/uses
Last updated on 4th of November.
I always find it interesting to read about which hardware and tools are used by people whom I perceive to be productive and who do good work. Certainly there’s something to learn. And because creating beats consuming, here is my version of it. It might be useful for someone else. Feel free to contact me in that case, I think the human connection is a big part of what makes this fun.
💻 Hardware for Work
- Apple MacBook Pro M1 14-inch (2021), base model configuration in Silver. Bought at Amazon because for some reason they are often selling them for cheaper and deliver faster than Apple. I think it’s the best laptop I’ve ever had and can’t think of anything to complain about. It’s overpowered for my type of usage, so the next laptop will probably be a MacBook Air instead of a Pro. It sits in a wooden little compartment which I’ve made myself and attached underneath my desk.
- Dell U3818DW 38-inch monitor, with a resolution of 3,840 x 1,600 pixels. It allows for three desktop size apps next to each other and that’s a big luxury, especially when writing, researching, or coding. I also have a Dell U2722DE 27-inch (2,560 x 1,400) which I sometimes swap with my 38" main monitor when I want a more minimalist feel. Both have integrated USB hubs and USB-C power supplies for the MacBook.
- Apple Magic Keyboard with Touch ID, super happy when this came out. Unlocking and locking the computer with my fingerprint is just so convenient. And typing on it is smooth and effortless. I have gone through many external keyboards, but this one still beats them all.
- Logitech MX Master 3S, it’s a good mouse. More ergonomic than the standard Apple Magic Mouse, but I think there’s still potential because it’s quite laggy at times. Played around with external touch pads but I’m still more comfortable with a traditional mouse. I would love to see Apple finally significantly improve their desktop mouse.
This setup doesn’t leave anything to be desired for me. An external screen is very helpful for my type of project management, coding, and writing work. Whenever I’m traveling with just my MacBook, I miss the external screen. Seeing all the relevant information at one glance has been improving my workflow by a lot. The MacBook is silent and powers everything effortlessly. Keyboard and mouse work great.
🕹️ Hardware for Play
Under my desk, there’s a Windows PC which I put together at the beginning of the first COVID-19 lockdown, early 2020. I use it for recreational gaming exclusively. It’s still powerful enough for what I like to play, which is mostly Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, IV, and V, the Half-Life series including the incredible Black Mesa and the Virtual Reality one, Alyx, on my Oculus Rift S, as well as the two Portal games and occasional some old classics like Minecraft or Anno 1602.
The MacBook and the Windows PC share the monitor (Mac via USB-C, PC via DisplayPort), the mouse via a Bluetooth dongle each, and after the the cheap speakers died on me in February of 2023 I finally went for good USB-connected active speakers of the Kanto YU2 type. They look nice, have no hum due to the USB connection instead of a 3.5mm audio cable, and by putting a bunch of different USB adapters in a row I was able to connect them to both sources (Mac and PC) with a USB click switch. I could get rid of my Behringer mixer that way and significantly reduced the amount of cables. Not to mention the sound quality is a lot better now!
🪑 The Desk and Chair
I’m quite happy with this setup. The wood adds warmth and the chair is unbeatable in terms of cost to benefit ratio.
- Flexispot EC1/EN1 electronically adjustable desk frame
A lot cheaper than most competitor models, but sturdy and decent looking nonetheless. Position save slots and collision detection can be added for a tiny sum on top. Got it for a bunch of my employees as well.
- IKEA Gerton table top (currently n/a, possible alternative: ANFALLARE)
Made from solid beech, looking great at an affordable price. Screwed to the Flexispot frame that’s a sub three-hundred Euros working place which is ergonomic, functional, and fits into every room.
- IKEA Markus office chair
This is a case of spending three times the amount of money might get you just a five percent increase in comfort over the Markus. In November 2022, I tested that hypothesis and ordered a pricey Herman Miller Embody, because everyone’s always raving about it. Two weeks later, I sent it back. Hypothesis confirmed, at least for me.
📱 Peripherals
- Apple iPhone 16. Standard storage since everything’s in the cloud anyways. After a few times of going for the “Pro” version, it seems like I no longer am a Pro. I’m happy with the device but I wish for more AI tools to be implemented sooner rather than later.
- Apple AirPods 4 (ANC). My old AirPods 3 were used up, so I had to get new ones anyways – but had I known how incredible these sound I’d done so even without necessity demanding it! What an amazing feat of engineering, seriously.
- beyerdynamic DT 990 PRO headphones for conferences and recording, recommended to me by my music producer colleague. Great at that price point, comfortable, and let in some sound from the outside which was important to me.
- audio-technica’s ATH-M50 headphones for my electronic drum kit, which is a Roland TD-17KVX. Comfortable, great sound, good price.
- Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 3rd Gen USB-C interface with a new Shure MV7 microphone on a Rode PSA-1 desk arm to get my voice into the computer with acceptable quality. And sometimes also the sound of my awesome .strandberg* guitar.
- Akai MPK Mini midi controller. A recent cute addition to my desktop, because I like playing a chord or some beats on it using standard GarageBand.
- Synology DS218+ NAS with two 2TB disks of the IronWolf Pro series by Seagate to have a scheduled daily backup of all my most important photos and files at home in case the cloud storage should for some reason lock me out or fail one day.
- kindle Paperwhite for reading everywhere (and dropping it in the bathtub without destroying it).
- A few Philips Hue bulbs, a bunch of Apple HomePod minis, some IKEA Symfonisk speakers and two Sonos Ones to have some good lighting and adequate sound in the house.
💾 Software on Desktop
🌐 Web
Most of my work happens within a web browser. Currently I prefer Arc with its refreshing new take on the ancient tool that a browser is. But in general I switch between all the major ones: Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge. I want to love Firefox, but it’s just not there.
📨 Mail
I’ve been a long-time Gmail user and email played a huge role in managing my clients, employees, and personal life. Recently, I’ve decided to step back from it a bit. I still love the fact it’s an open format owned by nobody and free for everyone. That’s part of the reason I have decided to move away from Google and now use the email server service provided by Swiss company Migadu after testing them for about a year. So far I’m using Apple Mail on macOS and iOS as IMAP clients and it’s working well. Not being able to search through my whole back log of email from since I began writing and receiving it is what I predicted being a strong downside, but that might have just been a belief I’ve had that has no grounding in reality. I’m finding that out currently.
💬 Other Communication
- Apple’s Messages and Meta’s WhatsApp.
- Fortunately, ever since selling my companies I haven’t had to do much video conferencing, but when I do, I prefer Google Meet to Zoom and all the others.
ℹ️ Information Management
One of the most important things in running a business as I used to, and running a personal family life, too, is staying organized. My brain currently works great with numbers and visual impressions, but in other regards it needs help. That’s why I use several different apps to stay on top of things.
- Fantastical is my preferred calendar. It runs on our shared family iCloud Calendar, works on iOS and macOS, and just looks good.
- Things is my daily to-do list. Clean and minimalist, I use it for keeping track of personal tasks like “order a new backpack for running”, but also work-related tasks that concern just me.
- Notion has become a favorite over the last few years. I was a loyal Evernote customer for a long time, but Notion finally took the lead here. It can do a lot more than note-taking and is solidly engineered. Again, all platforms are supported. Every piece of written long form information goes here, personal and work-related.
- Reminders has long been our family’s shopping list app, because it works okay with Siri and kids can add stuff by saying it to the HomePods around the house.
- iCloud, a Hetzner Storage Box, and a Synology NAS for file storage. I used to rely on Google Drive for almost any type of file, but have recently moved away from Google. The Apple integrated iCloud is working flawlessly so far, a cheap Hetzner Storage Box is great to duplicate a few gigs of data of high emotional value to me and satisfies the prepper in me, and an additional home hosted NAS has everything as well for the unlikely event of the internet going down for real. And then, there’s a little backup SSD drive I sometimes update with some of the core files.
⌨️ Development
I like to do web development myself. The world of development tools seems to change often, which is why I rely on the tool recommendations of my more experienced friends and former colleagues.
- VSCode is my favorite code editor. I was a long time Sublime Text user before that, but since the cool kids use VS, I tried it and switched right then. It can do it all and works flawlessly for me.
- Transmit to get files from one place to another. Long time user, never any problems. As a bonus, the company behind it, Panic, is really cool.
- TablePlus for visually managing database content. As most of our websites use databases, it’s helpful to be able to get a quick look and sometimes edit those directly.
- Warp to do terminal work like watching log file output live.
- Affinity Photo is my choice to edit pictures. It seems to have 95% of all Adobe Photoshop features, but at a reasonable one-time fee instead of the expensive Adobe Creative Cloud subscription necessary to access Photoshop.
- ImageOptim is a tiny and simple tool to improve file sizes of visual files. Everything visual I upload to the web usually goes through it to save space at no noticeable cost of quality. I think this app’s feature set should be a part of all photo editing software like Affinity Photo and Photoshop, but somehow it isn’t yet.
- Honorable mentions: ColorSlurp for identifying colors on the screen when I do anything design-related. RescueTime to automatically log my desktop Mac activities, just out of curiosity and for quantified self reasons.
🎛️ Other
The usual suspects and some specialties.
- 1Password for personal password management. Will probably get replaced by the Apple made Passwords app they have announced in June of 2024.
- Raycast as a more powerful Spotlight replacement. Launching apps and finding files feels so much faster with it. I probably only use 2% of its capabilities, but that’s already enough. Built-in unit conversation, currency and metrics is hugely helpful to me. As is the window management (e.g. put a new window to the right third of the screen by hitting two keys) and, of course, the Emoji picker 😉.
- ChatGPT for macOS is a no-brainer addition. As many others have, I too recognized the helpful potential and superiority at many tasks compared to using standard search engines. Money well spent on a monthly subscription. I’m very happy it exists and look forward to the future which will have generative AI doing a lot more for us.
- Spotify is a lot better than Apple Music in my opinion, and if it would start to pay the artists what they deserve, especially the smaller ones, I’d feel better and might stop to order vinyl and shirts I never listen to or wear in order to rectify that.
- Neural DSP allows me to plug my guitar into the Focusrite USB interface and model amps and effects for it on the Mac incredibly well. Playing around with it is lots of fun.
📲 Software on Mobile
I entered the iPhone market in 2009 with the 3GS model and subsequently went with an upgrade every one or two years. They’re great phones and there has never been a reason for me to switch to a different brand. Currently, I’m using an iPhone 16 in the black shade, 128 gigs minimal version, because I have everything in the cloud so I’m not devastated when my phone breaks or gets lost.
I’ll be only mentioning the apps which I haven’t before. It’s a rapid fire round.
- Carrot Weather – best weather app in my opinion. Fun to use, great widget.
- Google Maps – the standard everyone knows and loves.
- Apple Photos – has replaced Google Photos for me. Moving was a huge effort but it’s fine.
- Strava – for tracking my running and seeing inspiring runs from my friends.
- Sleep Cycle – to gamify my sleep. In my mind I win if it measures more than 90 percent sleep effectiveness after a night.
- Overcast – listening to podcasts. During commuting and running I listen to a lot of podcasts. I gladly pay for the subscription here, the app is great.
- Feedly – my choice for getting non-clickbaity news relevant to me is the RSS technology. I chose what to read. Feedly helps make that happen.
- Kindle – reading in the app isn’t nearly as great as on the hardware kindle, but the phone is always with me. Practicality wins.
- SwiftScan – I work 100% paperless. Every (important) document I receive in paper form will get scanned immediately using this app and automatically uploaded to iCloud. I love that.
- Fitbod – this helps me do a new short core workout every day so it doesn’t get boring.
- ChatGPT – many questions coming up during the day are much better answered by this app compared to Google or Wikipedia.
- Close-up – reminding me to take a daily selfie. It creates a movie out of those where you can watch your human body decay over time. Neat!
That’s all the basics. Do you have suggestions? What’s your setup like? I’d love to hear from you! Send an email to tim@tee.ge.