My Personal Technology

At it’s best, technology can be a tool for collaborative thought, communication, & friendship. It can also help you deal with BS more efficiently so you have more time for those other things. This document is intended to document my personal technology stack, mostly for my own purposes so that I know what I’m doing. I have a philosophy of liberally spending money on technology that will help me communicate, and being excruciating frugal in other areas.

Hardware

Macbook Pro 13” // iPhone 12 Mini

I’ve been locked in as a Mac user for 20 years. I’m really happy with the iPhone 12 Mini, though they could have made it even smaller! The iPhone 5 was the perfect size.

Email

Superhuman

[LOCKED IN] There’s a $10 per month plan if you work for non-profits. It’s really good.

Calendar

Apple Calendar

[HAPPY] Apple Calendar, backed by Google Calendar

Todo

Todoist // Notion

[MOSTLY HAPPY] I’ve started to use Notion for organizational tasks, and the workflow between Notion and Todoist is still in flux.

Notes

Notion

[MINOR PAIN] I’ve used other tools in the past for this – Bear, Apple Notes, Evernote, Google Docs. I have notes to migrate from these other tools. We are using Notion for CIVIC, and I think it makes sense to use Notion for everything.

Code

VSCode

[LOCKED IN] Happy with my setup here.

Browser

Chrome

[MINOR PAIN] I really tried to use Firefox for most things, on principle, but it became too painful. The aggressive privacy tracking broke a good third of websites. Now I’m just using Chrome, and making extensive use of Chrome profiles. Too much of my work is in Google Apps. When I was using Firefox, I found this extension that I use to automatically opens every Google application in Chrome. Unfortunately, despite Mozilla’s efforts, Google makes the Google Apps experience in other browsers just shitty enough that it really doesn’t make sense.

Music

Apple Music // Spotify

[LOCKED IN] I was very early on streaming music. I use Apple Music because of the integration with the Apple ecosystem and I can listen to my personal music collection of things that aren’t available for streaming & streaming music in one place. They need to offer more API access though! There are awesome applications like Pacemaker that let you do creative things like DJ with Spotify that aren’t available on Apple Music, so I am a subscriber to both.