Tools

Last Updated: 20261107

Hardware

Apple Mac mini — Mine is a base M4 with 16Gb of RAM. Sounds kinda meh, but its by far the fastest mac I’ve ever used.
Apple MacBook Pro - Mine is laughably old; its from 2015. Dual core i5 with 8Gb of memory. Its a tank though. These days its living out its best life with cachyOS.
Beelink Mini Server - A trusty little box with expandable RAM and SSD. Currently it runs Ubuntu and serves Plex and some docker apps. Recently, the case fan left the chat and after minor hassle sourcing the replacement, its running 100% again.
Synology DS220j - Yeah, its a baby NAS, but it works great and requires minimal intervention. The drives are probably nearing end of life (24 x 7 for almost 7 years), unclear if I should just replace drives or maybe move to something else.

Edifier Bookshelf Speakers - Impressive sound and not terribly expensive.
Anker Noise Canceling Headphones - Picked these up on a whim when my older headphones crumbled to dust. They sound great and are pretty comfortable.
AudioPRO Microphone - No real real frills but sounds decent to me.
Sudgho Lavelier - Cheap and basic but sound better than the AudioPRO when moving around on podcasts.

Keychron K10 - Just clicky enough without being super loud.
Apple Magic Trackpad - Yeah, super expensive but oh so nice. I’m on my second one, but current one is 10 years in and it feels and works like new. I suspect that all other pointing devices are likely ruined for me.

Claude - The one I find the best for code stuff. I happily pay for a pro account.
chatGPT - My gateway drug for AI, not a paid user, but use it cross referencing.
Gemini - I think its the best for image related stuff with Nano Banana. I don’t pay to use it directly but get some boosted usage as a perk with my Google One account.

Silver Bullet - Notes very similar to Obsidian but in a browser. Includes a PWA for offline use.
Bitwarden - Not quite as polished as 1password, but fits my needs and I run my own VaultWarden server.
Immich - locally hosted image storage and management. If you don’t look too closely, you’d swear it was Google Photos.
Apple Reminders - my task management needs are pretty modest, so its a pretty good fit. Reminders also has sync dialed in tight. All that being said, I’m test driving web based Tududi in my quest to manage all my own data.