Uses This

Who are you and what do you do?

I'm Richard White. I teach, run, play, climb, and travel. Mostly I teach, public school for many years, and now at a private school in Pasadena, California.

Most days I think I'm just about the luckiest guy I know.

What hardware do you use?

I use a 2021 Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch with 64G RAM and a 2-Terabyte SSD for day-to-day work—teaching, videoconferencing, emailing, coding, blogging, and web development. That machine is often plugged into a random external monitor, as well as a custom 87-key WASD keyboard.

I also regularly use a Dell XPS 13 running Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS, and I occasionally switch from Apple to Ubuntu.

I have a few other machines I work with as well. For local machines I also have a home-built i3-based PC tower running Ubuntu 18.04LTS with 4 hard drives in it that I use for media archiving and backup. It only has an old 17-inch LCD monitor, but the das keyboard connected to it is amazing. I have an iPhone 11 Plus that is pretty solid.

I keep backups, and think you should, too. I keep a bootable backup made with Carbon Copy Cloner, and use Backblaze to keep an off-site copy of my home folder. Additionally, because I have a lot of music and photo data, I keep a couple of mirrored 6-Terabyte external drives with long-term archives of old stuff that I don't necessarily need to have daily access to.

I often use a Logitech M720 Triathlon mouse. My printer is an ancient HP LaserJet 6MP, which I got new in 1996 for $1000, with the idea that I wouldn't need to buy another printer for a long time. Thirty years later that beast is still running.

I use DreamHost for website hosting, and have a server running at Linode. There is also an AWS server that I use with students in my computer science classes.

I use Pilot V5 pens, in red and black, for taking notes and grading papers. For sketching out ideas and code, I use a Pentel GraphGear 1000 (0.7mm). I use National Brand Engineer's Computation Pads for just about everything.

I drink Peet's Major Dickason's coffee, made in a French press.

I carry my stuff around in a ballistic Stealth Pack by Mountain Tools.

And what software?

I like Apple's ecosystem, in general, but am leery of getting too sucked in to it. So while I use their Calendar program for day-to-day appointments, I use a Python script I wrote, running in the Terminal, to manage my tasks, projects, and to-do lists. I love Panic's Nova for managing websites, Navicat for managing databases, and Bare Bones's BBEdit for working with text files (although I use VS Code and vim in class for teaching coding).

I'm preparing for the data apocalypse with open source alternatives. Much of my work is done in text files (usually Markdown-style), and new Word-compatible documents I'm preparing using the cross-platform, open source LibreOffice.

What would be your dream setup?

I'm there! The MacBook Pro has been a pretty solid machine so far.

If I had a little more time to play I'd move my hosting to a Virtual Private Server somewhere.

And if I were doing all this from a beach in southern France, that'd be nice, too. Someday...