Uses

I get no emails about what I use, but I love bikeshedding about tools. Here’s what I’m currently using.

Code

  • Claude Code is how I write most of my code these days both at work and at home.
  • Visual Studio Code is still my editor. A younger me would be horrified that I was both using and enjoying a Microsoft product.
  • I mostly use Wes Bos’s Cobalt2 themes everywhere.
  • I use SF Mono for my editor font everywhere.
  • I use Ghostty for my terminal.

Productivity

  • Obsidian is where almost all of my projects and notes go. I use a combination of Obsidian Tasks, Journals, and Bases to keep my various projects at the front of my mind.
  • Apple Notes is used for shared notes with my wife (including a squirrel list).
  • Apple Reminders and Calendar are how I keep track of what to do and when to do it.
  • InstaRemind lets me create reminders with a keyboard shortcut in macOS.
  • Raycast is my quick launcher. I still have Alfred installed for one single reason: Universal Actions. One keyboard shortcut to then move, copy, email, etc files from anywhere in the file system is hard to beat and Raycast has no answer to it yet.
  • Timeblock planning is how I plan my work days

Reading and Highlights

  • Raindrop.io is my bookmarking app of choice. Long ago I used Delicious, then moved to Pinboard, and then to Raindrop. It's nicer looking than Pinboard and has an official client. I got tired of waiting for the third-party Pinboard clients to care again.
  • Readwise aggregates highlights from a bunch of places (namely Kindle and Instapaper) and sends me a number of highlights to review every day. I can also create flashcards with the goal of retaining what I read.
  • Readwise Reader is where I save articles to read later.
  • Reeder is my RSS reader of choice. It beats scrolling through Twitter or Facebook.
  • Feedbin is my RSS service of choice for a number of reasons

Travel

  • Flighty tracks my flights and keeps me aware of delays and cancellations far before the airlines tell you. This has helped me get on the phone to reschedule flights before there's a huge wait.
  • Tripsy helps me and my wife setup trip plans and save relevant documents and reservations.

Other Apps

This is a mish-mash of web applications and iOS applications as the lines blur.

  • 1Password is where I store my 1000+ passwords and it keeps me sane.
  • Carrot Weather is a great, customizable way to check in on the weather.
  • GitHub should be obvious to anyone who writes code. I can remember signing up for their paid subscription a long, long time ago because I wanted to do my little part to keep them around. They're owned by Microsoft now, so I suspect they don't need my help, but they offer so much for so little. Almost all my public repositories with automated testing or linting use GitHub Actions for free.
  • Kubera is how I keep up-to-date with all my finances in one place: cash accounts, credit accounts, loans, investments. It's all there.
  • Opener lets me open links in various iOS applications without jumping around.
  • Overcast is my podcast app of choice.
  • Paprika is where I keep our ~1500 recipes, our meal plan for this week, and our grocery list.
  • Parcel is how I track my packages, though I miss Deliveries.
  • Working Copy is for when I need to edit something in a repository when I'm not at a computer.
  • YNAB helps my wife and I keep our budget in alignment with our goals.

Tracking

I started off tracking what I read through Goodreads and enjoy having that record, I've since expanded it to other media:

Content Blockers

The internet is a terrible place full of ads, cookie notifications, and other detritus. I try to remove as much of that as possible.

Home Automation

I'm firmly in the HomeKit camp at this point.

The repositories

You can see the rest of what I'm using in my dotfiles repository. It's probably most interesting to look at the Brewfile.

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