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 an HDMI screen (LCD projector in class, or external monitor in office), as well as a WASD mechanical keyboard, a Logitech M720 Triathlon mouse, and an external backup drive.

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

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.

I have an iPhone 14 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 drives with long-term archives of old stuff that I don't necessarily need to have daily access to.

I use DreamHost for website hosting, and have a server running at Linode.

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; they have a business model that often sees them heading off into new and exciting directions, directions with which I don't always agree. 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 Coda for managing websites, Navicat for managing databases, and Bare Bones's BBEdit for working with text files (although I use vim in class for teaching coding). I also use LibreOffice for things like classroom presentations and preparing paper documents like handouts and tests.

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

What would be your dream setup?

I'm already there!

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...