Paul FordInterview
Developer, writer, CEO (Postlight)
Adapted from Paul Ford's interview on Uses This, published 22 August 2019. 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 phone is a maxed-out Google Pixel 3, which I use for phone things: Email, reading, web browsing, messaging, music, and taking pictures, and as an interface to the New York City mass transit system, especially the buses.
She could look to see if we were on the train headed home, and then started up the grill on our deck.
I have plenty of Raspberry Pi computers.
Communication
Google's Gmail is my email host.
Recently, I'm thinking of automatically turning my Twitter archive into fake emails and feeding them into my email archive so that I can have all of those connections in the search, too.
(It's unfortunate I cannot do this using the World Wide Web, but in 2019 the web is less about documents and more for restaurants.) It's also easy to briefly reply to emails from within my text editor, although doing so means I need to use a special mode called messages-are-flowing.
Productivity
I also keep an old 2014 MacBook Pro up-to-date for when I need to update Keynote presentations at home or do other things that require platform lock-in.
Or you can feed Org mode content through the command-line tool Pandoc, which can output Microsoft Word documents as necessary.
Office because I have to send documents/contracts to recalcitrant organizations who haven't made it over to Google Docs, and I also sometimes have to open mega-Excel documents, because Excel is the program that runs the world.
Browser
I use Firefox as my default web browser.
Notes
80% of my life is spent in Emacs, using a "mode" called Org mode.
You can point to sections of the big text file and turn them into HTML for emailing, or turn a section into LaTeX code, which then can be turned into a PDF.
On the iPad I mostly use an app called Notability that lets you write on "graph paper" - or annotate a PDF - with the Apple pencil.
Security
I use 1Password for password management.
Coding & Development
The core of my life is in the free software text editor GNU Emacs.
I use a terminal editor called Alacritty, which is GPU accelerated so you know it's good.
On the Mac I use Homebrew to manage packages.
Design
I use the IBM Plex font family for all my daily work.
Creative Cloud because I have the educational discount since I teach in the MFA in Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts, and I can't quite bring myself to be without Photoshop, even though I probably only open it a few times a year and can do most of what I need with apps that cost about $15 all-in.
And also I still love OmniGraphSketcher, which is now open-sourced.
Media
Each seven-year-old kid has a low-end Acer Chromebook, which they use for games and NetFlix on weekend mornings.
Storage
I am pretty angry about the state of Google Drive, which has a set of user experience patterns that makes me wonder if the designers are paid by the number of new files created, rather than by the number of old files found.
Other
Most of them are just sitting in wire baskets but one is running Pi-Hole to block trackers.
Firefox Multi-Account Containers+ 1 other
I like the containers, which let you use multiple accounts at once without a lot of fuss, and the way pinned tabs work.
We built Dash, a tool for Slack that helps you make decisions.