David Lawrence MillerInterview
Ecological statistician
Adapted from David Lawrence Miller's interview on Uses This, published 9 August 2017. 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 currently use a 2013 MacBook Air - it's the best computer I've ever bought.
I use a Nifty MiniDrive with a 128Gb SD card to store large things (music, movies, datasets) without having to cart around an external hard disk (get the fastest, largest card you can!).
I use a Kinesis Freestyle II keyboard; top tip is to get some grip tape to put on some of the letters so you can find your way round when you start using it.
I also use a 3M EM500 vertical mouse, though avoid mousework as much as possible.
When I travel I take the keyboard and the Roost stand; both can fit in hand luggage fairly easily.
I have a Tom Bihn Brain Cell vertical case for extra laptop protection (after an unfortunate overheating situation caused by a previous laptop turning itself on in my bag a few years ago).
I have an iPhone SE because it's pretty much the smallest functional phone I could find that has a good camera.
Sony MDR-V6s are easily the best headphones I've ever owned.
Communication
Browser
Security
Coding & Development
Almost all my programming is done in R.
Almost everything I do ends up in git, I use git-prompt to show the status of the working repo in my bash prompt.
Storage
Other
Merlin Bird ID (iOS)+ 3 others
I think paper guides are still ahead of phone-based ones for now (aside from Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Merlin app for North America).
I write most of my analyses in R Markdown then convert to LaTeX/PDF/HTML as necessary.