Stuff I use

Inspired by my Uses This interview, which I discovered needed an update, I decided to maintain a uses page here on my own site.

Hardware

The following assumes a home setup. My job requires a lot of travel (I spent nearly 70% of 2019 on the road), which is a different hardware setup. I have that written up over here. Obviously, the travel setup isn’t really needed right now, what with my country totally stuffing its attempts at curtailing the spread of a pandemic. But I digress…

The Desktop: My workspace is basic, minimal, and mostly empty. The desk itself is a couple of IKEA FINNVARD trestles topped with a HILVER bamboo desktop. My chair is a Haworth Very Office Chair that I got a heckuva deal on from a local used office furniture store. On the desk itself: a 13” 2021 MacBook Pro, an Anker PowerPort Speed PD 5 (under the desk, actually, but this thing is so great I can’t not mention it), an Viozon Laptop arm, a 27” LG 27UK850-W 4K monitor on a bog standard adjustable monitor arm, a Logitech MX Mechanical Mini for Mac keyboard accompanied by an Apple Magic Trackpad 2, a Blue Snowball microphone, and finally a Logitech C920 HD webcam that lives on top of the monitor.

The Music: About the only time there isn’t music playing somewhere in the house is when I’m sleeping, so my musical devices are very important to me. I have a headphone addiction so I have many of those, but the ones that get the most use are my Bose Altos when I’m out and about (yes, they’re kitschy but I love them), my Bowers & Wilkins P7 Wireless when I’m at my desk (superb sound and comfort), and my Powerbeats Pro anywhere and everywhere (these easily kick Airpod ass in sound, comfort, and usability). When I’m doing stuff around the house (read: not using headphones) I either stream Apple Music to a bevy of HomePod Minis scattered about the house or I kick it old school using the reliable tech I’ve been using since the turn of the century: Slim Devices (now Logitech) Squeezeboxes and Booms streaming music from my Ubuntu server running Squeezeserver.

The Wetware: Beverages are nearly as important to my productivity as music. While I adore coffee (each morning features a 200ml inverted Aeropress of hand-ground Sweet Maria’s beans home-roasted in a Behmor 2000AB Plus; yes, I’m That Person), tea is my primary productivity lubrication when I’m at home. The majority of my tea is looseleaf from Upton, served in a vintage Swan Brand ‘The Carlton’ teapot. While I have a kettle, in 2018 I bought a Zojirushi CD-WCC30 water boiler and it’s been a life-changer.

The Mobile: My mobile devices don’t get much of a workout unless I’m on the road. Still, I suppose they deserve a mention since they’re pretty important to me in many ways. After reading the above it’ll probably be no surprise to learn that they’re all Apple devices: iPhone 8, a gen one 9.7” iPad Pro with equally vintage Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard/cover. I wrote a massive amount of my first book on that iPad Pro. It’s perfect for those little airplane tray tables. The mobile device that gets the most daily use is my Apple Watch 8, mostly for checking weather, tracking activity, and seeing the time in other regions.

Software

I’m in tech, and I’ve been telecommuting for at least 13 years, so a lot of my life is online. This means I use a ton of software. To be honest, I didn’t realise exactly how much software I relied on until I started making a list for this article.

The Exobrain: I have a mind like a steel sieve, write everything down (digitally speaking), and review it all constantly. The core of it all is my Exobrain, without which my life grinds to a halt and to which I refer dozens of times every single day. Larger projects and initiatives get tracked in Trello, discrete steps - and every other task or todo item in my life - all go into Apple Reminders, and web clippings go into DEVONthink. Zotero is priceless for storing and cataloguing all of the research papers I read.

The Writing: If I write it, it’s written in Markdown and stored in Git, or more specifically in repositories in GitLab. Every presentation, article, blog post, website, and even my book are in version control. I prefer the GitHub Desktop client on my Mac and Working Copy on the iPad, but I do spend time at the command line by way of iTerm2. My editor of choice is MacVim on my Mac or Textastic on my iPad Pro, but I’m becoming more of a fan of the editor that’s included with Working Copy as well. Lately I’ve started using VS Code to write my second book.

The Communication: I love email. It’s is such a wonderful and powerful tool and it’s the core of my communications. Because email is so important to my life and my productivity, I entrust it to professionals rather than to a search engine. Specifically, I entrust it to Pobox/FastMail, who rock so hard. I love them. I use Apple Mail as my email client. Instant messaging is almost as important as email for me. I spend most of my IM time in IRCCloud, which handles not only my IRC networks but also the innumerable Slacks that we all find ourselves in lately. Signal, Apple Messages, and Discord also get a lot of use. Zoom and Facetime are my preferences (in that order) for video communication and have been even before the pandemic hit.

The Presenting: Public speaking and conference presentations often are a huge part of my job. I used to use Keynote but discovered Deckset a few years ago and instantly fell in love. Deckset has transformed how I write, prepare, and deliver my talks. For brainstorming talks and everything else, I rely on MindNode for mind mapping and Procreate for my mobile whiteboard. Color Oracle helps me ensure my presentations will work for people with different visual abilities.

The Rest: And then there are all the tools that I don’t have enough of to form separate categories. Safari is my browser, thanks to its speed and impressively low power and memory use. Mastodon is my social network. A lot of my industry news comes from there, but increasingly more of it is via my RSS feeds in Newsblur. 1Password creates my passwords and ensures they’re secure. Alfred helps me find and launch stuff on my Mac. iCloud is my primary cloud storage service. While iCloud is my primary photo backup, Flickr is the photo service I prefer for sharing. TunnelBear keeps the snoops out of my network when I’m on the road. Every Time Zone ensures I know what time it is elsewhere before I accidentally schedule colleagues for meetings at 4AM in their location.

The Elephant in the Room: Yes, my life is dedicated to furthering Free and Open Source Software and its communities. No, pretty much none of my hardware or software is FOSS. I used Linux and free software as my daily driver for about ten years, then I realised how much of my time was spent wrestling with my tools instead of getting stuff done. I switched to the Apple ecosystem because it allowed me to get stuff done quickly and effectively. I sometimes catch flack from the less enlightened members of the FOSS world for that, but I have no regrets. When I have need for a new tool or to replace an old one, I evaluate FOSS and proprietary options. When a FOSS tool meets my usability needs I choose it, and happily. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen very often.

The original version of this page appeared on Uses This.