The Things I Tend To Use In A Day

I don't know how interesting this is for anybody, but similar to Wes Bos' Awesome Uses repository, this is a list of the tech hardware/software I use.

But sometimes the tools a person uses are simply “good enough”, so I thought I'd get a little more specific: Those things marked with a are things which I think are great and totally recommend. Those things marked with a are things which I've compromised into using for one way or another. It's the best I've found, but you could talk me into something else.

Development

• I write code using VS Code, having moved away from Brackets some time in 2018. My theme of choice is Plastic (with deprioritized punctuation).
• I almost always have Prepros running to handle my Pug, Sass and JS files.
• A lot of the work projects I use are Dockerized, and so I'm using Docker Desktop with either Docksal or DDEV. Not a fan of any of that, to be honest.
• If I'm working with PHP outside of a docker container, I'm serving it locally via XAMPP, which I like a lot better than MAMP or WAMP.
• I've never been particularly faithful to any one browser and change them around a lot, but right now my primary is Vivaldi, my secondary is Brave, and I stopped using Chrome entirely.
• I use GitHub Desktop every day and only use command line Git if I'm absolutely forced to.
• When FTP is called for I use FileZilla. I've tried to move away from FileZilla a couple times but never found anything I liked better.
• I stopped using the Adobe Creative Cloud after leaving a job that was paying for it. I am now using Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer and I personally like them beter than Photoshop/Illustrator.

Productivity, or what passes for it.

• I started using Notion and I use it a lot. It's primarily for note-taking and lists, but I try to keep as much as I can in Notion to keep everything organized.
• I use Mailspring for email and it's fine. Probably as good as email will be.
• I use the Slack app.
• I use 1Password to keep track of all my passwords (610 at the time of this update)

Hardware

• My primary personal computer is a NZXT Starter Pro.
• My primary work computer is a 2019 Macbook Pro (the touch bar one)
• I like mechanical keyboards. I've got a Redragon w/ Blue Switches that is loud as fuck, and I love it. I've also got a Bejoy w/ Silent Red Switches when I don't want my keyboard to be the loudest thing in the world.
• I use Anker vertical mice.
• I have both the PC and the Mac plugged into the workstation setup via a CKL KVM Switch, which is then plugged into the aforementioned keyboards, mouse and two basic Acer 24" monitors. I do like having a KVM switch, although this particular KVM switch is pretty flaky and I wish I had a better one.
• My phone is a Pixel 7a, using Google Fi.
• My primary headphones are these Soundcore Space Ones, which I use both wirless and wired. I like them a lot.

Podcasting

• My microphone is a Blue Yeti on this arm mount.
• I record and edit episodes in Audacity
• The F Plus uses Discord for all our VOIP.
• After an episode is edited, I do the post-processing in Auphonic

Misc

• My preferred messenging app is Telegram, and I'll use that with people who have an account. If they don't I'll use Signal.
• I use Pocket Casts for listening to podcasts. The Android app on the phone, and the Windows app on the computers. They sync together.
• I have a Deezer subscription, which is my personal choice for music.
• I sometimes buy games via Epic or Itch, but usually I'd prefer it thru Steam. The home computer has an ethernet connection to a Steam Link on the TV. Which works great like 90% of the time.
• Also on that TV is a Nvidia Shield for streaming just about anything. I have Kodi installed on it as one of the apps and I really love that program.

Hopefully some of that's interesting to you or else I don't know why you read this far. Now that we're done here, do you wanna go back and see some of the stuff I've made?