John SiracusaInterview
Programmer, writer (Ars Technica)
Adapted from John Siracusa's interview on Uses This, published 1 July 2009. 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 machine is a 2x2.8 GHz Mac Pro (Early 2008) with 8 GB of RAM, dual optical drives, an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT video card, and 3.5 TB of disk space spread over four internal drives: two 1 TB Western Digital Caviar Blacks, a 1 TB Samsung Spinpoint F1, and the 500GB Western Digital Caviar Blue that came with the Mac.
I use the Apple aluminum keyboard that came with the Mac Pro and a Logitech MX300 mouse.
(I haven't used an Apple mouse since the one that came with my Performa 6110CD.) I've also got a tiny i-rocks powered USB 2.0 hub.
(It's not the new dual-band model, unfortunately.) The AirPort, in turn, is connected to my gloriously symmetrical 20/20 Mbps FiOS Internet connection.
(I don't use the router that Verizon supplied; the AirPort connects directly to the FiOS ONT in the basement with 100 feet of Cat-6 cable.) An Epson Stylus CX7800 is also connected to the AirPort via USB.
The family laptop (ostensibly my wife's machine) is a 2.4 GHz 15-inch MacBook Pro (Mid 2007) with 4 GB of RAM, a matte screen, and the stock 160 GB hard drive.
It's intermittently connected via a FireWire 400 cable to a Western Digital Caviar 250 GB hard drive inside a Macally PHR-100AF external drive enclosure.
I've also got a Newton MessagePad 120 on my desk as a decoration.
Communication
My Twitter client of choice is Twitterrific, on both the Mac and the iPod.
Productivity
I use it instead of Apple Mail because of its superior Exchange support (for work), its integrated calendar, which I use instead of iCal, and a huge number of little features: mailing list manager, custom columns on a per-folder basis, quote-aware text re-wrapping, etc.
Despite having all those web browsers, I do most of my web browsing indirectly via RSS/Atom feeds inside NetNewsWire.
I've tried LaunchBar and a few others, but I always come back to Quicksilver.
Browser
My primary web browser has been Safari since it was introduced, mostly due to the minimalist user interface and speed of non-rendering tasks (e.g., how long it takes to create a new, empty browser window).
Coding & Development
I do all of my programming and writing in BBEdit, which I've been using since version 2.1 (despite a brief dalliance with emacs when I was in college).
The fact that Safari 4 now also renders web pages and runs JavaScript lightning-fast is just icing on the cake for me.
I use VMware Fusion for work and play.
Storage
I boot from and use the first drive, which is continuously backed up to the second drive using Time Machine.
I make a bootable backup of the first drive onto the third drive using SuperDuper! every few weeks.
I also do an encrypted network backup using Backblaze.
Dropbox is recent addition to my "essentials" list.
Other
So in addition to the Dock, I run DragThing with two docks: a "process dock" growing down from the upper right corner, a la Mac OS 9, and a "folder dock" in the lower right corner containing my most frequently accessed folders.
I still have ASM installed, but I rarely use it directly these days.
I also have the excellent iStat Menus installed so I can see the freaking date next to the time in the menu bar.