Em Lazer-WalkerInterview
Interactive artist, developer
Adapted from Em Lazer-Walker's interview on Uses This, published 17 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
My main computer is a 12" MacBook.
It's usually paired with my AirPods, which I adore.
As I said, I mostly work out of coffee shops, but working at home lets me use my beloved Unicomp Model M buckling-spring mechanical keyboard and Razor DeathAdder gaming mouse.
For hardware work, I have a lovely Weller WES51 soldering iron, plus a bunch of other much more forgettable tools.
For quick prototyping work, I have a Monoprice MAKER SELECT v2 3D printer.
Most of my screen time is frankly spent on my iPhone 6S Plus.
I take a lot of freehand notes, typically using Moleskine notebooks (hardcover, paperback-sized, and with grid rule, please) and Pilot Vpen disposable fountain pens.
Although I love my Nintendo Switch, most of my gaming time is spent on my phone or tablet.
Communication
Looking at the front page of my phone: Foursquare is my gold standard for finding places to eat in new cities while traveling.
Productivity
Fantastical is my calendar of choice.
Security
Coding & Development
Design
Media
Storage
Other
Other projects revolve more around recontextualizing familiar objects and spaces, such as a generative poetry walk in San Francisco's Fort Mason and a game where you sext with a robot.
This tends to manifest itself in open-source software tools to help other programmers be more productive (my day job is building iOS and web apps), "quantified self"-style tools mostly built for my own purposes, and educational projects to help others teach themselves new skills.
I'll occasionally augment it with my beefy home-built gaming PC at home or a Linux virtual box from DigitalOcean if I need to do something more computationally intensive.
Not to toot my own horn, but one of my most frequently-used apps is Bike NYC, a minimalist app I built for NYC's bike share program.
Another good example is Cortado, a location-aware caffeine tracker I use to help me see the effect caffeine has on my well-being.