John MacFarlaneInterview
Philosophy professor, developer (pandoc, gitit)
Adapted from John MacFarlane's interview on Uses This, published 25 May 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
For ergonomics I have the laptop opened almost 180 degrees and propped up on a 3M LX550 Vertical Notebook Riser, so I'm looking directly at its beautiful 1600x1200 15" matte screen.
I don't like mice, so I use an external ThinkPad USB keyboard with TrackPoint.
At home (and on the road) I use a 13" MacBook Pro.
I have a standing desk, an Ikea Utby bar table.
Communication
Productivity
To keep track of my schedule, I use Google calendar.
Browser
No matter which OS I'm using, I spend most of my time in a terminal, a web browser (usually Chrome), or a PDF viewer.
Notes
For books and more complex documents, I use LaTeX.
Coding & Development
I do all of my writing and programming with Vim in a terminal.
Almost all of my open-source code is on github.
Storage
At home on the Mac, I use a nice program called Arq, which also backs up to S3.
Other
I also have a Linode VPS that I use for my website and a few web applications.
To manage my personal website and a few other websites I control, I use yst, a static site generator of my own design.
I have recently started using Mendeley to manage my collection of academic books and papers.