The Setup

Leigh Alexander

2013-05-16T00:00:00-07:00

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Leigh Alexander, a journalist and critic of video games and their surrounding business and culture. I write about interactive entertainment and social media and the people who create and participate within that space. I’m editor at large at Gamasutra, I’m a columnist in Edge magazine, Kotaku and at Vice’s Creators Project, and I write at Boing Boing and Thought Catalog and anywhere else if I can find the time.

What hardware do you use?

It’s an entirely unscientific setup. I have two netbooks – an Eee PC that I take to events and an Acer Aspire One that I use for slightly more things. My entire livelihood depends on being able to create and publish text immediately from anywhere, so that’s all I really have the time and energy to care about.

But I suppose video game consoles, being essential to my work, count: I have an Xbox 360, a PlayStation 3, a PlayStation 2 and a Vita; a Wii and a 3DS, and I don’t think my iPhone ever leaves my hand for more than a minute.

Um, except for yesterday, when it got lost. Luckily someone found it and it got returned!

And what software?

All I really require is a web browser, a word processor and some kind of image software – that’s Chrome, Word and IrfanView for me. I’ve been offloading more and more of my content creation and storage onto Google Drive; I don’t even generally worry about where I store anything because if it matters whatsoever, it’ll be an attachment in my Gmail archive somewhere.

I can’t actually overstate the role Twitter plays in my life - Twitter’s basically taken the role of my web presence. I use it to keep up on and comment on current events in my field, to broadcast the things I write, and to engage with my readers. I’m obsessed with Twitter; sometimes I use it as a giant chat room. I tweet to excess, I think. The pull-and-pop of refreshing the app on my phone is like my rosary. Freelance writing and having a career that basically lives on the Internet can be very isolating, and it keeps me company.

What would be your dream setup?

Only when you asked me this did I notice it’s been forever since I had a proper PC with proper software licenses, instead of this scrappy little piecemeal stitched-together infrastructure I’ve built for myself that depends on netbooks and mobile stuff and things living forever on the Internet.

I wonder if I even remember how to do anything in Photoshop, for example. I grew up so attached to computing that I’d pet a PC tower the way one would a dog, but I find it very alleviating to think of the tech I use as lightweight, and not necessarily disposable, but certainly replaceable, since the important things are tangible.

Being a writer online I’ve had to learn to love how the content that’s important to me isn’t this essential, obsessively-protected save file I need to keep on a zip drive, but is fleeting; I can write something in a web backend, hit publish, let it go like a little leaf on a river, and yet it will probably live forever in some incarnation. Even losing my iPhone yesterday, of course I’d have been irritated about the replacement cost if I hadn’t found it, but with the exception maybe of some of my photos, everything that lives on there is still alive, could appear on a new phone.

I guess what I’m driving at is I’ve stopped meaningfully desiring hardware anymore; I’ve become indifferent to it. I do wish I could afford some kind of tablet; I love how iOS games can feel so much more intimate, tactile and immersive on an iPad. If I could really have anything I wanted, I’d want, like, a Mac Quadra running System 6 or something so I could play ancient discs full of black-and-white HyperCard stacks.

If I lust after anything, it’s the nostalgia of when my relationship to computing and gaming was weighty and tactile and puzzling, black screens winking serenely at me in luminescent green. I would love a working TurboGrafx-16 and an Apple IIe; I miss the particular texture of black, wiggly floppies. I have outlived the objects that raised me, and I feel very romantic about their physicality and their frailty and obsolescence.

But really, my ideal setup is pretty close to how it presently is: tiny little keyboard on my knee, and probably some kind of whiskey within reach. Simple stuff.

Nick Bradbury

2013-05-14T00:00:00-07:00

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Nick Bradbury and I’m a software developer. I started my career as a cartoonist, but switched to programming after random chance proved it kept a roof over my head more reliably than cartoons did.

I created HomeSite, TopStyle and FeedDemon for Windows, then switched to Android development a few years ago and created the Android versions of Glassboard and NewsGator Social Sites.

What hardware do you use?

My main development machine is a 27” iMac with a 21” secondary display. When I travel, I bring along a 15” MacBook Pro.

I have a growing collection of Android devices, including the latest Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 (which I love), plus a smattering of older phones running various versions of Android for testing. A while back I bought an incredibly crappy, low-end LG Android 2.2 phone to make sure my software runs well even on slow devices. I also have an iPhone 4S, which I use to keep up with what iOS developers are creating.

My closet is full of the skeletal remains of all the Windows systems I used over the years before switching to the Mac. Somewhere in that mess lies a dusty old TRS-80 Color Computer, which I taught myself BASIC & assembler on when I was a teenager.

And what software?

Far too many programs to mention! The desktop software I rely on the most is Eclipse, Google Chrome, 1Password, Parallels, Dropbox, MacHG, SourceTree, Acorn, Skype, ColorSchemer Studio, Balsamiq Mockups, and Delphi (when I’m running Windows).

On my phone, I use Glassboard an awful lot, not just because I helped create it but also because it’s so useful for private group conversations. I have a board with my co-workers and another with my family that I post to several times a day.

Before I had kids I was an avid gamer with a love for Quake-style games. I dropped that addiction because once I became a dad, something had to go.

What would be your dream setup?

A telepathic version of Google Glass that could read my thoughts and write the software I imagine without me having to do all that tedious coding.

Dave Jones

2013-05-09T00:00:00-07:00

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Dave Jones, and I’m a full time video blogger at the EEVblog. I live in Sydney, Australia, and record my shows in a purpose designed lab (nerd cave!) a few minutes from home.

I make a living making niche Electronics Engineering YouTube videos for other electronics nerds like me. I’ve been doing this video blog for 4 years, and now 2 years full time since the tech company I worked for packed up and moved to China. All of my video is non-scripted off-the-cuff. I don’t know what I will say until I hit record.

I also host a weekly engineering internet podcast radio show called The Amp Hour. My co-host Chris Gammell is based in Cleveland, Ohio.

What hardware do you use?

A Canon HF G10 video camera is my main blogging camera, with a mix of microphone solutions. One of the biggest things I have learned about video blogging is that audio can be more important than video. People will watch crap video quality with good audio, but they won’t want to watch top quality video with crap audio. I have fallen back to using the internal mic in the HF G10 a lot now for close-up, behind the camera commentary. Usually internal mics in cameras are crap, but this Canon has done the audio right - the mics are first class.

An external Rode VideoMic pro shotgun mic (Australian made!) is used for interviews and other field work. And an Audio Technica ATR-3350 lapel mic is used for talking head work in front of the camera. Curiously, the shotgun mic doesn’t work well in my lab/office environment. The aircon noise (peaks at 215Hz, based on the aircon ducting size and length!) in the ceiling from the other offices comes through too loud on the audio track and is distracting. The lapel mic works much better in this situation, even though I’m only 1m from the shotgun mic. The 6m cable on the lapel mic is really handy for moving around the lab while still wired up.

For field work I also have a pair of Audio Technica Pro 88W wireless mics that go into an Azden CAM-3 passive mixer. Two are useful for on-camera interviews. The Canon HF G10 can mix the internal mic with the external, and this comes in handy for field work as well.

Some bloggers will record audio separately with a handheld recorder, but this kills your editing productivity. Great for a Hollywood feature film, useless for regular blogging. You have to sync that audio for every clip, and try doing that for 200 clips in a 1hr video blog and it’ll take you a week to edit one video! So I record all audio in-camera. I also try to get the audio levels right in-camera (using the on-camera VU meter), so I have very little levelling work to do in the editing process.

I shoot at a fixed bit rate of 12Mbps AVCHD in 1440 x 1080 in order to save on file space. The 1920x1080 at 24Mbps my camera is cable of is simply not needed when you are dealing with YouTube and mostly non-fast motion material.

Most video cameras are useless at really close macro shots, so I use an Opteka x10 macro lens for this. Essential for close-up shots of electronics PCBs.

My B-Roll camera is a Canon HF-M400, sometimes useful for cutaway shots. It’s an older model that I had to deliberately get because the latest model used a different battery to my HF G10, and that simply wasn’t acceptable. Nothing worse than having to manage two different sets of batteries and chargers.

My two tripods are both Manfrotto Modo Maxi 785B for compatibility with each other. I found that you can insert the camera stem upside down and turn this into an upside down microscope (with macro lens). Great for vertical close-up shots.

All of my video is shot in-sequence, even if I move the tripod 20 times, and attach and re-attach the macro lens a dozen times. You save a huge amount of time in the video editing process by doing this.

I use a Samson C01U USB mic for computer capture work, and also my radio show. With a pop filter of course. I have the same mic at home and the office so I can desktop record at both locations and have the same sound. I have home-made acoustic absorption panels in my home recording studio to stop reflections.

And what software?

Almost all my editing is done in Sony Movie Studio Pro 12. It’s cheap consumer-level editing software, but I don’t do anything fancy. If you are doing fancy editing, then I think you are probably doing video blogging wrong! My workflow consists of taking the AVCHD files directly from the camera and dragging them onto my editing timeline. I then trim the dead space at the start and end of each video clip, and remove the occasional goofed clip. I might tweak the audio level of the odd clip, and occasionally add some text overlay explanations, but that’s pretty much it for editing. Like I said, about as basic an editing requirement as you can get, and that’s how I like it. And because I go to the trouble of shooting almost everything in sequence if possible, I don’t have to spend hours figuring out which video clip goes in what order, I just drag all the clip to the timeline and the job is done in a few seconds. When some of my videos are over an hour long, with up to 200 clips, that’s a HUGE deal!

I output from Sony Movie Studio in a matching fixed 12Mbps Sony AVC MP4 format that matches the input clip bitrate. Movie Studio (and most other editing software) is useless at outputting video in formats suitable for upload to YouTube, unless you have infinite upload Internet speed! They all lack a feature called Constant Quality, which changes the bitrate on a frame by frame basis based on the content in the frame. So fast-moving images take more space (less compression), and still images (like my talking head) take less space (more compression). Instead, they only offer fixed, and average/peak rates. So you usually end up with either a massively overkill output file size, or too heavy a compression that ruins moving image material.

So I render at a high bit rate in Sony and then use Handbrake to convert this large output file into a Constant Quality H.264 MP4 file suitable for YouTube. I use a CQ setting of 22 for a 1920x1080 master I upload to YouTube. The Handbrake file is the same quality, but much smaller in file size - and that matters when you are uploading HD content to YouTube on a daily basis. I also use Handbrake to produce a smaller 640x360 H.264 iTunes-compatible file (CQ=26) for a podcast version of my show (some people like to watch on their phones, etc.) I have some custom scripts to ensure that the same settings are used each time, and I can simply drag my file onto a desktop icon and it does the rest.

I occasionally use Corel VideoStudio for footage I need to speed up and/or do some fancy effect with that I can’t do in Sony.

For computer tutorials I screen capture using Camtasia. It’s got a file compatibility issues with Sony, but otherwise works great. I ensure that I screen capture at precisely 1280x720 (16:9 aspect) so that there is no scaling required in the video editing software. That produces nice and sharp screen text when viewing the final video. This is a big mistake that screen capture noobs make. I’ve also found that full HD 1920x1080 screen capture is just too much - the text ends up being too small to view in standard definition 640x360 playback on YouTube. 1280x720 is the sweet spot.

For the podcast radio show we use Audacity, a free open source audio program. We used to use Skype for real-time chatting during the show, but the quality just wasn’t there. We now use Mumble instead and the sound quality is a huge improvement over Skype or Google Talk. We rent a small server for this for a few bucks a month, and it allows guests to join the show and we can record their audio directly from Mumble in great quality. This frees the host from having to know how to record locally. We record our own audio locally using Audacity, and just use Mumble as the communications medium. Each recording is put through The Levelator, which automagically fixes all our audio issues. This is done before the two or three audio clips are merged in Audacity.

What would be your dream setup?

A tribe of intelligent thought-reading monkeys to do everything for me!

People keep telling me to “step up” to DSLR for video, but the simple fact is that whilst they are great if you are shooting a documentary and have all the time in the world to shoot and edit it, DSLRs are simply not as convenient as a proper video camera for the video blogging work I do. The lack of good audio features, articulating screens, good auto focus while zooming, form factor, recording time limitations, and a host of other small things that you take for granted on even the cheapest video camera all add up to just annoyance. But most of my dream setup doesn’t exist, regardless of price it seems, so this is just what I’d wish was available to tweak my setup and workflow.

I would love my video camera to have a tally light, and a really easy way to replay (and maybe delete) each clip. Most video cameras are so annoying at this, you end up not bothering to check anything until you go to edit it.

I would kill for video editing software that automagically trims the dead space of the start and end of each clip I drop into the timeline. That would save me 80% of my video editing work. It’s technically possible (detect no audio and cut it out), it’s just that no one seems to do it.

Purpose designed dolly camera rail on my bench, with an articulating arm so I can shoot footage from above the bench so the tripod doesn’t get in the way. I have parts for this, I just need to build it…

Diffused lights that just float in mid air, and you can easily position them anywhere you want. Nothing more annoying than a reflection off your ceiling lights off the thing you are shooting.

Internet upload speed as fast as my download speed. I have the fastest cable home Internet in this country (100Mbps download, 3Mbps upload), and the upload speed is just ridiculously slow for HD video upload. Internet companies offer no options for content producers like me, they just assume that everyone wants to download everything. “Upload, why do you need that Sir?”

A super fast quadzillion-core PC that renders video super quick. My current rate is about real time, so a 1hr video takes an hour to render + Handbrake conversion + upload.

A video editor that auto-levelled each clip’s audio seamlessly without any effort.

Infinite bandwidth between my office PC and home PC. At the moment my only option for HD video files is SneakerNet.

A software tool that allows me to easily respond to YouTube comments in a logical and quick manner. The YouTube comment system is nothing short of retarded.

An acoustically quiet and damped lab to work (and shout!) in. Preferably a huge separate garage out the back of my house.

Ann Friedman

2013-05-07T00:00:00-07:00

Who are you, and what do you do?

I am a journalist. I used to be a magazine editor, and now I write about women and politics and culture for New York magazine and about media for the Columbia Journalism Review - and lots of other things for lots of other magazines and websites. I draw pie charts for The Hairpin and speak at conferences and tell stories using GIFs. Last year, I co-founded a magazine called Tomorrow.

What hardware do you use?

I am deeply dependent on my two-year-old MacBook Pro. Also my iPhone. Every morning, before I even put on my glasses, I check email and Twitter on my phone. Given that I have to hold it about an inch from my nose, this is probably wrecking my already abysmal eyesight. Anyway, to round out the Mac stack, I also have an iPad that, letsbereal, I mostly use to read Instapaper and the occasional e-book. To further the young-urban-creative stereotype, I use two Moleskines: one (side-bound) as more of a personal journal, holding everything from little drawings to lists to long-winded prose, and one (top-bound) for my pie charts. Though really, I make pie charts on just about anything. Backs of envelopes, cocktail napkins, receipts. I’m not particular about the pens I use. I do not draw the circles with a compass, I trace a round cardboard coaster. (Classy!)

The James Bond-iest piece of hardware I own is my Echo Smartpen, which prevents me from having to juggle a notebook, recording device, and a pen when I’m doing interviews. It syncs the audio with my handwritten notes, so rather than transcribe a full three hours of interviews, I can just tap the section of notes that’s relevant and hear the playback from there. It is also an excellent conversation piece. When I used to work in an office I’d wear these bright red UrbanEars headphones to signal to coworkers, Hey, I’m actually working. Do not drop by and ask if I’ve seen that video of a baby giraffe trying to walk. Now that I am a freelancer, I apply this tactic to working in coffee shops. Sometimes I don’t even listen to music, I just wear the headphones so I feel focused.

Do dead-tree magazines and books count as hardware? I read those, too. Lots of them.

And what software?

Gmail is my everything, my life archive. I have a complex priority inbox + starring system to make sure I reply to everything without going crazy. Also crucial: Chrome. And Google Calendar. And Google Docs, which I use to pass drafts back and forth with the editors of my two weekly columns (at New York magazine and the Columbia Journalism Review). I love both Twitter and Tumblr, which are essential to how I find news and ideas, keep in touch with both friends and colleagues, and promote my work. Evernote, synced across my devices, is where I keep a sprawling list of column ideas and random thoughts to follow up on. It also helps me clip and organize links and documents when I’m doing a big reporting project.

I send my weekly newsletter with the help of TinyLetter. I use Expensify to keep track of receipts when I’m on a reporting assignment, Pinboard to bookmark and tag all of the great GIFs I find, and Skype for the occasional interview. Throughout the day, every time I run across something that’s longer than 500 words that I don’t need to read immediately, I’ll bookmark it on Instapaper. (I mess around with Flipboard and Pocket and the Longform app, too, but my archive is in Instapaper, and that’s just what I’ve stuck with.) Then I’ll read the internet - my curated version of it - later that night. I use Spotify to send music to friends and make themed playlists (“editing vibes,” “Up To No Good,” “stonezone”). When I am feeling rich, I let myself log in to Svpply. I love Instagram and Snapchat. I am trying to love Vine but I am very bad at it. Does the emoji keyboard count as software?

Now’s the part where I scream and cry and gnash my teeth about the demise of Google Reader. (RIP!!!!) When it had the sharing and commenting functionality, it was an incredibly important social network for me. And even after they removed those features and failed to push me to use Google Plus, I continued to use Reader as a way of selectively searching only certain sites that are relevant to me. As an example, when I decided to write a column on Martha Stewart, I first searched the sites and blogs that I follow in Reader to see whether any of them had written about her lately. Google News does not allow me to do this. Nor does Twitter or Tumblr. I’m still trying to figure out where I’ll migrate all of my RSS feeds - maybe The Old Reader? Feedly? I’m taking suggestions.

What would be your dream setup?

Right now I use my mantle as a standing desk. So, maybe a real standing desk with an external monitor? And the old, social Google Reader. I really, really want that back.

Floor Drees

2013-05-02T00:00:00-07:00

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Floor Drees, I’m a Dutchie living and working in Vienna, Austria. I studied Graphic Design in Rotterdam, worked as a Community Manager for about 5 years and now fiddle around with CSS and Rails after I realized in August last year that I miss making ‘stuff’.

I’ve organized a Rails Girls event in Rotterdam in January and have another one planned for September this year in The Hague. I’m the co-organizer of the Ruby developer and WordPress user group meetups in Vienna and I’m setting up a Python workshop for aspiring girl coders.

What hardware do you use?

I own a MacBook Air, an iPhone 4 (with a Dutch plan) and a Galaxy Camera running Android 4.1 (yup, Jellybean!). The latter is my gadget of choice lately. It’s an incredible tool that allows me to share good quality pictures and thoughts from the tech events I (co-)organize with the Interwebs. The flat I share with my boyfriend sports a Raspberry Pi farm and all kinds of blinking Arduino stuff.

And what software?

I use most programs that come with Adobe Creative Suite, a remainder of my years at the art academy. You’ll find Illustrator and/or Photoshop open on my computer almost every day. Still learning, I read a lot of documentation on my laptop as well. Textmate is my favorite text-editor for coding stuff and I use iTerm. Spotify is practically always on, as is the GitHub for Mac application.

Being abroad I like to keep in touch with the mother ship in the Netherlands, and with my Vienna friends whenever I visit Rotterdam or some other city in Europe. I like Europe.

What would be your dream setup?

Tablets aren’t really my thing as I need a keyboard, but I don’t want to carry a heavy laptop around all the time, hence the Macbook Air. I’d love to have a big, fat (or rather: slim) iMac though, that syncs neatly with my laptop, for my home office. And/or a ThinkPad, to make me less prone to hackers at the conferences I attend. At the CCC last year, the hackedy-hackers couldn’t get enough of hacking my iPhone. That’s funny and all, until you try to have a serious conversation with your mum that you haven’t seen for months.

But the real dream setup would be a neat space somewhere in Vienna, with 20 something laptops, decent WiFi, desks, a coffee machine and a beamer so that I can start my own little coding school. Teaching girls the workings of whatever programming language in the evenings and helping kids out during the day. And don’t forget about the pensionados. I’d love to organize workshops to help them get their online banking done safely and teach them the workings of Skype so they can stay in touch with relatives.

Joanne McNeil

2013-04-30T00:00:00-07:00

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Joanne McNeil. I’m a writer and editor. You can read some of my essays here: joannemcneil.com. I also just started a blog called Internet of Dreams.

What hardware do you use?

I’m writing this on my trusty unibody Macbook, which I got early in 2009 before they were all MBPs. It has survived about 900 battery cycles, so soon I’m going to need to decide whether to replace the battery or get an Air instead. It is typically carried in a custom satchel from Aixa Sobin, who sells amazing bags and cases outside Balthazar in New York.

I’m hardly ever without my Keyboard Kindle. I use it to check email abroad (always gets a laugh when I pull it out at a bar for this purpose. When you are typing on the keyboard it seems like a total 80s calculator-punk device, like if a smartphone had a rotary dial on it.)

Phone is an iPhone 4, which I got six weeks before the 4S hit stores because my 3GS shattered beyond repair (more on that here.) I’d like to live more dangerously and carry it case-less, but I am clumsy and also the case is now my secret hiding place for various paper treasures like ticket stubs, a nine year old bartender’s business card, and an Amelia Earhart puzzle crackerjack prize.

I also read physical objects and nothing makes me quite as happy as marking the cover of a new Moleskine notebook with silver sharpie.

And what software?

TextEdit for first drafts and to do lists. I’m working on a book at the moment and Scrivener is really as magnificent as everyone says. I wish I’d downloaded this years ago. I thought formatting the proposal would be an endless hassle, but instead I had something ready to submit immediately.

Calibre for turning epubs and pdfs into mobi files. Google Earth for “sightseeing.” I still have MarsEdit on my dock though I haven’t had a personal blog in a while. I edit Nostalgia for the Net podcasts with Audacity. YoruFukurou for Twitter. Browser is Chrome (the OneTab extension is wonderful.) Also Skitch, VLC, Dropbox, and Spotify, of course. I’m probably forgetting some other things, but really my day-to-day is usually typing & surfing.

What would be your dream setup?

I’d like it if my bedroom walls were touch screens with Google Sky rotating slowly at random at night. Touch screen tiles in my shower to check the weather. Touch screen barrettes in my hair. A touch screen kitchen table for browsing Tumblr with my morning coffee (the coffee cup is also a touch screen, and I’m using it to Skype with my friend in Japan…)

Honestly, I would like a treadputer. I get all my good ideas when I go for a walk. But I travel around so much that any kind of desk setup is too much commitment. A Roomba would also be nice, although I don’t have an apartment where a Roomba would make sense.

Evernote, DEVONthink, and the like have never worked for me, but I would love a visually interesting program to hold all my Pinboard saves, all the notes I email myself, and everything I bookmark on Google Reader (or whatever I end up choosing to as a replacement.) If it had stats on things like keyword frequency, even better.

Cameron Walters

2013-04-25T00:00:00-07:00

Who are you, and what do you do?

People call me Cameron, last name Walters. My initials are the genesis of my online identity in many places: cee-dub. Of course, different services have different username requirements, so I end up using @ceedub a lot, too.

By trade I’m a software engineer. Since 2005 or so, anyway. In that time I’ve been on the founding teams of Get Satisfaction and Square, and started my own small company, nb.io (best known for Domainr) with two good friends. I’m currently spending my work hours with a small crew of very smart people building a next-generation cloud platform at Apcera.

What hardware do you use?

I’m typing this on a 13” Retina Macbook Pro. I like to keep it pretty basic, as long as I have enough RAM. I hook it up to a 27” Thunderbolt display at the office to get code and a browser side by side. Pair this with an Apple extended keyboard and a Magic Trackpad on the desk and I’m set. If I work from home I just use it on my lap, which works out well because I love the crispness of the Retina display. I’m using this stuff to develop software that should be able to run on anything from your laptop to a huge compute cluster or a public cloud like EC2.

My home computer is a 1.5 year-old 13” Macbook Air, it’s where I sync my iPhone and put my photos. Media at home runs on a pretty old Mac Mini and a 1080p Apple TV going to a 46” Samsung TV. I probably only watch 2-3 hours of programming a week.

My iPhone 4S is in my pocket so much that my jeans always have a rectangular mark from the corners. I also use an original iPad in the kitchen sometimes for recipes and such.

And what software?

I write code in Go using Sublime Text, run my programs and tests via iTerm 2 plus the lovely oh-my-zsh, keep code in Git repos and do almost everything else in Google Chrome (using multiple profiles to help keep multiple Google accounts separated). I’m writing this in iAWriter which is wonderful for removing distractions. I get most of my music through Rdio, both on a laptop and through their iOS app. My other music comes from RapGenius articles like this (hello, drama!).

What would be your dream setup?

Oh man, a way to keep my photos somewhere that doesn’t suck (sorry, my external hard drive and Flickr aren’t really good enough) so that I can go back and look at the best of them without having to do so much work to upload, edit, tag, blah blah blah.

I’d also enjoy a laptop as light as the 13” Air but with a Retina display. And can I get more RAM, please? VMs use a lot.

Jonny Wilson

2013-04-23T00:00:00-07:00

Who are you, and what do you do?

Jonny Wilson, aka Eclectic Method. I call myself a video DJ producer remixer.

What hardware do you use?

In the studio I work almost entirely on a PC. I have a reasonable 6 core machine for the studio, and on the move I have a suped-up Alienware that can handle 1080HD video and effects. Then I just have a pile of hard drives and a few crates of hard drives in the cupboard that will never see the light of day, but I can’t bare to part with them.

When I play live I use a Macbook Pro, a Serato SL4 with 4 channels so I can have 2 audio + 2 audio/video channels, a Pioneer DJM-800 mixer because it has MIDI out so I can control video cross-fading and effects with the dials on the mixer, and CDJs (almost always 1000s).

And what software?

I edit almost everything with Sony Vegas. It has the ability to edit music in beats and bars instead of frames and seconds, which is just vital to feeling musical about video or looping stuff as you work on it like you would in an audio editing program.

I use After Effects to do small effects - mostly cutting stuff out and then editing it in Vegas using an alpha channel. Recently I have started using VDMX to do effects (mostly stuff made by Vade), I just haven’t found any easier way to do stuff like convincing datamoshing and simulated breaking graphics cards on a PC. I plug an MPC into VDMX and just jam about with dials and record it using Syphon. Then I bring the edits back to Vegas and choose the best bits.

When I left school I worked a bit with Brian Eno, and one of the most useful things he taught me was just to record everything and cut the best ideas later. Sometimes I will sit down and already hear in my head what I want, but a lot of it is picking the best moments from messing around. I use Ableton to make music with synths like Massive and Trilian and a lot of effects like Guitar Rig and Waves plugins. Ableton has a great way of compiling multiple channels of audio, it sounds the greatest to me and doesn’t start clipping as you pile on more and more. Sometimes I use a very simple MIDI keyboard and MPC to work out melodies and beats.

What would be your dream setup?

At the moment I am working on two shows that are going completely different directions. One is using Algoriddim’s Vjay app to DJ video on an iPad, so I can show up at a house party with the smallest setup available and jam 1080 HD video.

The other setup I am working on is multiple Macbook Pros running VDMX and Ableton to run multiple video screens but with different images on each that interact and can be “jammed” live. I hope from there to add stuff like holograms and portals to other dimensions once they are invented. The odd robot wouldn’t go amiss, and I’d love to waste some money on fogscreens. I’d like ED-209 to walk out halfway through a show and inform everyone they have “20 seconds to comply”.

Adrian Bowyer

2013-04-18T00:00:00-07:00

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Adrian Bowyer, and I invented RepRap - humanity’s first practical and useful self-replicating machine. RepRap is entirely open-source and free.

I used to be an academic at the University of Bath in the UK, where I spent time pretending to be a mathematician, a computer scientist, a chemical engineer and a biologist rather than being what I really was, which was a mechanical engineer in the Engineering Department.

I spent most of my time researching computational geometry, both for its own sake, and for application in engineering CAD systems. I am one of the authors of the Bowyer-Watson algorithm for Voronoi diagrams, I have devised a new class of fractals, and have written a number of papers on the use of implicit geometry in CAD systems.

What hardware do you use?

I have 12 RepRap 3D printers at the current count.

I also have a workshop with a lathe, a 3-axis mill, an arc welder, soft-tooling for casting, surface-mount soldering, electronics test equipment, microscopes, glass-blowing equipment, and a chemistry/biochemistry laboratory.

I intend shortly to get a small CNC mill and a laser-cutter.

I have a house and a laboratory full of PCs of various ages and states of decrepitude. But day-to-day I use a Zoostorm Desktop PC, with an Intel Pentium DC G860 3GHz, 8GB of RAM, and 1TB HDD with two 1920 x 1080 displays.

And what software?

All the computers I have run Ubuntu Linux, currently version 12.04.

Running along the launch bar: I use the Eclipse Java development environment, Firefox, Thunderbird e-mail with OpenPGP, Arduino Version, the OpenSCAD 3D CAD system, the Gimp image editor, Skype, LibreCAD 2D CAD, Pronterface 3D printer driver, Eagle and KiCAD electronics design software, RepRapPro’s version of the Java RepRapo host software, Inkscape, and Gedit

All that software is free, and (except for Eagle and Skype) it is all open-source.

I spend most of my time doing mechanical and electronic design for RepRap and writing software for it. The above list pretty much give the toolkit I use for that purpose.

What would be your dream setup?

All the above running 30-times faster in a much bigger set of rooms :-)

John Battaglia

2013-04-16T00:00:00-07:00

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is John Battaglia and I roast coffee.

What hardware do you use?

I roast on a Probat UG22. The “22” indicates its capacity in kilos. It’s a vintage, restored German-manufactured coffee roaster, frequently sought after for its cast iron construction. There is a nearly ideal ratio of convective to conductive heating that can exist when working with a cast iron roaster. Another advantage is the slightly forgiving and consistently predictable rate at which heat is transferred from the outside to the inside of the drum. When filled with coffee and heated from below with atmospheric burners, this horizontally-positioned drum roaster rotates at rates typically ranging between 45-60rpm. Our UG22 is tricked out with separate controls for airflow, drum speed, and cooling air. These independent controls can open up a new and exciting world of variables and manipulation, when executed properly.

I also use a ColorTrack, which is a roast color analyzer. It shoots lasers at a coffee sample at a rate of 10,000/second and produces a numeric representation of the degree of roast. Lasers!

And what software?

The software I use is called Cropster, which is data-logging/inventory management software that basically uses a graph to represent the progress of each batch with time and temperature on adjacent axes as well as degrees-per-minute. The resulting curve is a very basic, but extremely useful visual representation of a roast. This roast curve, in tandem with degrees/minute, can help visualize factors which greatly affect coffee that are not as easily determined when using a more traditional approach.

A roast curve is logged for each batch, along with other information relevant to that particular batch, and is later referenced as one of several data points we utilize to more accurately correlate what we’re doing in the roaster to what we’re tasting in the cup.

What would be your dream setup?

My dream setup would be what I’m currently working on, but outdoors with fresh air.