Charles BerretInterview
Communications Ph.D. student (Columbia)
Adapted from Charles Berret's interview on Uses This, published 6 December 2016. 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 home and when I travel, I tend to use a 13" MacBook Pro.
My go-to pen for getting ideas down is a Lamy swift.
Communication
Productivity
And I sync my enormous Zotero library to that machine using WebDAV.
The Jupyter Notebook handles 90 percent of the mixed code/prose work I do.
Browser
Firefox and Zotero do the trick for browsing and citation management.
I run Privacy Badger to block trackers, but I don't use an ad blocker since publishers really do need the money.
Notes
When fancier print formatting is required, that means converting to LaTeX, but most of the time I just dump my work from Markdown to PDF, HTML, DOC, etc.
Coding & Development
Homebrew gets me lots of the command line utilities I need that don't already come with Mac.
For straight prose writing or coding, I've been using Atom pretty much exclusively for about a year now.
First off, I find Sublime a little clunky.
Storage
For syncing between machines, I run OwnCloud on a server (also Ubuntu) that lives under my couch at home.
As it stands, I dump my archival images to Dropbox and then promptly evacuate them to my own servers.
Other
I also run MediaGoblin for music and movies.