Uses
What is on my desk and in my dock, and why. Everything here I paid for and still open. If it is on this page, I used it this week, not in theory.
Hardware
MacBook Pro 16" (2021), M1 Max, 32 GB
Four years in and it still edits video and runs the whole dev stack without the fans coming on. It is not the bottleneck. I am.
Apple Studio Display
One 5K screen, no second monitor. Text is sharp enough that I stopped thinking about it, which is the whole point of a monitor.
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
A photo camera on video duty for YouTube. Overkill for a talking head, and the skin tones are why I have not replaced it with something smaller.
Shure SM7B
The microphone every YouTuber buys, and for once the crowd is right. It ignores the room, and my room is not treated. On a Rode PSA1 arm.
Elgato Wave XLR
The box between the SM7B and the Mac. Enough gain for that mic without a separate preamp, and Clipguard means I can get loud about something and the recording does not clip.
NuPhy Air75 V3
Low-profile mechanical, and the first keyboard I did not swap out after a month. Flat enough for eight hours, loud enough to know the key went down.
Elgato Stream Deck
A grid of buttons I mapped once and now cannot record without. Scene switch, mute, timer. One job per button is the appeal.
Bose QuietComfort Headphones
Bought for the noise cancelling, not the sound. When they go on, the house knows I am working.
In progress
Tools I am building, or building on, right now. Expect them to change.
Obsidian
Where the notes went after Notion. I am still building the vault, and this time the notes are the point, not the setup. Everything my content tools draft lands here as plain markdown files I own.
content-cli
My own command line tool for the content side: pulling what I have already said, in my voice, into the next post or video. Unfinished, and used anyway, which is the honest state of most tools I build for myself.
Software
Claude Code
The tool this whole site is about. It writes most of my first drafts of code now, and the habits and weight logging on this site came out of it. What it does not do is know what should be built. That part is still me, and that is the point.
Zed
Fast enough that I notice VS Code now. I open it to read and for quick edits. The heavy lifting happens in the terminal with Claude Code.
WezTerm
A terminal configured in a text file, and nothing in it that phones home. Since Claude Code lives in the terminal, this is where most of my day happens now.
OBS
Free, ugly, and it records every video on the channel. Scenes switch from the Stream Deck, the camera and the screen come in as sources, and I have not found a reason to pay for anything else.
Arc
Spaces keep the work tabs away from the YouTube tabs, which for me is the difference between a focused day and a lost one.
Raycast
Replaced Spotlight and half a dozen small utilities. Clipboard history alone earned its place.
Notion Calendar
Notion itself left my stack. The calendar stayed, because it is the one calendar app that shows the week the way I think about it.
Todoist
A task app has to be fast, and this one is. Type "gym thursday" and it lands on Thursday.
1Password
Non-negotiable. The CLI means secrets get pulled at runtime instead of copied into files.
iA Writer
Where posts and the newsletter get drafted. Plain text, one font, nothing to fiddle with, which is the only way I finish a draft.
iA Presenter
Slides from the same markdown. I write the talk and it becomes the deck.
Figma
I am not a designer, but I open Figma before the editor for anything with a UI. Cheaper to move a rectangle than a component.