Dorian TaylorInterview
Entropy schlepper, maker of toys and diversions
Adapted from Dorian Taylor's interview on Uses This, published 14 September 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 have a hand-me-down MacBook of ambiguous vintage which I use as a front end to an old Dell I picked up from Free Geek for fifty bucks.
Okay, so let's say you've got the hulkingest monster twelve-core 3-gigahertz Xeon Mac Pro money can buy.
The last time I did 3D was as a teenager on a 486, and I remember drooling over those $50,000 SGI Octanes that could render mesh in real time.
All that said, I suppose one of these days soon I'll get off my ass and buy some slick little MacBook Air in case I have to pull it out in front of a client - for the exact same reason a real estate agent drives a Mercedes.
Communication
Productivity
Browser
Consider my browser: I use Firefox, because I put the effort into tarting it up with add-ons, but in a pinch just about any other browser will do.
Security
Any router or firewall-like thing is always OpenBSD, because reasons.
Coding & Development
There's probably one exception, and that's Emacs, the venerable text editor, wherein I actually do the work that pays me.
I could list the whole stack but that isn't very interesting, so I'll just summarize the languages: Perl is still my daily driver; I've been writing in it since 1997.
I am also finding myself spending more and more time with R.
For more organized "systems", I've recently been looking at Clojure.
Design
Other
My phone is some Android thing I bought off my little brother that's probably approaching 3 years old.
The development server is always some Debian variant, because their stringent policy tends to produce a sane working environment, including a vastly superior packaging system.
In my case the variant is Ubuntu, which is slightly less crunchy-granola than the original.