About Me
Hello! My name is Preston Pan, a student in Canada. Here is a little bit about myself:
- good at C and python, depending on who you ask
- terrible css/webdev skills as you can tell by this website
- self learning mathematics and electronics
- almost a ham radio operator (come back in a few months when I get my callsign!)
- insane card magic skills due to practising an insane amount
- day to day user and advocate of free software
- fun fact: I'm actually really bad at everything above
I'm also many other things of course. One of my hobbies is that I'm a magician, for example. However, this is going to be technology oriented probably so you can find the magic content either on my youtube, peertube LBRY channels. Links to them below.
Contact Me
I only use platforms that respect my privacy and allow me to freely express my views. Therefore, I do not have an active discord account or social media.
- My Email: preston@prestonpan.tech
- My IRC: I should be prestonpan on my IRC server. See services section for more info. I am most active here because it is my own platform.
- My Matrix address: @prestonpan:synod.im. Don't use this, the two other platforms are much better.
Video Platforms
- My peertube instance. Please, if you can, use this. If you want subscriptions, either use a peertube account on another instance, or use the rss feed for my peertube. If you want to use this platform with a terminal web browser, don't. Instead, use an rss feed and youtube-dl. It's a very workable solution.
- My youtube channel. Yes, it's Youtube, but I need to actually reach people somewhere. My not using youtube, I would be preaching to the choir about stuff like digital privacy. Also magic content for fun.
- My LBRY channel. Marginally better than Youtube. Everything above applies.
My long term goal for this website is to not rely on other websites. Therefore, it would be great if you could use this website as opposed to other websites for my content.
Projects
I mostly do programming projects, but social and political projects may be done in the future.
My Dotfiles

PrestonPan Website

NoExcess

Recent blog posts
The following are some recent blog posts by me that are not explicitly projects.
Switching to OpenBSD

Minimalism

Free Software

Services
These are all the services my website offers. You may use them for any purpose.
- My searx instance. A search engine that is actually okay, and is open source and does not require javascript. Unfortunately, it relies on other search engines.
- My onion site. A more bloated but more private way of connecting to the internet.
- My gopherhole: gopher://prestonpan.tech. This is a better protocol than http, but didn't get adopted. Oh well.
- My IRC server: prestonpan.tech on port 6697. Please use SSL. Please do not get your client to verify the SSL certificate because it is self signed. If you cannot get this working, then port 6667 without SSL should suffice. If you have an IRC server and would like to federate, I would be happy to do so.
Git repos
Please use my own git server when possible. This is because I don't update anything else too often. Nevertheless, here are some places where I have hosted some code.
- My Git: My git server's frontend can be found at that link. Please use my git server when possible to get a copy of my software. Because the frontend I am using does not have a page for issues or pull requests, you may use my irc server or email to file issues and pull requests. To file a pull request, simply send the diff file to me and I can decide if I want to patch the software.
- My codeberg. use only if needed. I update my own git server more.
- My github. Please do not use this. Please. I have a git server. It's right there. Please don't use my github.
About this site
This site was designed to be minimal, with less than 120 lines of css, and no javascript. To avoid using javascript, I used a static site generator that I wrote specifically for this website.
If you like that this website has no hidden trackers, google fonts, or really anything that could undermine your privacy, or frankly, your eyes, consider: