Uses This

1288 interviews since 2009

A picture of Rob Malda

Rob Malda

Founder, Slashdot

in developer, mac

Who are you, and what do you do?

Rob. Slashdot. Brief Enough?

What hardware do you use?

I'm currently using a 17" 2.3 ghz Core i7 MacBook Pro laptop for pretty much all of my computational needs.

I have a Drobo plugged into an ancient Macbook in my basement with 2 TB on it. I also put a lot of miles on my iPhone 4, my PS3, my XBox 360, a Xoom, a Samsung S1, and my glorious Canon 5D Mark II. At my office I have a big 'ole Apple screen that I plug into. Sadly I'm using a 10-15 year old Microsoft mouse. Works great. I like it. But it looks pretty tacky next to an Apple keyboard and screen.

I also have a PodPro on my desk and a red Gibson SG on the wall, but I usually wear headphones because I am a conscientious person, and I fear that people on the other sides of my office walls have firearms if I cycled through all 3 power chords a couple times per day.

And what software?

Truthfully almost everything I do lives inside of Chrome. Webapps for mail, news, spreadsheets, doc writing, bug tracking, reporting, and the entire Slashdot administrative UI. etc. My work is all in a web page.

I create Fluid installs for each of my major web applications (Mail, Google Reader, Slashdot, Google Docs, we use Jira for bug tracking internally, etc). I've used a number of different chat clients - I find myself increasingly using the built-in chat and Facebook chats. The only thing that taxes this beast of a machine is the occasional video game, but besides playing the Warcraft auction house, I don't have much time for games these days. I use Aperture for organizing my photo library. I have an Apple TV that basically is used by my kids to watch Cars or Toy Story 3 whenever Mommy and Daddy need 30 seconds to boil water. Sometimes I rip a DVD. This thing transcodes videos at 3-4x the actual frame rates, although it sure does get the fans spinning up. I wouldn't recommend leaving it directly on your lap.

What would be your dream setup?

I'd really like another monitor and a VESA mount so I could suspend a second screen without eating up my desk space. Then I could keep stuff that I casually monitor throughout the day visible, but without losing screen real-estate for the core of my day, which is generally spent writing documents, emails, and of course reading stories.

I also want a Marshall Stack and a 12 string Rickenbacker but noise restrictions apply. I wouldn't mind a really big telephoto lens like a Canon EF 600mm f/4.0 IS II or a Canon EF 400mm f/2.8 IS II. Then I could take pictures of nature and children without having to run around after them. I'm more of a hard core "sitting down" kind of person. I could also use more TBs in the RAID array: The 2TB that I have now is enough for now, but in 2011, it seems like 10TB is actually fairly inexpensive these days.