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 to that machine 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. 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'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 were also living in northern California or the south of France, that wouldn't be a bad thing.