Cows standing in the fields in Dossow

Uses

Willem Prins

Web development and (country) life.

Uses

I am a bit of a hardware nerd, so I really like it when people have a /uses/ page. The first one I saw in the wild – and one I still think is very cool – is https://wesbos.com/uses.

On this page, I will give an overview of the hardware, software and online services I use when I’m behind the computer.

Last update: 2024-01-03. Please note: links with a (🤝) are affiliate links.

Hardware

13.3″ Apple M1 MacBook Pro (8-core,16GB RAM, 512GB storage, from 2020)
Dell Ultrasharp 4025QW 40″ monitor that I’m still getting used to. It’s also worth mentioning that the M1 cannot provide the bandwidth needed for 120Hz.

Sound

Sony WF-1000XM4 Bluetooth active-noise-cancelling earbuds

Camera

Logitech StreamCam which sits on the monitor, with a simple ring light behind it.

Furniture

Fully Jarvis adjustable standing dancing desk frame, but with a simple Ikea desktop instead of the fancy bamboo/hardwood tops they ship with now. It seems that ordering just the frame is not possible anymore since they became part of Herman Miller.

Chairwise, I’m still hoping to find an affordable HÅG Capisco to accommodate my lower back problems. This will have to wait until I have room for it behind my desk.

Software

Development

Productivity tools / Utilities

I’ll limit myself to the most-used ones here:

  • Homebrew
  • Notes (MacOS app) for quick notes and clippings, synced across devices
  • Obsidian for longer notes and drafts. I aspire to learn how to better use its features (like the Web Clipper) sooner rather than later.
  • Magnet for window management
  • RayCast as a Spotlight-replacement, worth it for the emoji-picker extension alone! As with Obsidian, I definitely need to explore its features more
  • Karabiner-Elements is a handy tool for keyboard customizations: I use it to have alternative keys for the broken left- and right arrow keys on this MacBook.
  • Hand Mirror is a handy little app to check your hairdo before a Zoom call or as the website says itself:”a one-click camera check, right from the menu bar”
  • Passwords (again, the MacOS app) is surprisingly good, I recently discovered. Especially the 2FA integration is smooth as butter. Having been a 1Password-user for years (piggy-backing off of a work account using nifty iCloud integration that allows you to create a wholly separate, personal vault) I switched over within a week after first trying Passwords.

Media

Cloud storage / Backup strategy

  • STACK is a remote storage solution based on OwnCloud by TransIP
    I use half of the available 1TB for digital archive, which includes photos, music and recordings. It comes with a desktop app that allows me to sync it from a Samsung T7 SSD which functions as its offline mirror. A second backup exists (I want to say allegedly) on an old QNAP NAS storage that contains a enterprise-grade 5400rpm HDD drive
  • Dropbox (🤝). I have10+ GB on a free tier that I was able to bump to this size through referrals. I use this for all of my admin documents, so that I can store these on each of my devices
  • iCloud. The 5GB that I have freely available, almost full at this point, but I rely on iCloud for software that syncs across devices, like Notes, Obsidian and various messaging apps. I don’t sync documents, e-mails or photos to iCloud.

AI tools

This list is very short, but ‘m planning on doing some more discovery using this AI Radar (Link in German) which provides insights into viable KI-tools for product managers.

  • Claude is my go-to solution for text-related tasks.

On the website

Simple Analytics (🤝) is the tool I use for tracking visits on my website. It is a privacy-first solution and its interface is a thousand times more friendly to human beings than Google Analytics . I’m on the free tier, which only stores traffic data for a month and is not able to exclude IPs. As a result: currently my own visits make up 90% of my current traffic.