My Arsenal

Following the Flickr kids’ lead, Rafe took a few minutes to detail his toolkit. Which I enjoyed, and immediately decided to copy.

Hardware

• Sun Ultra 20, 30 Inch Dell LCD (Screencasting/Testing/VMWare)
• Mac Mini, 17 inch Princeton LCD (Mac stuff)
• Lenovo X300 (everything else)
• iPhone (makes every other phone I’ve owned look like a piece of crap)
• Amazon S3 (backup)

Operating Systems

• Image only: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Gentoo, Fedora, OpenSolaris
• OS X (testing)
• Ubuntu (primary)

Software

• Bibble Lite (RAW image processing)
• Emacs (writing) – I use the “pretty” build
• Firefox 3 (duh)
• Gmail (work and play)
• Google Reader (via Prism)
• GNOME Do (more addictive than crack, only 5% less than nicotine)
• GNOME Terminal (works)
• htop (great machine process visualizer)
• Jungledisk (backup interface to S3)
• Pidgin (what Adium is based on, for you Mac people)
• Twhirl (shiny)
• Tomboy (I can’t quit you, Tomboy)
• WordPress (work, play, and everything in between)
• VirtualBox (On the laptop)
• VMWare Workstation (On the…you guessed it…workstation)

A couple of related questions I get frequently:

Q: What do you use for offline mail reading?
A: Nothing. I no longer use Evolution or Thunderbird, and haven’t used an offline mail client for at least two years.

Q: Why don’t you use OS X?
A: One, because it doesn’t work the way that I want to. Two, because it doesn’t have a package management system equal to that found on Linux. Three, because many of the applications I need to test are Linux based. Four, because I like having flexibility in my hardware.

But as always, to each their own.

Q: Do you really use your iPhone as your iPod? What about the space?
A: It’s something of a surprise to me, because I do. I owned a 30GB Video iPod prior to getting my iPhone, and I’ve since divested myself of the device b/c I can’t be bothered to keep two devices charged. It’s amazing how nice it is to have your music with you everywhere, as well, because while I always have my phone, I only brought my iPod along sporadically.

As for the space, I’ve never had an iPod big enough for my music collection, so operating off of a subset of my music hasn’t proven to be a problem. I’ve still got 2 of the 8 GBs free, in fact.

Q: You like the Lenovo X300?
A: You can take it from me when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.