/Uses

The tools and software I use..

I’m not really a tools/equipment fetishist, but for the record, here are the things I use.

I’m not endorsing or recommending anything here. None of the links are “affiliate links” they are just to places to find for more information.

Hiking and Outdoors

I carry a Swiss Army “Climber” multi-tool. (Bruce Sterling writes eloquently about multi-tools in his Last Viridian Note).
When I go hiking I’ll also take my Opinel #6 pocket-knife — it’s light and has a really nice locking mechanism. It’s great for quartering an apple or stripping the bark from a branch.
Also for hiking, I have a basic compass with a lovely leather case for it that I commissioned from Vulpine Vision.
We live in a biodiversity hotspot, and make good use of my Olympus MD-5 Mk II mirrorless camera to record it while it still exists.
I sometimes tell people that the best piece of farming machinery I own is my refurbished Apple iPod Touch. No idea what year or model. It plays music, audio drama and audio described movies, and podcasts and keeps me sane out in the paddocks or on the commute or while doing the dishes.

I'm an indie audio description writer and at the moment I'm using:

My laptop is a used HP laptop I can’t be bothered looking up what it is. It’s nothing special but works just fine.
My desktop “the mainframe” is a 2nd-hand Dell Optiplex 9020 from work, with a new harddrive and power-supply. It has two monitors, one bought new, the other is 2nd hand from auction.
I have a Epson Document Scanner DS-530 which works great with Linux (not everything does) and is a great way to cut down on paper clutter.

I’m operating system agnostic in my work, but at home I run Linux on all my machines — specifically Xubuntu 22.04
I use the i3 window tiling window manager.
I do almost all of my writing in Vim on the command line, mostly in HTML.
I use subtitld for writing audio description scripts, and Audacity to edit audio.
When I need to write my own software, I'll typically use Python, Php or JavaScript.

My “smartphone” — if you can dignify the object with such a term — is a random cheap Alcatel Android thing with not enough memory I got mostly to test a website. I’m not joined at the hip to it, and mostly use it for playing the ASCII version of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
I love paper books but they do take up a lot of space. My Kobo Glo e-reader has been a boon since I got it as a birthday gift in 2012.
I have a hand-me-down Apple iPad something for reading comics and text-books, and to be honest it’s pretty annoying how difficult it is to get anything on there. I had to buy a piece of software to load books onto it; something my phone and my Kobo do out of the box.

I don’t have a smart watch.

Or any kind of watch.