brandur.org

Stuff I Use

This is a "uses" page, which lists my favorite gear and software. Check out uses.tech to see the surprising number of other people who also publish one.

535 Mission St

  • Macbook Pro 14” M4: It’s disturbing how much time I spend on this thing. Not only all day at work, but it’s where the lion’s share of my hobbies and entertainment comes from too.

    • I’ve lived through many of the most important personal computing advances in history, and Apple’s move to ARM chips yielded the most important. So much power that a desktop PC isn’t necessary, and so energy efficient that battery is never a problem. The MacBook Pro M4 base chip (non-Pro, non-Max) yields 24 hours of battery life. Incredible.

    • I like to carry a tiny 20W USB-C charging brick when going to work during the day. Takes ~no space and is enough to keep the computer charged.

  • Canon R6: Most photos on this site are shot with a Canon R6, which I’ve been shooting with for ~4 years. It’s full-frame (a must) and uses Canon’s RF lenses, which are admired industrywide. As good as smartphone cameras have gotten, I still lug this thing around because the detail and crispness of a full frame attached to real glass is that much better.

    • Despite that, I wouldn’t give Canon more than a weak recommendation. Their software is awful, they make consumer-hostile decisions like that cameras won’t charge over USB-C while they’re turned on so that Canon can sell you a proprietary power delivery kit extra, and their claim of weather sealing on premium products like their USM lenses is extremely dubious (as I found out the hard way recently).

    • I expect to transition off Canon eventually, possibly by surrending and embracing the supremacy of our smartphone overlords, which seems inevitable given the rate of change over the last ten years.

  • Kindle: After about a decade, I started using a Kindle again. In the intervening years, smartphones have gotten bigger while the Kindle stayed the same. An iPhone Pro Max is the same size as a Kindle, and much heavier. Unlike iPad, I can throw a Kindle into any pocket for trips without thinking about the size/weight tradeoff). Modern models are USB-C and backlit.

  • More Apple gear, which I love, but worry increasingly is stagnating compared to the Jobs era:

    • iPhone 16 Pro Max: Titanium, cool. Great phone, but I’d have to get pretty close to tell it apart from my previous 12, 13, 14, and 15.

    • AirPods Pro: Along with M1, Apple’s greatest innovation in a decade. Practically everyone has these things now, but I’m giving them a call out because aside from maybe my laptop, they’re the most commonly used piece of equipment I own.

  • VSCode: As a diehard Vim user I resisted for a long time, but finally had to concede: VSCode is the best software package written in a decade. Powerful, fast, and improved usability compared to a command line program, like making less frequently used features still accessible via GUI point and click.

    • Even so, the Vim extension is absolutely indispensible. Modal editing lives on.

  • Terminal suite:

    • iTerm2: A good terminal app for macOS. Highly configurable, and importantly, still supports non-native transition to full screen so that ⌘-Tab is fast.

    • Tmux: A good terminal multiplexer that I’ve been using since time immemorial. A short intro to Tmux is one of the first blog posts I ever wrote.

    • Zsh: A better shell than Bash. People tell me that I should use Fish instead. I tried it for a few days, but didn’t find enough in there that I loved to justify the migration effort.

  • Mac apps:

    • Alfred: For opening applications, bookmarks, and performing basic actions (e.g. lock screen) with a global shortcut and a few keystrokes.

    • iA Writer: For the first draft of anything substantial I write. No modal editing, making it easier to focus on writing over editing, and the best Markdown rendering ever devised (in which Markdown stays as Markdown instead of being transformed to WYSIWYG display elements after it’s written).

    • Movist Pro: The best video player, hands down. As compact and energy efficient as QuickTime Player, but it can actually play more than a single combination of carefully encoded codecs. The UI is ultra-minimal and it supports Mac features like pinning to top.

    • Moom: Keyboard-driven window manager. It’s less comprehensive than a tiling window manager, but that’s a good thing.

    • Notes: For notes and todos. This app is absolutely awful, but it’s ubiquitous, syncs nicely across all my devices, and is quick to access on the go, so begrudgingly, I use it.

  • Go: I write more Go than anything else. I’m a critic of the language, but it’s fast, compiled (and explicitly typed), reasonably productive, and has a lightweight concurrency model that works with minimal ritual.

  • Postgres: The world’s best database. Incredible feature set, versatility, and performance. When used well, keeps data streamlined and consistent, and acts as an anti-bug firewall.

  • Tailwind: Everything about Tailwind feels intuitively wrong, but I finally embraced it after writing tens of thousands of lines of CSS over the years and in doing so concluding that it’s unmaintainable at a fundamental level.

  • WeWork: This is an odd item to appear here, I know, but despite Adam Neumann’s its shenanigans, a $300/month all access pass from WeWork. I use it daily in San Francisco and have taken advantage of it as far away as London.