Schuyler TowneInterview
Security anthropologist, research scholar (Ronin Institute)
Adapted from Schuyler Towne's interview on Uses This, published 1 March 2016. 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
It features a Shapeoko 2 that my wife & I received as a gift at our wedding.
I have a nice little mini mill that a machinist friend set me up with - it's just the right size for anything I would ever want to do, which is primarily making cutaways of locks and the occasional jig for the Shapeoko or other small parts.
In particular, I have a nice, but super affordable microscope that I use for lock forensics work.
The only piece of digital equipment I consistently rely on is my Tascam DR-05 audio recorder.
Productivity
Despite now having access to PowerPoint, I still prefer OpenOffice Impress for slide decks.
I've used Zotero to good effect in my X-Locks poject, and I doubt I could say enough good things about it, however it doesn't quite fit the way I like to work, especially when it comes to bringing on outside researchers.
Notes
Coding & Development
For writing, including the answers to these questions, I almost exclusively use Sublime Text.
Years ago I loved Q10, a super minimalist, distraction free text editor, and in many ways Sublime replicates that experience by stripping away spell/grammar checking, word counts, page counts, etc.
Design
I actually still use Adobe Flash once in a while to bash out quick animations.
For more involved lock animations I rely on Blender.
For any 2D graphics and often just to help me think visually through a 3 dimensional problem, I use Adobe Illustrator.