Matt MightInterview
CS Professor (University of Utah)
Adapted from Matt Might's interview on Uses This, published 6 January 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
I travel a lot, so size is the dominant factor for my primary computer--a maxed-out 2011-model 11" MacBook Air.
A 2010-model Mac Mini drives Netflix, iTunes, Hulu and Amazon Video to the TV.
I use a 64 GB 3G iPad 2 to peer review papers and edit my own while I work out.
I use a Linksys E2500 Dual-Band router, with SSH and VNC port-forwarded to allow remote access to the home network.
After its predecessor--a 2 TB Time Capsule--died, I realized it's better to split the functions of household file server and router among two devices.
You can pry my Kensington remote from my cold, dead, ergonomic grip.
You will find 85 Watt MagSafe laptop power adapters (sometime two) pre-installed everywhere we frequent in my house: the couch (x 2), the kitchen desk, the home office (x 2), the rocking chair and the bed.
When I travel, I always carry a portable power strip for airports and a HyperShop HyperJuice external battery for long plane flights.
Communication
I use TweetDeck for my twitter client, and I use SMS instead of instant messaging.
For IRC, I'm nostalgic for the customizability of mIRC.
Productivity
My only regret in switching from Linux to OS X is giving up the raw efficiency of tiling window managers like ion.
For task management, I use OmniFocus on my MacBook Air, my iPhone and my iPad.
My wife and I keep our phones, laptops and iPads synced with about six different Google Calendars, so that we can play secretary for each other.
Notes
Coding & Development
When it's imperative that a page renders properly in Internet Explorer, Windows XP and Windows 8 running in VMWare Fusion get the job done.
My personal site and blog run off a homebrewed, slowly-evolved collection of shell scripts, Makefiles, HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
For collaboration within my research group, my linode also hosts an SVN repository exported over WebDAV, but we are currently transitioning to git over WebDAV.
Design
For charts (like this one), OmniGraphSketcher for OS X is a joy to use.
For graphs constructed by hand, OmniGraffle is perfect.
Media
For talks based on a research paper, the ability to copy and paste vector-scalable graphics from PDFs in Preview into Keynote is a killer feature.
Storage
Other
A 512 MB RAM, 36 GB linode powers might.net and my personal cloud.
We installed Ubuntu on it, she used it for a summer, and now it's slated to become the nerve center for the home security and automation system.
Red Hat Enterprise Desktop+ 3 others
I ran Red Hat Linux for about seven years before switching to the Mac.
I've been using OS X for about six years now.
ShiftIt makes up some of the difference.