Who are you, and what do you do?
I'm Kathy Reid, I'm currently finishing a PhD at ANU's School of Cybernetics, where I've investigated voice dataset documentation - like metadata and datasheets, from various angles, as a way to help create speech technology that works better for more people. I do a lot of reading and annotation of PDF files - most academic papers, and do a lot of writing in platforms like Overleaf - and I also use VSCode for writing. I do a lot of my analysis work in platforms like Jupyter Notebooks and Observable.
In my spare time, I tinker a bit with technologies like wearable computing - so Lilypad and Arduino pieces, and yes, I have a Flipper Zero, although I haven't had time to explore it in any great detail.
What hardware do you use?
Over the years, I've covered by hardware and software setups in my "State of my Toolchain" posts, but in summary my main laptop is an ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 with 32GB RAM and an RTX 3080 GPU. It cost nearly $4k, so it's worth more than my 20-year old Mazda, but as I justified it to myself - I run a few errands a week in the car, but I use my laptop for 12-14 hours a day, so I see it as an investment. It's the second ROG Zephyrus - my last laptop was a Zephyrus as well but it died after about two and a half years with a motherboard failure. To be fair, I'd worked it pretty hard in that time. I'm just frustrated there isn't a way to get some sort of return or recompense from recycling computers - I can give it away as e-waste, but I reckon some of the components, if stripped, could have resale value.
One idea I have for the Dead Laptops I have lying around is to strip them back to their parts and record a video, then say mount the parts as a display, like sport-ball people do with sport-ball memorabilia.
I have a 10-year old Acer 32" monitor - 1920 x 1080 - and it still works fine. When it goes - although it's showing no signs of failure - I'll probably replace it with something a bit larger because with my eyesight I use very large font sizes - about 140-150% of standard on most websites. My second monitor is mounted vertically, although I have to use some special arandr foo on Linux to get it working.
I've just purchased an Onyx BOOX Tab X - I heard good things from two close colleagues - Sae Ra Germaine, who heads up VALA and is the Deputy CEO of CAVAL, and my doctoral advisor, Professor Alex Zafiroglu - about the Remarkable tablet - and they have similar workflows and task profiles to the type of work I do - reviewing and reading a lot of documents, sketching and note-taking and so on.
But when I looked at the Remarkable I felt that the ecosystem was very closed, and didn't integrate well with my existing cloud choices. I primarily use Dropbox for storage - although for university I have to use OneDrive. A tablet that was Android based seemed to be a better option, and the Tab X uses stock, vanilla Android - AOSP? - and it's been an excellent choice. The Neo PDF software on the Boox Tab X lets me annotate PDFs with ease, and because I have poor distance vision, the 13" size lets me read full size A4 PDFs easily. The one gripe I have with the Neo Reader software is that I can't find an option to add a PDF page - a blank page - to a PDF document, to let me add more thoughts or writing. So far, it's been a great purchase. It's an e-ink tablet, and I find it has excellent battery life - and being black and white it doesn't seem to "scream" at me as much as a colour tablet. It has Bluetooth so I can type on it with a keyboard and use a mouse too - so if it's warm outside I will sit outside in the sun and write on it.
I have a Mobvoi TicWatch Pro - I bought my first one in 2018 and it lasted until last year, then I bought the equivalent model last year, primarily so I could re-use the spare chargers I have. It really irks me that when I change hardware, I have to change charging accessories - I'm glad that the industry has pretty much standardised around USB-C, that that isn't the case for e.g. smart watches yet. I love the convenience of the smart watch, it reduces how much I check my phone, and it records my heart rate, which I plug into Cardiogram.
I do a lot of work with audio files in speech recognition, so good headphones are a must. In 2016? ish I bought my first Plantronics BB Pro 2 headphones, and got another pair on sale half price a couple years later. They're great. My first pair has next to no battery life now, but still work if plugged in via USB, and the ear padding on the second pair is shot, but they're been great. I scored a great deal a couple years ago on a Sennheiser MOMENTUM 3 over ear wireless headphone set and the audio out of that is great.
I have a Keychron K8 keyboard with blue switches. It's heavy, clunky and absolute joy to use. The size fits my man-sized hands, and because I learned to type on a legit actual mechanical typewriter (yes I am an Elder Nerd), I can punch away without shattering anything. I have some custom jelly caps that pair nicely with the RGB lights. Would definitely Keychron again, it's lovely. I used to have a Model 01, but I couldn't get the hang of it. I have a Logitech mechanical keyboard for use with the Boox. My go to mouse is the Logitech M720, I love how you can pair it with the Nano receiver, or Bluetooth.
And what software?
Software wise, I use Ubuntu Linux 99% of the time. I'm on 22.04 LTS and it's really solid. I like Wayland over X - it's still glitchy in places, but it's a really great user experience. I have some heavily customised .bash_login scripts and a customised shell with Gogh for all my terminal stuff. My IDE is VSCode - begrudgingly, because I loved Atom, but I've been pleasantly surprised.
I use Firefox as my browser, with a whole heap of adblock stuff like uBlock, and I run a PiHole on my network as well. I don't know how people can use the internet these days without ad-blocking software, many sites are virtually unusable. I have opinions™ on Mozilla's foray into advertising ;-)
I'm on Thunderbird mostly for mail. I really like the recent releases, and to be honest I'm surprised it's still around. I've been using it for 15 years.
For the Microsoft suite on Linux, I use the Office365WebDesktop for Linux by Rafael Angulo Ealo - it's almost equivalent functionality. Just brilliant (huge thanks, Rafael!).
What would be your dream setup?
I'm actually very happy with the setup I have now, and I'm aware of how much privilege I have with the hardware I have, so I think it would be ostentatious or bougie for me to fantasise about having "more" or "better" things for my setup.
What I'd like to see is hardware that lasts longer, that isn't obsolete as quickly. For example, look how quickly USB-B went obsolete with the introduction of USB-C. I want a laptop to last 5-10 years instead of say 3 or 4 - I mean, I'm not even getting 3 or 4 years out of top line hardware right now. I want hardware that is more upgradeable - so it will be interesting to see how the PinePhone and the Framework laptop will play out - I think a lot of the problem here is about ecosystems - a lot of our choices about hardware and software are driven by the ecosystems they operate in - what they work well with and what they don't. I know that drove my choice of the Onyx Boox - away from the Remarkable - and it's driven my choice of laptop hardware in terms of what works well with Linux.
I want hardware that doesn't consume as much energy, particularly in Victoria where we're still burning fossil fuels to generate electricity (IKR?). This goes double for GPUs and the increasing rush on GPU hardware as everything is now sprinkled with "AI".