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A picture of Gabriel Weinberg

Gabriel Weinberg

Web developer, founder of DuckDuckGo

in developer, windows

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Gabriel Weinberg (usually yegg online). I founded DuckDuckGo.

What hardware do you use?

My main setup is a HP Pavilion Elite HPE-180t PC, which is a glorified name for a quad-core desktop with 16GB RAM. Attached to it are three 28" Hanns G monitors, two vertical (on the ends) and the middle one horizontal. I also have one of these D-Link USB hubs and way too many associated devices sitting around. But mostly for devices I use a very old Plantronics headset and a Logitech Orbit webcam (for Skype).

When not in my basement, I'm using my laptop, which is a HP Envy 13T-1000. Hmm... probably not going to be buying any more HP machines :). The important specs of the laptop are its 3GB RAM, solid state HD, core duo processor and major extended battery that overlays the entire bottom of the laptop.

For phone, I have a Android T-mobile G2, though its slowness is getting on my nerves lately. At least they finally upgraded the firmware to Gingerbread the other day though -- about time!

On the go I use a 3G-enabled iPad 2 with the new Zagg keyboard folio so I can easily fix server problems.

I also recently bought a new DSLR camera -- Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2 to be specific -- though I still haven't wrapped my head around all of its features.

And what software?

I'm in PuTTY all the time. I like to develop remotely. On the server, I'm usually in emacs and messing around with git and nginx. My dev machine is actually my desktop and I use VMware Server to manage it. My main desktop OS is Windows 7, the dev server is running FreeBSD and I also use Ubuntu.

I do a lot of Skype. For company communication, we've also been using Yammer, HipChat and join.me. Oh yeah and GitHub and Trac for code collaboration stuff. I also use TweetDeck and Pidgin to manage Twitter and IRC, respectively.

I use all the Web browsers a lot since I'm constantly chasing browser bugs, and don't currently really like any of them though I lean towards Chrome (but currently am annoyed at it because it keeps crashing on me).

For personal stuff, I use Picasa for photos, Sonos for music (with Pandora and trying Spotify right now).

For business stuff, I use QuickBooks and Photoshop Elements mostly, and occasionally Illustrator.

I actually don't regularly use a lot of iOS or Android apps. Mainly just Twitter stuff, the official one on iOS and Twidroid on Android. Oh yeah and all the DuckDuckGo apps :). I of course have a bunch for managing servers like connectbot and Decaf. And then a ton of kids stuff for our 2.5yo (and soon for our 4mo old).

What would be your dream setup?

I'd actually like more monitors :). Three is not enough but three was enough of a PITA to set up correctly that I haven't bothered going the extra mile for more. I like to use some of the screen real estate for long running things I can just glance at, and I've already used up all my screen real estate twice over.

I need better music as well. I'm tired of Pandora -- hopeful for Spotify, but I really like the radio aspect of Pandora.