Hardware

Laptop: MacBook Air M1 in Rose Gold. Why Rose Gold? Because gold is bold, like that sweet, sweet M1. The M1 is insanely fast and power efficient.

Phone: iPhone 12 Pro Max. Was rocking Android for years, but don’t got time to be messing around with ROMs anymore. The beauty of the Apple ecosystem, it just works. I chose the 12 Pro Max to circumvent the need to buy a nice camera.

Keyboard: Realforce 87U Topre Keyboard with variable actuation weights. Made in Japan. No clicky noises annoying the office, feels amazing, and compact. No flashy LED party either. Not for everyone.

Mouse: Logitech MX Master 2.

Monitor: No specific monitor here yet, but i’m part of the single monitor gang. one 4k monitor, 27 inch ideally, with USB C connection.

Headphones: Airpods Pro, for the noise cancelling and convenience. Yes, the sound quality is inferior.

Speaker: Sonos Five. Ignoring price, this thing is a pretty impressive package! I’ve been impressed with the quality and Airplay support. Has been my go-to for listening to music for about a year, coming from JBL monitor speakers and a Denon Class A Amp.

Software

OS: Sadly stuck on MacOS Big Sur with the M1, but prefer Arch Linux. I stick with Ubuntu Server for anything server related. At least it’s not Windows!

Editor: VSCode with vim plugin. Though sometimes I use vim in my terminal. I’m not one to go crazy with extensions, I prefer vanilla usually.

Terminal: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal written in Rust. it is pretty barebones by design, but is stable!

Messenger: Telegram. I moved to it from Google Hangouts a good 5 or 6 years ago, way before it became as popular as it is now. It amazes me that they keep adding more and more amazing features. Every release is better than the last. I don’t use it for the privacy features, I use it because it’s AMAZING.

Browser: Firefox Nightly on computer, DuckDuckGo on phone. The burn it all button is oddly satisfying.

Music: Spotify for normie stuff. Currently am testing out Funkwhale to access my personal music stash, but it has a long way to go. The concept and backend is good, the interface sucks. I also stream from the Live Music Archive pretty regularly. Most of my new live shows are (legally) torrented from bt.etree.org. All of my music is stored in FLAC.

Books

The Death and Life of Great American Cities - Jane Jacobs: A book written in the early 1960s that talks about major issues with cities in the present and past. The parallels to today’s issues is rather astonishing. Jacobs has a first-hand count of seeing many of these areas in person, and stood up against the problems that arose with suburban sprawl.

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble - Dan Lyons: A comical read about a Boomer writer from Forbes and Newsweek that takes a job at Hubspot and rants about how much he hates working in the tech business. Lyons was also a producer and writer for HBO’s Silicon Valley.

Backable: The Surprising Truth Behind What Makes People Take a Chance on You - Suneel Gupta: A fresh take on some strategies to making yourself backable. Lots of fun, story-backed exmaples and relatively concise.

Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood - Edward M. Hallowell: about 5% of people in America have ADHD, so you likely regularly interact with someone who has it. This book is dense, and more ideal to skim. It dives into how those with ADHD simply think and operate fundamentally differently than those without it.

Articles

A trip through the Graphics Pipeline: A detailed overview of how a GPU actually works. Far more complex than CPUs!

Uber’s Engineering Disaster: A first-person story about Uber’s not-so-smooth move to Swift for the iOS App.

Tools

Power Tools: Milwaukee M18 stuff. Still growing my collection, but am happy with everything so far. Not the best bang for your buck, but I chose it because the bulk of their lineup is pretty quality.

Socket Wrenches: Tekton 213 Piece Socket and Ratchet set. Pretty good quality, price isn’t too crazy, and the cases are awesome for not losing sockets. The best part? Tekton sells individual sockets, so you can replace anything you lose!

Soldering Iron: ts100. Open source, pretty powerful, and easy to bring places. Me gusta. I have a Hakko FX-888D for anything that needs more oomph.

Multimeter: Fluke 117. Tried and true meter. Can’t go wrong with this one.

Everything Else: Probably Harbor Freight.

Cars

Daily Driver: 2007 Ford Mustang GT, stock except for Hurst short throw shifter. Got it with about 30k miles on the clock, is practically a new car. Gets the job done, and the price was right. Not in love with it.

Project Cars:

  • 1972 Ford Courier. A rebadged Mazda B1800 before Mazdas were sold in America, the first year for the truck. Bought it in Oregon to haul stuff around in Silicon Valley. Blew the engine. Shipped it to Ohio to store until I get time to work on it in the future. Planning to gut it completely and put in a 2.3 Ecoboost and make it a true Ford.

  • 1967 Ford Mustang. It’s the boring model, inline-6, automatic, coupe. Was sitting for about 10 years, rebuilt engine and transmission during pandemic. Runs nice now. One day i’ll put a bigger engine in it.

Past Cars:

  • 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid Manual. A rare stick-shift hybrid. I learned stick on this car. Bought it at 180k miles, drove it everywhere. Put leather seats and door panels in it from the Acura EL (only sold in Canada). It was slow, but 50 mpg! Honestly a fun car, you actually had to use all the gears and bring the engine to redline to get anywhere.

  • 2003 Nissan Sentra SE-R Spec-V. This was a complete beater, but it had a 6 speed and an LSD, paired to the QR25DE engine. Ran horrible, but lots of fun to drive. Crazy amount of torque, paired with crazy amount of torque-steer.

  • 2000 Honda Accord V6 Coupe. First car. Was a great car, lots of power, handled well, super reliable. Only downside was automatic transmission.