What I geek out on

Typography

Typographers whose work I admire usually come from independent type foundries, who are hungry and innovate fiercely. The typography industry is not exactly a fast-moving one, and there’s no incentive for incumbents to innovate—often ending up as rent-seeking dinosaurs and becoming stagnant.

Favourite type foundries:

Gear

These are some of the stuff I use for both work/leisure. I generally enjoy putting things together myself and customising my tools.

PC Guts 🔌

I like to keep my PC running cool. As much as possible, I’d try to keep the total power draw of the system low and pick parts that are known to run at chilly temps.

  • AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
  • Gigabyte X670E AORUS PRO X
  • DeepCool AK620
  • FSP Vita GM 1000W, 80+ Gold
  • Corsair Dominator Platinum 2x32GB DDR5 6000Mhz C30
  • Samsung 980 Pro 1TB
  • Gigabyte RTX 4090 AORUS Master
  • Fractal Design Torrent

Display 🖥️

I no longer use a dual-monitor setup because bezels are annoying. Ultrawides are the way. I’ve also found a KVM switch that doesn’t suck, and allows me to switch pretty seamlessly between my work and personal machine.

Peripherals ⌨️ 🖱️ 🕹️

I switched from G203 to a trackball mouse ever since I started my masters in computing. It took me a week to get used to it, and I’d like to think I’m a little more productive than before now. It is likely not a good idea to play PC games with a trackball mouse.

  • Logitech MX ERGO
  • Keychron S1
  • XBOX 360 Wired Controller

Audio Gear 🎙️ 🎧

After a decade of trying to keep background noise out of my mics, I’ve found that dynamic mics are what I should have been using all these while. Superior audio quality for recording, streaming, voice chats and all that jazz. Say no to condenser mics.

  • Zoom UAC-2
  • Rode Procaster

Home network

I had a lot of fun setting these up in my home a while ago. A network switch with PoE ports was crucial to getting full wifi coverage with ceiling mounted APs.

  • 2x UniFi® AP AC Pro
  • UniFi® Switch 8-60W
  • UniFi® Security Gateway

Software

I spend most of my time inside a Debian VM nowadays, as I’ve switched my main OS from macOS to W10. I liked the fact that my dev environment is completely portable and can survive untouched between any OS reinstalls/upgrades or other shenanigans.

I had been running macOS Catalina on OpenCore for a good 4 years or so—which was surprisingly painless and easy to maintain. It’s all gone for good now since I changed my graphics card.

Terminal

Is there anything better than iTerm 2 on macOS? Regardless, zsh is my shell of choice with the following splendid plugins.

Text editors

I used to be a fervent ST supporter, until VS Code surpassed it in terms of features. Nowadays, I still stick to ST for quick text editing. Colours are important to me, not just for contrast/legibility purposes, but I need palettes that look good to me (subjective, of course).

I’m also pretty sure I was bought over by Monokai Pro’s creator’s personal website before I got bought over by the colour palette.

Favourite Browser

Stupidly awesome devtools. What’s more to say?

  • Firefox Nightly

Password Manager

Made my life much simpler when it comes to passwords. While you still need to consider a sound strategy for a sustainable, long-term reliance on password managers, I’ll admit that I get lazy in my backup-migrate-restore routines simply because 1Password is so convenient.

  • 1Password.com
  • KeePassXC