Karl AndersonInterview
Software engineer, phone hardware hacker
Adapted from Karl Anderson's interview on Uses This, published 17 February 2015. 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 use a 12.5" ThinkPad X220 laptop.
At work I get to use a sweet large MacBook Pro with a lot of memory so I can do things in several virtual machines at once and talk with my co-workers at the same time.
They don't let me use it to authenticate at work, because it's too old, so I use a Yubikey for that.
When I'm at the office, which is most of my screen time, or working for a while at home, I use a second monitor, a Goldtouch split keyboard, a thin keyboard tray with negative tilt, a GeekDesk sit-stand desk, and a Steelcase chair.
Futel runs on payphones we get off Craigslist, Linksys WRT54G routers and Linksys SIP adapters we get off eBay and thrift stores, and old laptops, as well as cables, conduit, hardware, and concrete, and lots of other scrounged crap.
Security
I'm a software engineer for Duo Security.
Coding & Development
I spend most of my screen time in Emacs, in terminal and editor buffers, whether on my host OS or a virtual box.
Other
I have an obsolete Android phone that I don't use much because it's horribly slow and I don't trust it anyway, but I can't justify spending hundreds of dollars on whatever phone is current these days.
My personal laptop is an Ubuntu box, which I don't like that much, but I spent too much time in my youth figuring out what OS to run and how I wanted to configure it.
We use DD-WRT on routers because we can use cheap hardware, and because we can put an OpenVPN client directly on the router.