One of my favourite things to do, is to obsess over the minute details of a thing until it is absolutely perfect. Take my keychain: I have spent years trying different keychains, key organisers, to find the one that fits my day best. My keys are organised in the order that I use them in the day. The keys I use when it's dark are the ones that are easiest to access, and then they're sorted by chronology and frequency.

I know what you're thinking; this is the mind of a person who is out of problems to solve, and you're almost right - some problems really annoy me and when I factor in my own neuroses, it makes things that are very simple to some people, very complex for me. For example, I carry my bike lock key on my keyring. I have used my bike lock less than ten times in the last year, but I still carry the key because it's enough for me to remember to bring the lock without remembering the key as well. I realise this is ludicrous, but that's just how I work.

There are many categories to this list. I have the capacity to obsess over gear in any genre. I am also exceptionally fickle - gear that matters intensely to me today could be almost completely irrelevant to me next week. I welcome changes with open arms, but if they don't improve my life in some notable way, I will dump them so fast.

Work

Hardware

My current obsession. How to improve productivity; how to derive joy from my day.

Out of all the things I do, the single-most-significant continuous thing I do whilst awake, is work. I love my job, and if you think I have capacity to fuss over my keychain, then buckle up because I have spent decades honing this!

The 16", 2021 MacBook Pro M1 Max

I referred to my last MacBook Pro as a beast. This thing makes it look like an abacus. The Apple Silicon is so powerful it's unreal. I've had it for a little while now and I've never heard the fans come on. And I've used it. The only downside of it is compatibility. So many vendors haven't updated Docker images to support the "new" architecture. I get it; they want you on new versions, but that isn't always possible and it's so irritating when people don't realise or don't care that not everyone can budget for constantly keeping all their dependencies upgraded to the very latest version.

I've managed to find workarounds for everything except Elasticsearch, which isn't bad I guess. Although I'm not proud of some of the things I've had to do to get our legacy Ruby projects running.

LG 27GN960

The last monitor I used was really good, but this new one has ridiculously low response times, and I can use a VESA mount to free up some desk space (to take up with more stuff!).

CalDigit TS3 Plus

Loads of connectivity for all the various things I need to plug in throughout the day. Mostly it's nice to be able to just plug one cable into my laptop and get power, screen, keyboard, and external hard drives, with enough spare ports left over for magsafe charging for Airpods, card readers etc. It runs a little warmer than I'd like but never gets silly.

Logitech MX Master 3

I am becoming increasingly frustrated with this mouse, and Logitech's baffling software ecosystem. I still genuinely don't know if I'm using the correct drivers/configuration software for this device, and now Logitech seems to want me to have an account and log in to my mouse. It'll be a cold day in hell before I log into my mouse. I'm beginning to look for replacements for this, but I'm currently toying with building a Charybdis Nano which might render a mouse mostly pointless anyway.

Keyboard

My current main keyboards are the BastardKB Charybdis Nano and BastardKB Dilemma.

Pens and Pencils

I love physical writing tools. I don't do this often but if I need to take notes properly I am increasingly trying to do that on paper. For this, I use either a Parker Jotter, a Rotring 600 or a Uni Kuru Toga. I dabbled with using fountain pens for this, but I find the gaps between writing with a lid off caused the ink to dry out pretty quickly, which makes these pretty useless for note-taking for me.

Software

Vim

No matter how appealing some other text editors are, I can't deviate from Vim. My entire setup for work is a house of cards; if I remove one piece of it, I have to start over. Vim is one of the most flexible, stable pieces of software I've ever used. I couldn't imagine using anything else, even if I were to try something new. I have recently switched to neovim though.

tmux and tmuxinator

I use tmux as a terminal window manager. It works nicely with Vim so that I have a main editor window for all my projects which has a Vim pane, then 3-4 smaller panes for running things like Docker, Rails, and firing arbitrary commands for things like unit testing.

Most of my projects have some sort of variance, so I use tmuxinator to configure each one. Tmux sessions don't persist through restarts, so it's very useful for me to be able to configure each project and return to it easily if I need to restart. Tmuxinator uses YML to let me configure things like pane sizes and layouts, and initial commands.

Docker

As I grow longer in the tooth, the versions of software I used to make things becomes more fragmented, and it's important to be able to rely on returning to those versions if I need to make changes to older projects. Docker's sandboxed approach means I can have as many different versions of dependencies as I need without polluting my main OS. Newer projects are completely containerized (although running MacOS presents its own challenges here) which massively improves deployment and version compatibility. It took me a while to get my head around Docker, but now that I'm comfortable with it I wouldn't be without it.

Gitlab

Gitlab started out as a pretty shameless Github clone, but came along at a time when Github's pricing was prohibitive if you wanted uncapped private git repos for teams. They've since added a load of really nice features; including hosted docker image registry, and continuous integration and deployment.

Not Work

Bikes

I am obsessed with fixed gear bikes. If I can help it, I don't ride anything else. I currently ride a Brother Cycles Swift frame with Sugino 75 drivetrain, an American Classic Aero 420 rear wheel, some rando Shimano front wheel because the AC front kept breaking, Continental Gatorskin tyres, and Exposure lights.

Cameras

I use:

• Canon R5
• Canon 1DX mk2
• Leica M typ 240
• Ricoh GRII
• iPhone 14 Pro Max

And:

• Canon RF 35mm f1.8
• Canon EF 50mm f1.2
• Canon EF 70-200mm f2.8 mk2
• Canon EF 24-105 f4
• Canon EF 85mm f1.8
• Leica 50mm f2.8
• Leica 28mm f2

Headphones

I have 3 categories of headphone requirements:

• Convenience: Apple Airpods Pro 2
• Quality: Shure SE846
• Selfishness: Sennheiser HD600

As the name implies, I could probably do without the Selfishness category, but when headphones sound as good as those Sennheisers, I'm not sure why I would. These categories are also sorted by how frequently they get used, which is a bit sad.