Tim JacobsInterview
Inventor, hacker, engineer
Adapted from Tim Jacobs's interview on Uses This, published 2 May 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
I own probably half a dozen MIDI keyboards and my favourite is still the Yamaha KX-5.
Most recently, I bought an Arturia KeyStep since I wanted a really portable keyboard with full-size MIDI connectors.
Cameras are a really important part of what I do, and my workhorse is still the Nikon D7100.
I only upgraded from my beloved ten-year-old Nikon D80 after the shutter mechanism jammed.
I use the D7100 for video too, with my Zoom H2n connected to it.
For checking audio I have my AKG K702 Headphones which are driven with a custom-built amplifier.
My favourite lens is the Nikon 60mm f/2.8 AF-D Macro.
Recently, the TS100 has become my main soldering iron.
And the final bit of hardware I should mention is the AmScope SE400 stereo microscope.
Productivity
I use i3, which is a popular tiling window manager that's very easy to customize.
Sumatra is the best PDF reader.
Notes
Coding & Development
I use git for everything, even things which aren't source code, such as CAD designs and circuit boards.
Design
I can heartily endorse OpenSCAD, which is a very unique 3D modelling program.
For more artistic stuff I have become a devout fan of Blender, which has become astonishingly good in the last few years.
Media
Krita is a program I just started using.
Other
My main laptop is running Arch Linux, a distro I chose primarily because of their excellent wiki.
I feel so strongly about this that I use it on Linux under Wine.