Thorsten BallInterview
Writer, software developer
Adapted from Thorsten Ball's interview on Uses This, published 25 December 2018. 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 main machine is a 2016 13-inch MacBook Pro.
My keyboard at home is a Topre Realforce 87U, which I adore.
At work I use an Apple Magic Keyboard, because I haven't found the courage to take the spare KUL ES-87 to the office.
My desk at home is a height-adjustable Steelcase Ology.
Now, when I'm sitting, I'm sitting on a Steelcase Gesture.
I'm not a big phone productivity nerd but I have to mention my iPhone X.
Another favorite device of mine is my NAS, a Synology DS716+II with a total capacity of 4TB.
Next to it is an old Apple TV, which we use to access streaming services without having to connect the TV itself to the internet.
Communication
Productivity
I wrote a lengthy blog post on the topic that you can read if you want the details, but the short version is this: pandoc.
Browser
Security
But, you know, one that actually does something useful, as opposed to the OpenBSD server I kept in my teenage bedroom for which my parents had to pay the electricity bill - sorry!
Coding & Development
In the terminal, everything happens in a tmux session.
My shell of choice is zsh and has been for a few years.
Now, drumroll, fanfare, spotlight, take a deep breath, here comes the most important piece of software on my computer: my editor, Vim.
Especially after I switched to Neovim for better performance and could run my tests in the built-in terminal emulator.
That lead me to dipping my toes into this endless well (some say: abyss) called Emacs.
My note taking setup consists of Markdown files in a Dropbox folder as the storage engine and Vim and fzf as the editing frontend.
Media
Storage
It sits right next to the router, holds Time Machine and photo backups, important documents and large media files.
Other
Every multi-day project I'm working on gets its own session and in the rare case that I have to reboot the computer, I persist and restore the sessions and their window layouts with tmux-resurrect.