The things I use

Hardware

• 16” MacBook Pro. It has an M2 chip. I like it a lot, but it’s a company machine, not mine.
• 8BitDo’s Commodore-style keyboard. Clacky, compact, and very stylish.
• A keyboard wrist rest made of black walnut, the best wood. I commissioned this from someone selling chopping boards at the local market.
• A Logitech G502 Hero mouse. It’s great, but I’m not good enough at videogames for my mouse to have ever been the bottleneck. I do love the unlockable scroll wheel for whizzing through long web pages.
• An MSI Raider GE68 gaming laptop at home. Not the cheapest way to get a decent gaming rig, but boy is it pretty. Runs as hot as the sun.
• Jabra Elite 85h (discontinued) cans / Anker Liberty 4 NC ear-buds, depending on whether I’m at home or on the go. The sound quality and noise-cancelling on both are more than good enough for me, and the batteries last for ages on one charge.
• An ECHO MINI with wired Apple earbuds for listening to music. Wonderful bit of kit.
• A5 dotted notebook. Zippered Galen Leather cover, which keeps the outside beautiful and the while the inside nice and disposable.
• 3.5” by 5.5” notebooks in another Galen wrap. This is for general purpose notes and journaling. Journals get kept, notes get recycled.
• Pens, in descending order of preference:
  • LAMY Safari, currently maining teal Diamine ink.
  • Pilot Explorer. It’s getting more use than the LAMY at the moment. Very nice for such an inexpensive pen.
  • Kaweco Sport Brass.
  • A black fineliner or gel ink pen. I’m not picky about the brand, so long as it doesn’t scratch too much.
  • One of the approximately ten billion random ballpoints I’ve accumulated over the years.

Software I use a lot

• Obsidian for the majority of my note-taking and journaling. For all its wonderful features, it’s essentially a layer on top of a soup of version controlled markdown files. As with this website, it’s important to me that so much of my important data isn’t locked in to a particular vendor or platform.
• Todoist for holding chaos at bay.
• NetNewsWire and Feedbin for subscribing to RSS feeds.
• iTerm2 with Oh My Zsh. I wrote more about this in a post about how I use iTerm2.
• CleanShot for screenshots and screen recordings. It’s easy to use and makes capturing quick gifs a breeze.
• I have a dotfiles repo to make my configuration as consistent as possible between installs.
• foobar2000 for playing music on the computer. mp3tag for managing it. If it weren’t for some reason illegal in the UK to rip CDs you legally purchased, I would use Exact Audio Copy to do that.
• CLI tools:
  • neovim for most code and text editing. After several swings at getting into it, it seems to be sticking this year.
  • jq and jless for wrangling JSON data on the command line.
  • ripgrep to replace plain grep.
  • bat to replace plain cat.
  • It is late 2026 and I’m finally getting around to learning to use tmux.
  • curl with folders of bash scripts for repeated requests. Variables are written to .env.whatever and then sourced in the script.

Software I use a little

• Windows Subsystem for Linux whenever I’ve doing web development on a Windows machine. I spent a long time rotating through various Linux distributions, but these days I don’t have the patience or skill to babysit them. And I like video games too much.
• Figma for design work. I’m not a designer, and Figma makes it easy to put together at least basic wireframes and prototypes without really needing to know what I’m doing.
• RubyMine and Visual Studio Code when I hit a hurdle in neovim and I’m in too much of a hurry to figure it out.

Software I try to avoid using

• Algorithmic social media and attention economy platforms. They aren’t built for you. I still have accounts and I still check when people send me memes.
• Platforms that lock away data that I will still be interested in after the platform stops existing. I keep lists of books I’ve read and movies I’ve watched. I want to avoid a scenario where that information is only stored in some website and they run out of VC funding.

Previously used

• A 104 key WASD V2 with MX Blues. It’s big and clacky and I love it. In the time I’ve had this keyboard I’ve used the numpad maybe half a dozen times, so my next keyboard (if this trooper ever gives up) is going to be a slightly more compact model.
• RapidAPI to interact with and test APIs. I just use curl now. I like a fancy GUI, but for my needs the overhead of another tool was never justified.

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