Gear
This page started on Tumblr, as a place I could direct people who ask about what I have for gear, computers, cameras, mobiles, etc. It’s grown overtime, and I now host it here on my primary site. If you have questions, feel free to email me.
Primary computers
15 inch MacBook Pro (mid-2009) – 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM, 500GB HD.
Mac Mini (mid-2011) – 2.3GHz Core i5, 8GB of RAM, 1TB internal drive with 1TB external drive for backups, and 500GB for asset storage.
Backup computers
13 inch MacBook Pro (mid-2009) – 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, 320GB HD.
13 inch MacBook (mid-2007) – 2.0GHz Core Duo, 2GB of RAM, 100GB HD.
Camera
Nikon D40 with an 18-55mm Nikor AF-S lens, plus more Class 10 SD cards than one should ever purchase during their lifetime.
Will be replaced in 2012 with a Nikon D90 or D3100 and likely an 18-200mm lens and 34mm fish-eye.
Mobiles
BlackBerry Curve 9360 from Vodafone UK, in use on AT&T in the states.
16GB iPhone 4, for backup purposes.
Various Bits of kit
Rather cheap Compaq 22 inch widescreen display, Sony MDR-7506 for desktop use with Beyerdynamic replacement earpads (worth every bit of the £22), Etymotic MC5 for mobile use. Apple Bluetooth Keyboard, Logitech MX Revolution, Cisco E3200 Wireless-N router and a £7 LED lamp from IKEA, which sits atop my £30 IKEA desk.
Software & Apps
Desktop: Photoshop CS5.1, Illustrator CS5.1, InDesign CS5.1, iPhoto, TextMate (hardcore code editing), Transmit (FTP, S3 and everything in-between), Espresso (less hardcore code editing and CSS mods), Osfoora for Mac, Pochade (colour tool), Adium (IM client), Last.fm.
BlackBerry Apps: Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, Radio 1, TuneIn Radio, Sky News, BerryWeather, Wikitude and BlackBerry Messenger.
iPhone Apps: Osfoora, Foursquare, Tumblr, OmniFocus, Google+, Fancy, Shazam(RED), Camera Awesome, Camera+, Hipstamatic, Instagram, WhatsApp, Starbucks, Consume, BBC News, Reeder, Instapaper, Radio 1, Absolute Radio, 1Password, 360, iBooks, Skype, Yelp.
Hosting and CDN
WordPress 3.3.1, Using the Akismet, All-in-one SEO pack, Stats by Google Analytics, as well as a modified in-house solution, reliant on Urchin.
Hosted by Media Temple on the Grid, cached by WordPress Super Cache and automatically served by CloudFlare from one of 16 CDN nodes during high-load periods to save on (gs) GPUs. I’ve been using the Grid since 2008, and while it’s often slayed for being a bit slow and pudgy for database connections, I find it’s sufficient, and generally makes up for it during load-spikes. At £12p/m, I can’t really argue with it.
This will likely be done away with in favour of a (dv) 4.0 in late-2012. I do like the Grid, but having more advanced control over my environment will be nice.
Images and general post assets served by Amazon S3, using the S3 CDN service. Currently storing about 2GB worth of post assets dating back all the way to 2008. I use S3 to again, reduce my GPU usage on the Grid. This is taking it a step further and is likely a bit extreme, but I’ve found that Amazon usually serve images a bit quicker than Media Temple anyway, and it’s not much in the way of additional effort, so I continue to do it this way.
Theme is a variant of Derek Punsalan’s GridFocus theme, which I’ve cut small bits and pieces out of to suit my tastes better and to be a bit more efficient for use on the Grid. I’ve renamed it “DAK Sierra” but much of the core remains the same, although you would find some witty code comments I put in various PHP files.
Picture!
Everyone seems to like a picture of someone else’s desk, seeing how I’ve come across at least one site devoted entirely to it, so here you go! Click for a full size version.
