nour@agha.dev (Nour Agha) — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 13:54:13 -0400

I’ve spent some time recently rebuilding my website from the ground up, and I’m continuing to develop it. I’ve updated the theme, refined the visuals and styling, and added new pages, sections, and content. Check out the colophon to see how the site was built.

This section is a microblog for shorter thoughts and updates.

Colophon

nour@agha.dev (Nour Agha) — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This website is my personal and independent home on the web — a place to share my thoughts, ideas, projects, writing, and experiments.

Rooted in creative and artistic expression, engineering discipline and philosophy, and digital independence and freedom, it reflects both my identity and my values.

Inspired by the principles of the IndieWeb, it’s a space where I own and control my content. Its design and development are guided by three core principles: privacy, simplicity, and performance.

Now

nour@agha.dev (Nour Agha) — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A snapshot of what I’ve been up to lately. This page is inspired by the /now page movement.

I’m focused on growing as a software engineer, building things I care about, taking care of myself, and finding a sustainable balance between work, learning, health, and the things I enjoy.

🏢 Work
#

I’ve been building and maintaining systems, documentation, and tooling while troubleshooting software and hardware issues. I’m also exploring AI integration and automation through projects while working toward my long-term career goals.

Uses

nour@agha.dev (Nour Agha) — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The gear, software, and tech I use day to day. This page is inspired by the uses.tech community.

I highly value privacy, simplicity, efficiency, and flexibility.

⚙️ Hardware
#

💻 Laptop: Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 16IAH7 — my main machine for work and development.
- CPU: Intel Core i7-12650H
- GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3060 6 GB
- RAM: 64 GB DDR4
- SSD: 512 GB NVMe M.2
📱 Phone: Samsung Galaxy A55 — for calls, messaging, photos, and everyday essentials.
📱 Tablet: Samsung Galaxy A9 — for reading, media, and casual entertainment.
⌚ Smartwatch: Amazfit Active 2 — an elegant and lightweight smartwatch for daily wear, notifications, health monitoring, and fitness tracking.

🖥️ Software
#

👨🏻‍💻 Development
#

⚙️ Operating system: Pop!_OS — Ubuntu-based Linux and my daily driver for development, productivity, and gaming.
🪟 Desktop environment: COSMIC
⌨️ Terminal: COSMIC Terminal
🐟 Shell: fish — a friendly, interactive shell with syntax highlighting, autosuggestions, and tab completions out of the box, giving me a cleaner experience than zsh with plugins.
🧩 Shell plugins: Fisher — plugin manager for fish. I mainly use plugin-git for git aliases, fzf.fish for fuzzy finding, and nvm.fish for node version management.
✨ Prompt: Starship — a minimal, fast, customizable, and cross-shell prompt.
📝 Editor: VS Code — for code editing with extensions and AI agents.
🧠 Languages: C, C++, Java, Bash/Shell, and Windows Batch/CMD
🔄 Version control: Git
⚡ Static site generator: Hugo — a fast static site generator with a single binary and no runtime dependencies, powering my website.
🚀 Hosting & infrastructure: Cloudflare Pages and DigitalOcean
🟢 Status monitoring: Better Stack
📊 Analytics: Umami — privacy-first, cookieless analytics for my website.

🤖 AI
#

💬 Assistant: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Ollama (local) — for brainstorming, research, learning, productivity, creative exploration, problem-solving, and feedback.
🛠️ Coding & agents: GitHub Copilot (primary coding assistant), Codex, Claude Code, and Antigravity — for coding, agentic development, and technical workflows.

📦 Applications
#

✉️ Mail: Proton Mail — for private, secure, and encrypted mail with SimpleLogin for email aliases.
📅 Calendar: Proton Calendar
🔑 Password manager: Bitwarden and Proton Pass
🛡️ Authenticator: Ente Auth and Proton Authenticator
🌐 Browser: Firefox — I use a hardened configuration for privacy.
- Main extensions:
  - uBlock Origin (ad and content blocker)
  - Violentmonkey (userscripts)
  - Stylus (userstyles) — I use the Catppuccin Mocha (Sapphire) theme for many websites.
  - Dark Reader (dark mode)
  - Firefox Multi-Account Containers (separating personal, work, and other browsing)
💬 Communication: Signal, WhatsApp, Discord, and Element
🗝️ VPN & network privacy: Cloudflare WARP and Proton VPN
📝 Notes: Obsidian and Standard Notes
🖼️ Photos: Ente Photos
💳 Wallet: Cake Wallet, Coinbase Wallet, and Proton Wallet
🎮 Game launchers: Steam (with Proton), Lutris, Heroic Games Launcher, and Prism Launcher
🔁 Windows compatibility: Bottles — for running Windows apps and games on Linux.
🖥️ Remote desktop: RustDesk
🎛️ Digital audio workstation: Bitwig Studio — for music production and mixing.
🔐 Encryption: Cryptomator (cloud) and VeraCrypt (disk)
💾 Backup: Kopia
🎨 Design & editing: GIMP and Kdenlive — for creative media editing and content creation.
📸 Screenshots: ShareX — the best screenshot tool I have ever used.
❤️ Health & fitness tracking: Zepp Health — for my Amazfit Active 2 watch.
🍎 Nutrition tracking: Cronometer
🌈 Theme: Catppuccin Mocha (Sapphire) — my favorite theme across many applications. I like its calm, colorful, and soothing aesthetic.
🅰️ Font: Inter and Fira Code — my main sans-serif and monospace typefaces for the site and code.

☁️ Services
#

🔎 Search: DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, and Startpage — for private search and varied results.
📁 Cloud storage: Proton Drive, Tresorit, and Google Drive
🎵 Music: Spotify and Anghami
📺 Video: Netflix and Prime Video

🧰 Accessories
#

🎧 Headphones: Anker soundcore Space One — I really like Anker audio products for casual, everyday listening and calls. They offer great quality, excellent value, and solid ANC, and I can connect and manage everything in the same polished, feature-rich Soundcore app. Check out the reviews on SoundGuys.
🔊 Portable speaker: Anker soundcore Select 4 Go — one of the best purchases I’ve made. It punches well above its weight and is surprisingly loud for its size, with much better sound and value, and nearly three times the battery life of the JBL Go models I previously owned.
🔋 Power & charging: Anker 336 Charger (67W), Anker 533 Power Bank (PowerCore 30W), and Anker USB-C Cables — Anker is hard to beat for charging essentials. Reliable, practical, and consistently excellent quality and value.
🎒 Bag: SWISSGEAR ScanSmart Backpack

Blowfish

nour@agha.dev (Nour Agha) — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A personal website and blog theme for Hugo that powers this site.

Added Ko-fi integration (#3118), shipped in v3.9.0.

nunocoracao/blowfish

Personal Website & Blog Theme for Hugo

HTML

2912

763

Privacy

nour@agha.dev (Nour Agha) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This site is designed and built with privacy in mind.

It uses privacy-first, cookieless analytics that collect aggregate information about site usage, such as pages visited, referrers, approximate country, and device/browser type. This information helps me understand which content people find helpful, how they navigate the site, and how the site and its content can be improved. The data is anonymized and does not include personally identifiable information. There is no advertising, tracking cookies, or cross-site tracking, and analytics are not used to build personal profiles.

Minecraft SMP

nour@agha.dev (Nour Agha) — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Paper server built, hosted, and administered for a dedicated community of over a thousand members, featuring JVM performance optimization, plugins, live 2D/3D web maps, and analytics for server performance and player activity metrics.
Fabric client modpack curated, hosted, and maintained on Modrinth with thousands of downloads, featuring performance optimization and graphics enhancement mods.

Hugo Coder

nour@agha.dev (Nour Agha) — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A simple and clean blog theme for Hugo, previously used for my site.

Added automatic color scheme switching for syntax highlighting (#815)
Added support for Pirsch analytics (#795)
Added giscus as a comment system (#753)

luizdepra/hugo-coder

A minimalist blog theme for hugo.

HTML

3116

1153

Hosting an MTA-STS policy using Hugo and Netlify

nour@agha.dev (Nour Agha) — Sat, 13 May 2023 17:23:10 +0300

An MTA-STS (Mail Transfer Agent Strict Transport Security) policy is essential for securing your emails with both encryption and authentication. This helps prevent potential and malicious MITM (man-in-the-middle) attacks which involve interception and tampering during transit through SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) used by mail providers. MTA-STS is a fairly new standard which makes email communication much more secure, and has been adopted by Google only a few years ago and Microsoft as of last year. If you have and use your own domain for email, you will need to create, configure, and publish your own MTA-STS policy.

Creating a Mastodon alias

nour@agha.dev (Nour Agha) — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 01:54:18 +0200

You can create a Mastodon alias with your own custom domain without having to host your own Mastodon server, thanks to some web magic. It’s called an alias because it doesn’t change your actual address, but it’s very useful for identity and discoverability. This means that others can find you on Mastodon (or the wider fediverse) using your alias – a part of your identity that remains unchanged, even if you switch or migrate servers.

Welcome

nour@agha.dev (Nour Agha) — Sat, 08 Apr 2023 23:29:33 +0200

Welcome to my blog!

This is a place to share my ideas, projects, guides, and documentation, and a home for my thoughts, opinions, insights, and perspectives regarding any topics or subjects of interest. When it comes to technical blogs, my aim is to make my guides and documentation user-friendly and accessible to anyone regardless of technical skill and background, where possible or necessary.

You can find out and explore more about me and my background on the about page, where I cover my main areas, passions, and interests. If you would like to connect, need help, or have any questions, feel free to reach out via my contact page – I’m always happy to chat and meet new people.

About

nour@agha.dev (Nour Agha) — Sun, 05 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction
#

👋🏻 Hello, I’m Nour, a computer engineer and software developer from 🇱🇧 Lebanon.

I’m currently working in a senior support role in the computer guided surgery field in digital dentistry, helping and enabling dental professionals to design, craft, and spread more smiles.

I’m a dreamer, writer, gamer, and electronic music lover, a free and open source software (FOSS) enthusiast, and a privacy, security, digital freedom, and humane technology advocate. I’m interested in science and philosophy and I’m passionate about STEM, academically and professionally. My favourite literary and entertainment genres are sci-fi and fantasy. I enjoy music, writing, gaming, and football as hobbies.

Contact

nour@agha.dev (Nour Agha) — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Message
#

You can contact me at nour@agha.dev, hello@nouragha.com, or hi@nour.lol.

dotfiles

nour@agha.dev (Nour Agha) — Thu, 29 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

My developer environment and system configuration files, designed for instant setup to deploy all of my configs and applications across any system with a single command.

nourkagha/dotfiles

🔧 .files, configs and applications for my Pop!_OS desktop, managed with 🏠 chezmoi.

Shell

Cryptomator

nour@agha.dev (Nour Agha) — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Multi-platform transparent client-side encryption of your files in the cloud.

Added support for MEGA and pCloud as cloud providers and vault location presets (#1622), shipped in v1.5.15.

cryptomator/cryptomator

Cryptomator for Windows, macOS, and Linux: Secure client-side encryption for your cloud storage, ensuring privacy and control over your data.

Java

16318

1540

Custom WeakAuras

nour@agha.dev (Nour Agha) — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Customizable graphics and event-driven Lua elements for real-time status tracking and UI customization in World of Warcraft.

Wago.io | Nour