What I use
Here is a detailed list of the tech that I use.
(Note: items in italic are use for work and personal use. This is also a work in progress so stay tuned for updates!)
For work
- MacBook Air: After my MacBook Pro fell apart, I got myself a M1 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM and 500GB storage. It’s as fast as I need it to be and does what I need it to do. I also have one provided by work but I rarely use it as I have all my favourite apps and things on my personal one (and admin access)
- Apple Keyboard and Magic Mouse: They came with all work stuff and while the keyboard is great, the ergonomics of the mouse are notoriously bad
- Screaming Frog: a Web crawling client for when I need to quickly crawl some pages or a whole site. For more in depth analysis, I use…
- Sitebulb: a more robust crawling option but it can be a bit finicky with its reports when crawling JavaScript sites
- Google Search Console: the easiest solution for assessing crawling and indexation
- Python: Python comes up a fair amount in my work as a way to automate and obtain data faster. I mainly use Jupyter Notebook as opposed to Terminal to get stuff done as I can troubleshoot better and split code to get at least some data if there are restrictions.
- Google Workspace: Gmail, Meet, Docs, Sheets, Slides, you know the stuff.
- Sublime Text: For work, I often use Sublime Text for its Regex capabilities or to edit Python scripts. Outside of work, I use it for editing this website.
- Notion: I mainly use Notion for storing album/track name ideas because…
- Keep: …I use Keep for note taking!
- Todoist: My autistic brain needs this app, so I can keep track of what I need to do and mark off what I have done everyday.
- Pocket: The place where saved articles go to rot (just kidding, I do read them eventually). I’ve also started saving memes here to share with my loved ones.
- GitHub: Without GitHub, I don’t know if this site would exist, at least in this way.
Personal use
- Terminal: I use ohmyzsh now, although I haven’t used its extensive features yet. Otherwise, I have Terminal on all the time and it’s an integral part of this site’s functionality
- Firefox: I’ve used all the major browsers and after using Brave for 3 years, I moved to Firefox at the end of last year. It’s been pretty smooth, although not being able to
Cmd + Shift + Vin Google Sheets is very annoying. - Airmail: Easy email client to use.
- iMovie: I can’t afford proper video editing software so I use iMovie for all my meme/rudimentary music video needs
- Ableton Live: My DAW of choice. I love Ableton. Been using it since 2020.
- Cyberduck: My FTP client of choice, mainly because the duck is cute. And it’s reliable.
- Spotify: How I listen to most of my music. Problematic but using my (4th) broken iPod classic isn’t sustainable these days
- Raindrop: Where I save articles to blog about. I wrote about it being part of my content flow a while back.
- Splice: I use this for royalty-free samples (mostly drum hits and melodies). I have so many tokens but if I cancel, I lose access :(
- Discord: How I keep in touch with friends and keep up to date with certain things like Astro and Pokémon. Although I don’t use it as much because of that shitty AI data selling thing
- GitHub Desktop: Easier to use this than the main site for deploying stuff
- Transmission: I’ve been using this for torrents after Vuze’s malware put me off. Clean and easy to use.
- DeepL: When I remember, I use this over Google Translate (also wrote about why on Cultrface)
- Pika: My colour contrast app of choice. The colours always have cool names!
- Parallels Desktop: How I use Windows so I can play my favourite Windows games and apps
- Tunnelbear: My VPN of choice. It’s not ExpressVPN, NordVPN, or Surfshark, but the bear is adorable and it does what I need. (I’m not sponsored… but if you’re listening, Tunnelbear…)
- PS4 Pro: I bought this in early 2024 and I love it. Cheaper than a suped-up PC and I can play Dragon Quest in 4K!
- Nintendo Switch: I mainly use this to play Pokémon and it’s no 3DS but whatever. I have so many Nintendo consoles.