Máirín DuffyInterview
UI designer, usability tester (Red Hat, Fedora)
Adapted from Máirín Duffy's interview on Uses This, published 30 August 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 primary machine (Aiko) is a Lenovo Thinkpad x61 tablet with a 1400x1050 12.1" display, 2GB RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo L7500 processor, GM965 Intel graphics card, and a fingerprint reader that I use to log in.
At the office, I have three Dell Precision 470 Workstations (Spira, Hello Kitty, and Chococat) which are quite old and out-of-warranty .
I also have an old Kodak EasyShare DX6490 that I always keep at my desk in the office to record whiteboard sketches & notes.
My web cam is an old Creative Webcam Notebook that at one point required installing the spca5xx drivers but now works out-of-the-box in Fedora.
Finally, my scanner is a Canon LiDE 30.
As far as other portable devices go, my music player is the pink Sansa Clip 2GB model.
My phone is an old, basic, but pink (noticing a trend here?) Virgin Mobile Flasher v7 phone; I would like to upgrade to a smart phone at some point, but I'm not ready yet.
Communication
Browser
Notes
As part of my work at Red Hat and as part of my participation in theFedora community, I work with several MediaWiki installations.
For tracking tasks and other work items, the Fedora Design team uses trac and it's been very useful.
Xournal is a note-taking application aimed at tablets, and it's great for jotting down notes as I'm conducting a user interview or recording diagrams drawn during a meeting for later reference.
Coding & Development
When I choose a version control system these days I choose git.
Design
The single most important piece of software to me is Inkscape.
Media
A close second in importance is the Gimp, which is an image-processing application similar to Adobe Photoshop.
I listen to music (mostly in OGG Vorbis, although I have some old MP3s as well as some from the Amazon MP3 store) using Rhythmbox.
I've had a Flickr pro account for a couple of years but I'm torn about continuing to use it since it's not open source.
I've set up my own Gallery2 install and I may start migrating over to it.
Other
I work at Red Hat and I'm also the team lead for the Fedora Design Team.
They all run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
It's on my systems that I use to host stuff - I hook them up to Red Hat Network and I don't worry about them too much.
My desktop of choice is GNOME.
Another useful tablet tool is CellWriter, which enables handwriting-to-text recognition - very useful for when I have my keyboard folded out of sight but I need to type text on-screen.