Inspired by Harry here’s the beginnings of a page about stuff I use to do my jobs – day job and night job! – and my hobby (music). This page isn’t complete, Ill update it when I get time.
Hardware
- Lenovo Y510P
- My main workstation. I bought this about 3 years ago, and other than slow start-up times (it doesn’t have an SSD drive) it’s still pretty fast. Probably the 12GB RAM helps. Battery life is OK, and the screen is quite good. I run Windows 10 on it.
- Dell XPS L702X
- My multimedia laptop, dual booting to Ubuntu and Windows 10. I use this for watching Netflix and DVDs (my wife and I have box-set obsessions) and for guitar effects using Guitarix. Bought second-hand off eBay several years ago, but still runs really quick because of the SSD drive. Downside: it weighs as much as a small car.
- IKEA chair
- Nothing special, but it has small arms which makes holding a guitar while seated easier.
- Logitech M-UAG120 mouse
- Having a mini mouse with a short lead is great, as it can travel with me (although I don’t take my laptop out of the house often). A mouse is a must as I find trackpads unbearably fiddly.
- Grado SR60 headphones
- I wanted headphones that were the best sound quality for a very limited budget, and these delivered. I have to be honest: they aren’t comfortable to wear for long periods, but the sound quality is fantastic. If I were to buy some new headphones they’d almost certainly be from Grado as well.
Software
- Visual Studio 2015
- For my day job I’m rarely out of Visual Studio. It’s still the daddy of IDEs, but it’s huge footprint and – frankly – overwhelming number of features is often overkill. I’m still on 2015, but will be upgrading to 2017 very soon.
- Visual Studio Code
- For my own personal coding I’ve fallen in love with Code. It’s a great text editor, and the wide range of plugins means it can turn its hand to almost anything. It’s meant I haven’t opened Netbeans in months to do PHP development.
- MySQL Workbench
- For WordPress work this is invaluable to run queries in the database.
- Slack
- I’m constantly in about 4 or 5 Slack teams and run the desktop and mobile apps.
- Docker/Kitematic
- As I’m on Windows 10 Home edition I need a little extra help running docker images. Kitematic makes that easy, hooking into VirtualBox.
- Github
- Who doesn’t use Github these days? The desktop app is open most of the time as I’ve been lazy and not learned the command line tools!
- Postman
- Testing APIs would be a million times harder without Postman. And the environments feature makes a great tool even better.
- MediaMonkey
- I don’t listen to music all the time when I’m working, but when I do this is what I’m running.
Music Equipment
- Line6 Variax 500
- My trusty axe for over 10 years, it still astounds me regularly with the range of sounds it can produce. The Martin D28 acoustic sample alone is worth the price.
- 1978 Fender Precision bass
- This is my pride and joy, a classic instrument. More modern basses may come and go, but I’ll own this bass forever.
- Roland GR-09 guitar synth
- This is a pretty old guitar synth which I bought from a very dear friend who sadly passed away a couple of years ago. The sounds on board aren’t great, but I often plug the MIDI in to a laptop and use more modern, and much higher quality, samples. It never fails to amuse me when I plug my guitar in, strum a chord, and people are startled to hear a piano come out the amp!
- Line6 Pod 2.0
- While I don’t use anywhere near the full capabilities of this box, it’s always in my rig. Coupled with the Line6 Shortboard for volume and wah control it’s invaluable.