Ask HN: What do you use?

Hardware:

- Dell Studio 14" laptop

- Sennheiser HD202 headphones

- Nokia 5310 XpressMusic cellphone

Everyday software:

- Arch Linux

- Awesome window manager

- GNOME environment

- GNOME Do

- Rhythmbox

- Google Chrome

- Pidgin

- Dropbox

- Nexuiz (open source FPS game)

Programming tools:

- Eclipse Helios

- Java (Sun's JDK)

- Various Java frameworks and libraries (Wicket, GWT, Hibernate, Guice)

- Mercurial

- TortoiseHg

- gEdit - VirtualBox

- Windows XP (virtual machine)

- Adobe Flash Builder 4 (running on the virtual machine)

- Gimp

Hardware: I alternate between a Dell 14" XPS Laptop and a home-built desktop. The laptop is run-of-the-mill, and the desktop is a dual Q6600 with 8GB Corsair and a couple 2Tb WD drives, housed in a gorgeous Lian-Li brushed aluminum 12-bay case and 3 24" Acer monitors (cheap). Keyboard is a Logitech G19, Mouse is a Logitech MX-9000. Speakers are the little volume icon speakers from art.lebedev (they were a gift, but they're cool, and don't sound bad at all). I've also got an 8GB Dell Optiplex that I use as a sandbox. It's running ESXi with a single Ubuntu guest.

Looking around my office, I've also got some Linksys Powerline adapters (faster than WiFi), another Dell Studio 14" with 4GB ram running Windows 7.

Software: All three boxes are running Ubuntu 10.something, the desktop and laptop are running 10.10, while the Optiplex is on 10.04(LTS).

Servers: I've got a colo'd VM with 8GB RAM, dual Xeon 1.8Ghz and 200Gb disk running Ubuntu 10.04 with GoNexTek (http://gonextek.com) for some older sites of mine, as well as 2 512Mb slicehost instances for staging (haven't migrated them to Linode yet), and a Linode 512 Slice.

Hosted platforms: I mentioned Slicehost and Linode, but I have a couple of tentative apps on AppEngine.

Servers: I've got some (what I consider legacy) sites running PHP-based code -- mostly forums and the like. Newer stuff is mostly either Django behind either Apache or Nginx or, more recently, most of my stuff is with Tornado/Twister/Nginx (Twister is my management framework).

Databases: MySQL, MongoDB

The newest project I'm working on (Plum) is using the following: Nginx, Tornado, Python, Celery, RabbitMQ and MySQL & MongoDB and Memcache. Steve built a beautiful MySQL / Memcache abstraction layer he calls BPEngine that acts as our ORM, but in addition that, it also populates / expires / manages keeping memcache seeded & updated, as well as kicking off requisite tasks into celery for some of the backend work.

That covers almost everything I can think of.

Hardware: used Dell Optiplex 745, old 17" LCD, Unicomp clicky keyboard. Kensington trackball, HP GPIB card, Grado SR-125 headphones. Sun Ultra 60 and a Soekris in the closet. Several classic Tektronix oscilloscopes and plugins, assorted HP frequency counters, generators, and meters. Trimble Thunderbolt GPS disciplined oscillator as my 10MHz house reference. (My Rb atomic clock is currently powered down.)

Software: WinXP, VirtualBox, OpenBSD, Cygwin, Codewright, Opera, and lots of weird embedded tools.

( more here http://paulstamatiou.com/stuff-i-use )

2 pairs of rayban titanium glasses with anti-reflective coating for computer screens (or that's what they told me). worth the investment. i can't wear contacts for more than a few hours without pissing off my eyes. curious about trying "gunnar" glasses though. anyone have them?

year old 17-inch MacBook Pro matte 2.8GHz C2D with 8GB DDR3 and RAID 0 X25-M SSDs http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-apple-macbook-pro-raid-0-arr...

timbuk2 commute 2.0 (tsa approved) messenger bag but I find it too wide with my big 17" and I often bump into things/people so I just ordered an incase backpack

trash can and boxes for converting into standing desk mode http://picplz.com/user/stammy/pic/gntn/

large whiteyboard for calculating runway and scribbling ideas. http://blog.notifo.com/notifo-installs-their-whiteyboard after having it a few months, it is hard to clean/erase.

Chrome is default but I have 3 versions of Firefox (4 beta, 3.6 stable, 3.0 stable) each with their own profiles so I can run them simultaneously if I need to catch some stupid bug

NotifoGrowl for desktop notifo needs http://notifo.com/desktop and Chrome to Notifo extension https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/lgffhepmapgeepjn... (disclosure: i made the latter and my cofounder made the former)

Panic Transmit for sftp needs, but mainly for S3 stuff.

Panic Unison for usenet needs http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-download-with-newsgroups (disclosure: post has aff links)

1Password

Little Snapper for taking full-page screenshots for design inspiration

I use OS X Spaces a TON. Three spaces: chrome + textmate, ical + campfire + terminal + itunes, tweetdeck

Vmware with Ubuntu 10.10, Windows 7 Ultimate N, XP SP3

1TB Time Capsule for time machine, attached to 2TB WD disk for laptop image backups via super duper or CCC

magic mouse + apple charger (but i like using lithium batteries more.. much, much lighter) + Magic Prefs

MainMenu.app for basic system maintanence

delibar.app for managing delicious and pinboard accounts http://www.delibarapp.com/

brew! https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew

Charles.app for misc HTTP lurking and easily repeating HTTP posts (naughty confession: used it to opt-out of AmEx publishing's online form 3,000 times. they had been filling my physical mailbox with sweepstakes offers several times per week. needless to say, got a personal reply by a higher-up saying they would make sure my address was correctly opt-ed out as my previous 2 opt-outs did nothing)

Lightroom + Aperture. Lightroom replaced Aperture for me (seems faster)

mid-range sony earbuds when on the go

Dre Beats circumaurals when at home http://paulstamatiou.com/review-beats-studio-by-dr-dre-and-m...

dropbox with grabbox for sharing screenshots easily

Propane.app for Notifo company campfire

TextExpander -- MUST HAVE

TextMate with Ack in Project, PeepOpen

iWork (keynote!)

iStat Menus for looking at how much ram redis is eating and how much CPU chrome is using

Samsung wireless B&W laser printer for printing out convertible notes (was $149 at officemax)

Mint.com for reminding myself how I still owe 6 figures for out-of-state georgia tech tuition loans

a custom apple script (saved as a .app by automator) that runs at boot to launch 4 terminal tabs with things like compass for sass, redis-server, redis-cli, git status and the like https://gist.github.com/627190 then I discovered some other github project that did pretty much this but much better. forgot the name of it

gitx for easily looking at diffs (also use mdr for that http://readablediff.com/)

f.lux app http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/

taskpaper app for simple todos but i write most things with pen and paper

breville tea maker. kevin rose approved. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoZeeogblr0

Sony NEX-5 pseudo-DSLR "EVIL/SLD" (sold my big Nikon D90 SLR and canon P&S, & kodak Zi8) this can do all and is much smaller. used it to record this notifo app tour: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW5hp3aoF9M

Adobe CS5 Suite + Fontcase for managing lots of fonts (but recently it keeps crashing on me.. any ideas? I have ~1500 fonts loaded in it)

xScope - VITAL for anyone that pushes pixels http://iconfactory.com/software/xscope

Skype phone number tied to Google Voice. Handy for taking business calls on my laptop next to my cofounder so we don't have to take turns yelling into iPhone 4 speakerphone

Spotify for listening to music my friends favorite because I hate searching for music

Hype Machine in Fluid.app

smcFanControl for cooling down/manually adjusting fan speed when necessary

TunnelBlick for VyprVPN when at coffee shops (#firesheep) http://paulstamatiou.com/how-toreview-surf-securely-with-vyp... (outdated review, theyve since added geek-approved openvpn and 256-bit L2TP/IPsec IIRC)

and last but not least, my trusty kindle http://paulstamatiou.com/review-amazon-kindle-3-wi-fi-readin...

also:

  parse_git_branch() {
    git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/(\1)/'
  }
  PS1="\w\$(parse_git_branch) $ "

and

  diffy () { 
    for file in $*; do 
        git diff $file | mate
    done
  }

dream setup? a lighter 17-inch macbook pro with 2560x1440 res that could morph into 13-inch form factor when on flights. this thing hits both the damn armrests in economy. grr

oh and a secret stash of chocolate-covered espresso beans in my desk drawer..

What I do: all form of web devel.. 40% 'building' 60% 'maintaining'.

Desktop: generic dell dual 2.66ghz 4gig ram, dual 22in wide screen displays. I do most of my 'work work' here.

I use a kensington 'expert mouse' in lieu of a real mouse.

Laptop: Lenovo T410.. never use a mouse for this. i turn off the touch pad and use the little nib.

Software: (not much compared to most people)

Ubuntu for my linux distro , xmonad for window placement , vim for coding , git for source control , ff/chromium for browsing. , grooveshark for listening,

I use a couple vim plugins, mainly nerdtree. My vim is heavily customized.

My ff is heavily customized with vimperator, i also use firebug, measureit, and adblock

I have a nice pair of pass-through headphones, I don't remember the make or model.

I have a crappy razr-era cell phone and a couple old digital cameras.

I am pretty happy with my setup, I don't do too much cranking and neither of my systems really lag unless there is some serious javascript going on in FF.

I do virtually all of my work through a shell and spend more time in vim than anywhere.

I occasionally run windows inside a virtual machine to hack on flash.

I'd like to move my OS to a SSD. I also wouldn't mind a headless badass private server.

Vimperator and learning to customize vim have been the best things I have ever done for my computing environment.