Stuff I use day-to-day
To do what I do, I often need tools. Tools that I'll likely have opinions on, might as well list some here.
Workstation
Custom built PC
My pride, my joy. This is my workstation, my gaming station and the place I make my friends online. I‘ve built many PCs in my life, but this is my first custom-loop water-cooled PC.
• AMD Ryzen 7800x3d
• Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Hero
• Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5 (2x16GB) @ 6000MHz
• Gigabyte RTX 3080 Aorus Master 10G
• And a lot more.... a LOT more.LG 27GR95QE-B (27", 1440p, OLED, 240Hz)
Having a beast of a PC deserves a beast of a monitor to ensure the top graphical fidelity, no? This monitor, alongside two nondescript side-monitors helps me enjoy the most, while also giving me the screen space to work on things.
Sennheiser HD800 & Schiit stack
Okay, I‘ll cheat a little here. But they‘re all connected to each other anyway. My Sennheiser HD800 is an engineering marvel, its sound signature is perfect, and my Schiit Valhalla 2 and Schiit Bifrost are capable of driving it so well. Because aside from music, even games need to have the audible part ramped up to max fidelity.
Herman Miller Embody Chair
If I’m going to slouch in the worst ergonomic position imaginable all day, I might as well do it in an expensive chair. At least it encourages me to slouch less?
Mobile workstation
16” MacBook Pro, M1 Pro, 32B RAM (2021)
In the past I was a linux user. And in a way I still am. That was until Apple‘s only good recent product, the M1 cpu. I had an air and I was immediately sold, this thing was a beast. Still don‘t like MacOS, it‘s horrible, it has a horrible window manager... but it‘s linux-y in its command line?
Sennheiser HD700
Technically this is my old Sennheiser headset, but it still gets the job done very well. Whenever I‘m working somewhere, this is the headset I use to isolate myself from the world... with music.
Kindle Scribe
I had a Kindle (Oasis), I had a reMarkable 2. One day I said, why not combine the two? And Amazon happened to have a solution. I love this thing for note-taking and book-reading. Now I‘m just waiting for their colour version.
Development tools
Jetbrains IDEs
Expensive, but so worth. These IDEs help me bring my ideas to life. It‘s definitely a step-up from how I started my career... in notepad. These days, the refactoring capabilities and how clearly it understands my projects, aside from a huge plugin ecosystem.. this is my go-to company for my IDEs.
Warp
Because the built-in terminal in MacOS sucks. This one looks prettier, has more options, has less weird behaviour and even has a little sprinkle of AI. What would you want more?
Productivity & misc
Google Workspace
There was a time where I ran my own postfix/dovecot server setup, these days I‘ve just accepted that being a newcomer to email is a pain. Easier to just have a provider for it. And Google Drive lets me ignore Dropbox :)
Yubikey
In my line of work, security is important. Ensuring that no one can pretend to be me, or can access the things I can access. While my Yubikey is not the sole layer of security, it is a huge step and help in making sure all that I do is secure.