Uses

What Luke uses

This website

This site is generated by Hugo and hosted on CloudFlare Pages.

The theme is a custom design I made built on the pico.css classless CSS framework.

In the past I have used 11ty, WordPress, and now-defunct Anchor CMS.

Hardware

Phone

I use a Product Red iPhone 11, and it’s been great. I was a diehard Apple fan, then a diehard Android fan, and now I’ve come full circle.

Previous phones I’ve had and their fates:

Watch

I don’t really wear watches anymore. I own a Slow analog watch and a Fitbit Charge.

In the past, I was a big Pebble fan and used the original Pebble, the Pebble Time, and the Pebble 2.

Development and general purpose

I use a 2021 MacBook Pro 14", with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage.

It’s hooked up to two 27" 4k LG displays, scaled down to 1440p effective space.

My peripherals include a HHKB Pro 2, a Magic Trackpad, and a Logitech MX Master 3.

Gaming

These days I mainly game on an Xbox Series X.

My gaming PC uses an AMD Ryzen 3600, Nvidia GTX 3060, with 16GB of RAM. I use the same two 4k LG monitors.

My peripherals include a CoolerMaster Quickfire Rapid with MX Browns, and a Glorious Model D mouse.

Audio

I love audio gear, and currently run a Schiit stack consisting of a Modi Multibit, Loki, and Magni 2. A Little Dot Mark 3 with Mullard tubes is my tube headphone amp, and Fostex TH-X00 Purplehearts are my daily drivers.

I also own a couple Beyerdynamic headphones, the DT 990s and the DT 770s.

AirPods Pro are my on-the-go set.

Networking

I have a small collection of networking hardware, and the majority of it is Unifi by Ubiquiti, with a pihole running on an old Intel NUC.

Equipment:

Software

Text editing

My text editor of choice is Sublime Text, but I primarily use VS Code for development.

Sublime Merge is my Git client.

I’ve been having a lot of fun learning Vim, but it consumes so much time.

Coding font

I use JetBrains Mono set at 13px.

Other fonts I’ve used, in order of preference:

Graphic design

Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo are my favorite graphics/photo manipulation tools.

I use Figma for mockups.

Music

Apple Music is my current streaming service. I was a longtime Spotify user, but since they added podcasts the experience went downhill for me. Not to say Apple Music on macOS is any better. A big factor is that I share an Apple One account.

I still miss Google Play Music.

Podcasts

Pocket Casts, hands down. Syncing my playback position across devices is a must-have and something no one else seems to have figured out.

Terminal

I use fish shell and Terminal.app. I compared a number of terminals and found Terminal.app to be the best balance of features, latency, and battery life.

Notes

I use Obsidian and sometimes per-project .md files. I used to use Apple Notes, Google Keep, Microsoft OneNote, and before it went downhill, Evernote.

My goal with Obsidian and Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is to have one set of notes that last my entire lifetime, therefore flat-file storage and version control are important.

Todo

Apple Reminders covers all my needs. Before that, it was Google Keep. I also usually keep a todo.md in most of my projects.

RSS reader

NetNewsWire is my reader on Mac and iPhone.

Browser

Depends on the wind.

Sometimes it’s Safari, other times it’s Edge. Sometimes I’ve got 7 different browsers open. I use Velja to accommodate my frequent switching.

I used to be a big Chrome user, but www.chromeisbad.com.

I still miss Opera before they were bought out and switched to the Blink engine. I think Opera 12 is the last Presto version. The Turbo compression feature really helped me out when I was on dialup. Vivaldi comes close but the UI is laggy and has no energy reduction features like Edge does.

I’ve held frequently changing opinions on Firefox over the years. I keep it installed for testing.

Email

I use iCloud Mail and the default Apple Mail apps.

I used to use Fastmail and still recommend them.