Uses

Software and hardware that I use.

Uses - Software and hardware that I use.
  • I use a 15" Macbook Pro (Mid 2014) for work and it's been a great laptop for many years now. The battery does drain far too quickly now though.
  • I switched to a Mac back in the early 2010's when I started doing some iPhone development so I have a Mac Mini (Mid 2010) too. The hard-drive died back in 2014 so, after an update and a new drive, it does work but I rarely turn it on any more. I do run the Plex media server on it from time to time.
  • I also have a Dell Vostro 430 desktop machine with Windows 10 on it. This gets turned on for games and the kids use it too.
  • Visual Studio Code is my code editor of choice. I switched over in September 2016 and absolutely love it.
  • I've used the Panda Theme for VS Code for a while now.
  • I use the mono-spaced Fira Code font for development work but I don't enable the ligatures. I still like two symbols rather than a single character for code like != and =>.
  • I use iTerm2 as my terminal with the Z Shell rather than bash. No real reason other than I started using it after moving over to using dotfiles and I like the plugin and theme system.
  • I started using Alfred as it used to have better searching than Spotlight. I've never moved off it when Spotlight improved.
  • I take a lot of notes, especially for work, and I use a combination of Dynalist and Evernote.
  • I use Slack on most week days for work. I lead a very remote-friendly team at the BBC so it's a must for communication.
  • Due to my excessive emoji use, I also use Rocket to enable Slack colon emojis in other apps too.
  • I often code late into the night, when I know I shouldn't, and I've used Flux for years now to protect my eyes from the brightness of a glaring monitor. Again, this has been replaced by OSX Night Shift but I've just stuck with Flux.
  • I like to avoid using a mouse / trackpad if I can so I like to use a window manager to move them around using keyboard shortcuts. I used Spectacle for years in OSX but it's no longer supported. I've just switched to Rectangle which seems to be an open-source fork of the project.
  • I switch between various messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or Telegram depending on who I'm chatting to. Telegram is primarily used to allow me to build interesting automations with its bot API. I like being able to type my messages quickly using OSX apps rather than the phone apps if I can.
  • My browser of choice is Chrome, mainly because I use Google's tools (Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and so on) on a daily basis.
  • All of the above are installed using Homebrew and Homebrew Cask. Take a look at my Brewfile in my dotfiles for more info. This allows me to move to a new machine and be up and running incredibly quickly.
  • I use Gmail on the web as my primary email but I also use Spark for another email account.
  • Zoom is something I use multiple times a day for video and audio communication. It's been the best video calling service I've used to date and works well for a remote working.
  • For recording my screen and videos for my YouTube channel, I use Camtasia.
  • I've produced electronic music for a long time and used to record a podcast back in the mid 2000's. I've always had an AKG C1000S microphone for recording. I'm not a microphone expert but it does the job for me.
  • To ensure I have great audio quality, and to enable low-latency audio for music production, I use a Focusrite Sapphire 2i2 audio interface. It's light and USB powered and does the job.
  • I've DJ'ed since 1988 and I can't stand bad audio. Since my days in nightclubs spinning vinyl, I've sworn by Senheiser headphones. My current (and previous) pair are the Senheiser HD25. I've used them in clubs and for studio monitoring, as well as just listening to music. I live in a pair of headphones most of the time and they help me to concentrate, even if I forget to put my music on!