Adrian HolovatyInterview
Web developer (EveryBlock, Django), musician
Adapted from Adrian Holovaty's interview on Uses This, published 13 January 2012. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
I use a 17-inch MacBook Pro with a 250 GB SSD and 8 GB RAM.
I use a Logitech MX Revolution mouse with "infinite scrolling," which means I can give the scroll wheel a spin and it keeps spinning.
I never thought I'd be one to get excited about routers, but I got a Netgear Rangemax WNDR3700 router at home a little while ago and have been quite pleased with it.
I have a ReadyNAS, with half a terabyte of RAID-ed disk space, which is where I keep a bunch of files, including my music collection.
I have a 160 GB iPod.
With it, I use a pair of Bose QuietComfort 15 headphones.
For that, I use a Sony PCM-D50 stereo digital audio recorder.
Communication
Web apps: Gmail all day long ("apps for your domain"), and unfortunately I have to do the separate-Google-Accounts-in-separate-browsers dance because my various Google apps aren't capable of supporting simultaneous log ins.
Productivity
Browser
Security
Coding & Development
I'm a co-creator and co-BDFL of the Django Web framework.
Some little-known gems I use a lot: youtube-dl for downloading YouTube videos.
Max for converting between audio-file formats.
Media
I use iTunes to manage my music.
Audacity for quick clean up of audio files.
Fission for lossless sound editing (trimming live concerts into separate songs, etc.).
Everyday for taking photos of my son.
Storage
Other software I use almost daily: Dropbox for commonly accessed files.
Other
Caffeine for easy control over when my laptop can and can't go to sleep.
Sidestep for encrypting my Internet traffic while on public wifi.
iPhone apps I use daily: Buster (real-time Chicago bus tracking).