Benjamin Mako HillInterview
Social scientist, free software hacker (MIT)
Adapted from Benjamin Mako Hill's interview on Uses This, published 11 April 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
At the moment, I use a Lenovo Thinkpad X201.
At home, I have a special edition Model M keyboard with a trackpoint.
Happy Hacking Keyboard+ 5 others
On the road, I sometimes use a Happy Hacking keyboard to allow for better posture.
The computer in my pocket is currently an HTC Sensation.
I carry around a hacked Kindle DX (graphite) I use exclusively for reading academic papers as PDFs.
Communication
I read my email in Mutt and write it in Emacs.
I've never found an IM/XMPP/Jabber client I liked, so I run Bitlbee which represents my IM client as a IRC channel full of my contacts.
Productivity
In my impetuous youth, I fell in love with Ion.
Browser
I browse the web in FireFox and rely so heavily on a series of extensions that I find it very hard to imagine switching to Chrome or anything else.
Notes
Security
On a related note, I use the GNU Privacy Guard and wish more people did too.
Coding & Development
vim -- which I had switched to -- seems to be trying to occupy the space Emacs has vacated.
These days, I do most of my programming in R within ESS.
Media
Storage
Other
My laptop runs Debian "sid" (i.e., unstable).
It it is the latest in a series of Android developer phones by HTC I've moved through.
I actively maintain and use three servers: two run Debian stable and one Ubuntu LTS (all are now Xen VMs).