EM4E: The Tools in Use — and Why

There is a philosophy and practicality behind the tools chosen here.

Not a manifesto or a recommend tech stack. Just an honest account of what the author uses, why he chose it, and the current that runs through it all.

The Thread That Runs Through It

The story behind EM4E’s technology choices began the same way it does for most — with questions asked when technology breaks or when the friction it carries becomes more that what is comfortable.

For years, the computers, software, and services the author used followed the familiar path: get what fits your needs, upgrade when told, accept the terms, absorb the costs, repeat. It worked, until it didn’t. Forced obsolescence. Expanding data collection. Operating systems that began to feel less like tools and more like managed relationships — where the vendor held most of the cards.

At some point, a simple question began to emerge:

Do I really want to keep repeating this cycle — and endure the ongoing expenses to support it?

The answer that was once a resounding “yes,” over time evolved into a clear and practical “no.”

What followed wasn’t a dramatic break or an ideological conversion. It was more of a personal feasibility study — a slow process that considered many variables and scenarios relating to clients, deliverables, work flows and creative expression. Each change considered and then earning it’s place through actual testing rather than any principle or marketing pressure. The same orientation and approach that the author applies to EM4E, the books, and other writings, all carrying the same invitational approach for readers: use what truly helps, leave the rest. No pressure, and no programs, just a quiet examination of some options.

The short summary of tools list below are a few of the tools that survived the process. None of them are prescriptions. All of them are honest and solutions that work for the author at this point in time.

-> Learn more about the author.

Kubuntu Linux — The Foundation

The operating system running beneath all of this work is Kubuntu — a Linux distribution built on Ubuntu, using the KDE Plasma desktop environment.

The name Ubuntu comes from the Zulu and Xhosa languages, where it carries a meaning that has no clean English equivalent: ‘humanity’ is one common translation, and ‘the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity*’ is another. Sometimes the meaning is also rendered as “I am because we are,” all generally describing a set of African-origin value systems emphasizing the interconnectedness of individuals with their surrounding social and physical worlds.

That a widely used operating system carries this name is not incidental. Linux, and Ubuntu within it, is built on the principle of freely shared, openly developed software — a community if you will, that is contributed to and maintained by people across the world — people who have no obligation to do so except their own sense of what is worth doing. The name and the thing are two sides of the same coin.

The practical reality of Kubuntu is quieter, at least for the author, than its philosophical roots might suggest: something stable, calm, fast, transparent, flexible — something that quickly become a comfortable new operating system home, where updates don’t arrive as unwelcome surprises. Where nothing is forced and the system serves the work rather than the vendor’s roadmap.

Of course, the path here wasn’t without a couple of hiccups and a few rough edges — like most technology. But with some patience, perseverance, and a slow and steady approach, this operating system turned out to be the right tool for the work ahead.

Posteo — For Email

Contact here arrives at em4e@posteo.de — an address hosted by Posteo, an independent email provider based in Berlin, Germany.

Posteo has been operating since 2009, entirely self-financed, with no loans, no investors, and no advertising revenue and not stock holders to appease. The business model is simple: subscribers pay a small monthly fee, and in return their email is private, untracked, and unconnected to any advertising profile. The servers run on actual green energy (not so-called “certified energy”). The company’s founding purpose — to offer an alternative to surveillance-model communication services — has not changed since they began.

The .de domain is not accidental. German privacy law is among the strictest in the world, and Posteo’s Berlin location places it under that scrutiny and those protections by design.

In the author’s view, there is something fitting about an EM4E contact address being part of the Posteo system. A provider that asks very little of its users, offers something genuinely useful, and has been quietly doing so for a long time — without drama, without scale ambitions, without optimizing for growth.

Mojeek — For Search

The search engine used here at EM4E is Mojeek, which is based in the United Kingdom.

Most search engines — even the privacy-focused ones — do not actually own their search index. They are intermediaries, drawing results from Google or Bing and presenting them with a different interface and different privacy terms. Mojeek is one of a small number of exceptions: it maintains its own independently built and crawled index of the web, drawing on no third-party sources other than the actual indexed results.

The practical consequence of this are search results, which in the author’s experience, more closely reflect and support what the search intention actually was — and then present a broader spectrum of content from a wider set of sources — not just what an algorithm-applied profile predicts you want to see, what advertisers have influenced, or what your prior searches have shaped. Just the query and the index.

Mojeek’s own documentation describes what they call the search filter bubble — the way personalized search gradually narrows what a user can encounter, until the flexibility to meet genuinely new information is quietly gone. That narrowing is, in its own way, a small version of what the EM4E books address: awareness that has been compressed by accumulated pressure until it mistakes its current range for the full picture.

An independent search engine that simply returns what it finds, without agenda, without profile, without prediction, felt like the right tool for this work.

Zettlr — For Writing

The writing behind much of this work happens in Zettlr, an open-source Markdown-based writing application built for people who take long-form thinking and writing seriously.

Markdown is a plain-text format — words and simple symbols, no proprietary file types, no vendor lock-in, no document that becomes unreadable when a software subscription lapses. What is written in Markdown belongs entirely to the writer, in a format that any text editor on any system can open, now or in the future.

Zettlr adds to this a calm, distraction-reduced environment suited to the kind of sustained attention that good writing requires. It keeps the technology simple and direct.

Hugo and the Ed Theme — The Website

This website is built with Hugo, an open-source static site generator using Markdown text files as the source, using a lightly customized Ed theme for the skin — a minimal, text-forward design originally developed for digital scholarly editions, and now used for a variety of writing-forward websites.

The choice of Hugo was deliberate on three counts. First, simplicity of maintenance: a static site where the plain HTML is generated with each save cycle. No database, no server-side processing, and no moving parts that can break from time to time. Second, the Ed theme’s clean, reader-centered aesthetic is exactly what the author feels a site like this should look like — nothing competing with the text, nothing asking for attention. The site visitors get to choose what feels right.

Second, no lock into to a website platform or subscription website service. Just a basic low-cost hosting.

And third. the architecture of the Hugo/Ed system is simple and it serves the underlying philosophy is at work: no Google Analytics are in use, no tracking pixels, no persistent cookies, no third-party scripts monitoring visitor behavior. This is how the site was envisioned and how it was built. A static site built with care and without surveillance infrastructure. The privacy the footer describes isn’t a just an empty promise — it’s a reflection of our respect for every site visitor.

No Recommendations Here

This page is for the curious. Nothing more. There are no affiliate links and no sponsors.

The tools and technology are the result of choices that evolved over time, and from the author’s perspective, worth sharing — chosen because they fit the work, the philosophy, the daily work flow, and the practical reality of how this corner of the author’s world operates.