What I Use

11:12AMJune 19 2023Daniel Tompkins

Tech­nol­o­gists and their Stuff

When I was a kid, I played Pong a few times on my dad's Com­modore 64 and an old Sony CRT. I wasn't nearly as ob­sessed with elec­tronics and soft­ware then, but my cur­rent self would be thrilled to re­visit the 8-bit com­puter and the static-y curved glass of that old dis­play.

Today, our per­sonal com­puters are vastly more di­verse and ad­vanced. With smart­phones, most people carry a pow­erful com­puter in their pockets. If I had oo­dles of cash, I could buy a video card that has more VRAM than my first com­put­er's hard disk storage!

What's the tech that keeps you run­ning day-to-day? What's your dream setup?

Com­mand Line In­ter­face (CLI)

Ter­minal

Ed­itor

Font

  • Jet­Brains Mono
    Nerd Font patch
    Using lig­a­tures (==>/!==) ​ver­sion

Hard­ware

Dis­plays

  • Dell 24" S2421HGF, 1080p

Audio

  • Head­phones
    Sony MDR-XB700

3D Printing

Lap­tops

  • Mac­Book Pro (M3 Pro, 2024)
    MacOS, 18GB RAM 512GB SSD

  • Dell XPS13 9343 (i5, 2014)
    Linux, 4GB RAM 250GB SSD

  • Alien­ware m18x R2 (i7, 2012)
    Win­dows, 24GB RAM 1TB HDD

Single-Board Com­puters (SBC)

  • Rasp­berry Pi 3
    2GB, Runs Oc­toPi to con­trol my 3D printer

  • Rasp­berry Pi 4
    4GB, This is my little testing com­puter. Cur­rently sending code to an Ar­duino for motor con­trol.

  • Rasp­berry Pi 4
    8GB, Home media server to con­nect to Hulu, Net­flix, etc. (with the Rii K18 wire­less key­board/​trackpad )

  • Rasp­berry Pi Zero W
    1GB, Run­ning my Vim clutch

  • Rasp­berry Pi Zero W 2
    2GB, Waiting for the right pro­ject

Gaming

Hand­held

  • Nin­tendo 3DS XL
    First gen (no fancy second joy­stick 😥)

  • Nin­tendo Game Boy Ad­vance SP

PC Gaming

  • RuneScape
  • Oblivion
  • Skyrim
  • Elden Ring