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Tools

People get caught up in tools as a distraction from actually learning and doing. I probably do too, but I also find directing attention to the tools around me that mostly just disappear into the background and are taken for granted is a great way to find the very best exemplars of what tools should be, and helps me be a better tool-maker[1].

Here are some of the more important tools I use day-to-day to build with[2]:

Digital Tools

Firefox. To be honest most browsers are all pretty decent, but some are slightly more decent than others. I like Firefox.
DuckDuckGo. I know it’s basically a re-wrapped version of Bing, but I still enjoy the vibe. Search results are generally good enough and I like their !bangs[3].
Futureland[4]. Where my process[5] is recorded and I work through a daily routine.
VS Code. I recently switched over from Sublime Text, and it’s been pretty good so far with a nice ecosystem of plugins. I just wish it wasn’t quite as heavy.
Figma.
iTerm.
Fastmail[6]. Hosted my own email for a few years but eventually gave into using a service when the big G decided to send all my mail to spam. Turns out they just blacklist IP ranges for public cloud providers. Fastmail has been a pretty nice alternative.

Physical Tools

A computer. It runs Ubuntu and Windows. It’s got an i7 8086k, 16GB DDR4 RAM, and an RTX 2060 TI. I’ve had a custom built computer like this for quite a while. I tend to re-use the old components when I sell off pieces of it, so it’s a bit of a Ship of Theseus[7] situation.
A laptop. It’s a MacBook Pro 13” from 2017 with whatever the cheapest specs are. It’s in the process of nearing it’s date of obsolescence; highly unfortunate.
A knife. It’s a Kan Knives Santoku[8].
A pan. An All Clad D5 Stainless Brushed 12-inch fry pan. Gorgeous tool.
A trenching shovel. An absolutely essential tool for the garden. Second only to the pickaxe, but the trenching shovel is a bit more broad in its uses.

I was going to add this to the list, but I realized I really don’t use it much and definitely don’t use it to create anything. It’s still on here because I like ranting:

~~A phone~~. It’s an iPhone XR that I got when my old iPhone 6s died. I was in Omaha[9] without a car at the time and walked to the only Verizon store in the city only to find that the least-fancy phone I could get was an iPhone XR. It seems inferior to my old phone in pretty much all of the meaningful ways I can think of.

Last updated Sun Dec 12 2021 in Berkeley, CA

Links

1: /thought/me.gmi

2: /thought/build-it-yourself.gmi

3: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

4: https://futureland.tv

5: /thought/process.gmi

6: https://www.fastmail.com/

7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

8: https://kankitchen.com/meet-the-knives/

9: /thought/omaha-nebraska.gmi

Backlinks

/thought/me.gmi