nikhil.io

Hardware

M2 MacBook Air. My daily driver and the best personal computer I’ve ever used. I use this machine heavily and it simply doesn’t break a sweat1 and does my bidding with an almost frightening Golem-like efficiency. It is thin, light, fast, cool, quiet, and the battery lasts an eternity. The trackpad is still too big but, importantly, the keyboard is no longer subject to the quixotic whim of a person who may have surrounded himself with yes-men for a short, stubborn while. Rosetta just works. Superb stuff.

An ARM MacBook is the best laptop you can buy right now, hardware and software, and Apple is so far ahead here I imagine I won’t have to edit this sentence for a while.

42" LG OLED TV at 2440p@60Hz as my only external display. The colors on this thing are 🤌 They weren’t kidding about the contrast ratio. Software continues to enshittify hardware so don’t connect it to the internet and all shall be well.

Logitech C925E 1080p ‘enterprise’ webcam with an easily discernible shutter/lens shade. I’ve had this since 2019 and have have no problems with it since.

iPhone 13 Mini. The computer I use the most, and I contend that it’s the most perfectly-sized smartphone. Reminds me of the iPhone 5 which I thought was perfection. Doesn’t look like Apple’s going to make more Minis for a while so I baby mine around and hope to use it for many, many years.

AirPods Pro 2. I have tinnitus and progressive hearing loss and mostly use these with the noise cancellation turned on. They last many hours and the ‘handoff’ across devices is just magical. Not an audiophile but the music sounds amazing to my pleb ears2.

Vortex Race3 with Cherry Browns as my keyboard and a Kensington Wireless Trackball as my mouse. I’ve used a trackball since 2003 and won’t go back. I will get used to a split keyboard one day at which point I hope to justify the purchase of something like this. My wife is much faster at typing and loves her Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard. She resisted my efforts at trackball adoption but appears to love her standy-mouse thing. Whatever. Love your wrists, yo.

Herman Miller Aeron with an Autonomous sit-to-stand desk and a Nordik Mat. The setup was not cheap but I’ve had this for ~10 years and have no complaints. I set the desk on some cheap wheels and, via a Belkin Thunderbolt 3 Dock Pro and a cheap 12ft power cable, can move the rig to wherever I’d like in my apartment with a single plug. Lovely.

Home Server is a Xeon E3-1230 with 64GiB of memory and ~12TiB of usable storage on WD Reds. Also run two Raspberry Pi’s for miscellaneous things. All home networking is with Unifi gear: Router, Switch, and AP. Things are sort of programmable and I use the ill-documented API (if you can call it that) for the stupidest of purposes.

Software

I write a lot of Java/TypeScript and bash for work and play and am extremely productive with using them to get computers to do things. I also write Python and Go for mostly personal stuff. Modern CSS is a marvel I continue to learn and appreciate. Vite has been a force-multiplier of late. After frustrations with my beloved Sublime Text3 I finally switched to using VSCode and NeoVim as editors, switching between the Gruvbox and Ayu Dark themes, and CommitMono and Lilex fonts4. I am one of those strange people who loves programming ligatures and monospaced italics 🤷‍♂️

Other intangible indispensables:

  • Things for all manner of lists and notes. It is supremely well-designed in that it stays out of the way of what you’re trying to use the damn thing for. A product manager didn’t go apeshit and things are where a reasonable person would assume they’d be. You can’t say this about a lot of apps these days5.
  • iTerm2, the best terminal ever. No notes.
  • Github Desktop, the best minimal git UI that allows me to focus on the 90% of porcelain that’s relevant to my day-to-day.
  • Transmit is still my favorite file transfer manager. Another supremely well-designed app.
  • Rectangle to manage the 42" of screen real estate on my bigass ‘monitor’.
  • yadm to manage my dotfiles.
  • Acorn. All the Photoshop most of us would need with none of the Adobe bullshit. One-time license, husband and wife team, ⌘ + Shift + o is your friend. Not paid to say this: Buy it.

Arq Backup securely backs up my stuff up to the Cloud in a lovely snapshotty way. I run Ubuntu Server and ZFS on my home server. Docker runs a few apps like Plex, PiHole, and PiVPN6.

  1. It really reminds me of my first Mac, a machine I thought was the ‘ultimate’ laptop. It was a base model Titanium PowerBook G4 that I picked up for ~$200 at an Iowa State University surplus sale many years past its prime. Just needed some love via a new hard drive. I was really in awe of what this thing looked like, and then what it could do. Even then, Parvati (that’s what I named the laptop) proved to be leagues ahead of her competition in terms of both design and performance (not so much the heat dissipation). I destroyed her by clumsily spilling water while arguing with a friend about pointless shit in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin around July 2007 and miss her to this day.↩︎

  2. I do like the words “deep, rich bass”.↩︎

  3. Which I still use for documents VSCode cannot open performantly, like large CSVs.↩︎

  4. I have a sideeye on Berkeley Mono and will try it soon.↩︎

  5. I am over 40 and get to yell at clouds.↩︎

  6. We’re all losing the battle but something is better than nothing.↩︎