Ted LeungInterview
Technologist, photographer
Adapted from Ted Leung's interview on Uses This, published 13 December 2010. 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
At work I am using a 2.8GHz MacBook Pro with 8G of RAM, and a 200GB OWC SSD.
In my home office I have an 8 core 2.66GHz Mac Pro with 12G of RAM and pile of storage in the internal drive bays, including a 1.5TB Time Machine disk and a 1 TB disk for photographs.
The display on the MacPro is an NEC 30" 3090WQXi which is a wide gamut LCD display, which is great for photographic work, and for putting lots of code on a single screen.
There are also some photography dedicated peripherals including a Sandisk Extreme Firewire Compact Flash Reader, a Wacom Intuos 3 tablet, and an X-Rite ColorMunki
I have a 16GB Wifi iPad which is becoming my go-to away from my desk computing device.
My 32GB iPhone 4 goes with me pretty much everywhere.
I'm using a Panasonic GF-1 micro 4/3 camera as the camera that is mostly with me.
For hardcore photographic stuff, I have a Nikon D3 SLR, along with a pile of big, heavy and fast lenses.
Communication
At the moment Echofon is my Twitter client of choice, but I don't consider it to be perfect.
Adium is my choice for both instant messaging and IRC.
On my work computer I run Gabble, a native desktop client for Yammer.
On my work machine I am using Entourage since we use Exchange at work.
The rest of my writing ends up on my blog, and I use Ecto for writing blog posts.
Productivity
Brent Simmons' NetNewsWire is my RSS reader of choice.
iCal gets the nod for home calendar management.
OmniFocus is a great program for Getting Things Done style project, idea, and task management.
I also use DevonThink to capture and organize information of various kinds, although the majority of what I store there is web archives of interesting web pages.
At work I have Microsoft Office, but I only use it to read documents that other people send to me.
My biggest office productivity task is making presentations, and for that I prefer Apple's Keynote, which is part of the iWork suite.
Browser
Firefox is the default because it is the best at dealing with lots of tabs.
I've taken to using Safari for those quick lookup kinds of tasks.
The Finder hasn't aged well in OS X, and prefer PathFinder for a variety of reasons, including the ability to split windows into panes, and to have tabs.
Notes
I use Evernote for a note taking tasks.
Security
I can't talk about the browsers without also talking about 1Password, which is an essential tool for managing passwords, and for automatic form filling.
Coding & Development
I use homebrew to install Unix/Linux packages that I need.
Design
When Lightroom is not up to the job, then images end up going to Photoshop for finish work.
Media
Photoshop Lightroom+ 86 others
For much of my photographic work I can do everything that I need to in Lightroom.
Within Photoshop I use Noiseware for noise reduction and selected filters from Nik software.
Storage
I also have an external 1TB disk which is an exact duplicate of the internal photographs disk, courtesy of a nightly SuperDuper! job.
1Password can use Dropbox to sync between all my computers and devices - it's a must have.
Other
Plugged directly into a USB port on the Mac Pro (due to its position on my desk) is a Fujitsu Scansnap S1500M - I'm in the process of getting rid of a bunch of paper that has been lying on my office floor for years.
For my other social networking needs, I run Fluidized browsers for Facebook and Flickr.
iStat Menus is a great tool that lets me know what's happening on my computer, and it has a much richer menu bar clock.