I always enjoy reading about other peoples setups, configs and equipment, my own is built from years of taking slices from others, but I realised I have never publicly posted about mine. So here it is, in the hopes that someone gets to take a piece to incorporate into their own like I have so many times.

Tech

Monitors

Primary monitor is an Apple Studio Display, the built in speakers and webcam allowed me to simplify my set up and the crystal clear text rendering from the 5K resolution is easy on the eyes. Off to the side is a LG DualUp, it’s the perfect reference monitor for terminal output, long documents, or stacking two split windows on top of another. Before this configuration I went through them all: 3 monitors, primary monitor only, 2x 4K and so forth, but I think I have found my forever setup until spatial computing is main stream.

Laptop

14-inch 2023 M3 Pro, 32GB RAM. Every year I put a ThinkPad T480 into a shopping cart with the intention of it being the year I finally switch to Linux, but the convenience of MacOS keeps me satiated.

Keyboard & Mouse

I have recently bought a Glove 80 to help combat some brewing RSI pain, but while I am stuck at 20 words per minute on it, I switch between a GMMK Pro and a CODE 87-key. I love the form factors of TKL and having function keys, but I do not think I’ll be purchasing another traditional QWERTY keyboard since experiencing the comfort of a split keyboard.

You know what it is going to be: MX Master 3, though since my ergo kick I am going to try a vertical mouse soon.

Headphones & Microphone

For listening to music at a desk I use Sennheiser HD660s, powered by a Schiit Vali3 and Schiit Magni. For on the go, and days with lots of meetings I use Sennheiser Momentum 4 Wireless, these are lot more comfortable for meetings & hot days. This is complete overkill, ultimately I stream audio through Spotify. Listening to music is so important to me that I wanted to try and offset the quality of streaming as much as I reasonably could, and since using the HD660s I have been entrapped by these golden headphones that makes everything else sound so much worse than they objectively are.

Shure SM57 powered by a Motu M2. For me this has been the perfect balance between minimal equipment, price and sound quality. If you take work calls from home, the people you meet will be very grateful for upgrading your microphone. Meetings flow easier with a clear voice and all external noise being suppressed.

Networking

Synology DS923+ is my NAS of choice, this is currently a Plex media server but is in the process of becoming my self-hosted Dropbox alternative while Dropbox or another cloud provider will only be used for storing an encrypted blob, rather than the source files themselves.

A Raspberry Pi 4 with PiHole running. I have 800,000 domains on the blocklist, with an average of 10% requests blocked. So far no websites have broken. It has been a tremendous quality of life improvement when accessing the web. Combined with Brave Browser and uBlock extension, I can’t remember the last cookie pop up or advert I saw.

For the router it is a TP-Link Deco XE75 Pro AXE5400. These are outrageously expensive, but it took me from a daily internet instability, slow speeds in parts of the house and extra equipment for one off boosters, to never ever thinking about Internet stability and unified equipment. The added bonus is the software that enables me to firewall off IoT devices, have guest networks and so on. If you work from home I highly recommend investing big with a quality long term purchase.

Cameras

For film photography I use a Leica M6 TTL and a Mamiya RB67 for medium format.

For digital I switch between FUJI x100v for day-to-day and FUJI GFX50s II for medium format.

Overall the experience of film is much more enjoyable, but the pantomime (and price) of development, scanning and so on has me reaching for digital more these days. I am considering consolidating all the equipment to a Sony AR7 IV.

Misc

Desk light via BenQ ScreenBar, combats glare during the day and eye strain during the evening.

Dock from CalDigit TS3, allows me to have a one cable solution to switch between personal and work laptop. Have had for years with zero issues, does one thing and one thing very well.

After amassing hundreds of paperbacks I have ran out of space for physical books and have caved to becoming a Kindle Paperwhite user. I thought I’d be a physical reader for ever, but have to admit the Kindle has unlocked me reading more books than ever before.

Software

Productivity

Generally speaking, after many years of app-hopping to the newest shiniest series A thing, I now use as many default Apple apps as I can, and resign myself to, or overcome their limitations and quirks. Mail, Calendar, Reminders, Notes. It’s all good enough and just works.

For e-mails I chose FastMail with a custom domain. I first went with Proton Mail but the extra layers of privacy came at a big convenience cost, and ultimately concluded my threat profile does not warrant E2EE emails. I need privacy from advertising companies, not from law enforcement. If you do not (a) own a custom domain and (b) run your emails through it, I cannot recommend it enough. Better addresses, peace of mind that you can take them wherever you go, control over who you use, and the ability to easily make aliases is a great quality of life bonus.

For browsing I use Brave for my setup and reasoning see my post: Convenient Privacy: Brave Browser.

CMD + Space is powered by Alfred. If you are using Raycast I encourage you to review their privacy policy and stop using it.

I am nearly permanently connected to my VPN of choice: PrivateInternetAccess.

Window management through Yabai, shortcuts powered by SKHD. My dotfiles have my config for both. Window managers are not for everyone, but I strongly encourage exploring SKHD. Fully customisable global (and app-aware) keybindings is a huge efficiency gain, no need to tab-cycle through all open windows if you can just key bind your browser to alt + w, or locking your laptop via alt + L. Related is Karabiner Elements without this I could not smartly remap Caps Lock to ESC (when pressed) and mapped to CTRL when held. You should not be shouting at anyone, so there is no need for Caps Lock, and having CTRL and ESC so readily available opens up a new world of shortcuts and ergonomics when using Vim.

Coding

Everything I write is via Neovim, my dotfiles will forever be in a WIP state. Ghostty is my terminal, it is unbelievably fast, which is a strange thing to say about a terminal until you experience it, the font rendering is gorgeous and overall has just gotten out of my way.

For fonts I switch between Berkeley Mono, JetBrains Mono, Dina and Zed Mono.

Misc

Socialise through Signal, although I do not truly need E2EE, I want to be away from advertisers. But the main selling point for me is the culture of having disappearing messages enabled. This is default enabled for all new chats for me. I see, and have had no need for permanent records of ephemeral discussions.

For a deeper dive, peak the Mac setup script I run on all new OSX devices.