What’s changed in the last year?
As you might be aware, I’ve been doing a writeup of my toolchain every year or so for the last couple of years (2016, 2018). There are a couple of reasons for this:
- The type of work that I do has changed in that time, necessitating exploring different tools, and different equipment
- And the technology that I work with continues to evolve – new models, new ways of working, and new mindsets – and our toolchains need to evolve to
This year, I’m studying a Master of Applied Cybernetics at the 3A Institute in Canberra – back to being a student; which I haven’t done for five years. Interestingly, my tools of choice 5 years ago have remained steady – Zotero for referencing, LibreOffice for writing essay type work, and Atom as my IDE of choice.
The key changes are;
- A change in the main laptops I use
- I’ve adopted Trello / Pomodone / RescueTime as a combination for personal productivity, with Passion Planner as a written diary / visual planner
- My Fitbit Ionic died an inelegant death and has been replaced by the Mobvoi TicWatch Pro
Main laptop
My Asus N76 finally gave up the ghost and had unrecoverable hardware failure, including failure of the Bluray/DVD-rom drive that was built in – it’s not worth repairing and I think I’ll send it to disposal / recycling after taking 7 years’ worth of stickers off the front.
You were a Good Computer, N76. You were a Very Good Computer.
In my previous Toolchain tear-down, you would have read about my interest in System 76‘s Oryx Pro 3. One of my friends was selling hers (huge thanks, Pia!), and I immediately fell in love with this hard working, nerd-first beast of a laptop. I chose to flash it with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS rather than System 76’s POP OS, basically because I’m so familiar with Ubuntu and I didn’t want any additional learning curve. This machine continues to be my desk-based workhorse of choice. It’s a beautiful, solid, high-performance machine, but it’s not a good mobile choice.
Enter the ASUS Vivobook (my model is the X510UQ). I bought one of these devices for Mum, as she needed a new machine, and was so impressed with it – it has 16GB of RAM and a reasonable NVIDIA GPU (!) that I went back to the shop and got one for myself. The mobility is so-so – with a battery of about 4 hours if the screen is reasonably dim, but then I tend to run a lot of CPU- and battery-hungry apps. It’s lightweight, has HDMI out and 3 USB ports and the small bevel means plenty of screen space. I’ve set it up to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu, and if I’m honest it could use a much bigger SSD. That will be a holiday job.
Mobile phone
My Pixel died a couple of months ago after the battery life suddenly dropped to less and 30 minutes after the update to Android 9 – a problem that seems to be quite widespread. I’ve been on a Pixel 3 since; primarily because it’s what JB Hi-Fi in Geelong had in stock. The camera is amazing, and I’ve finally ditched my 3.5mm audio jack headphones for Bluetooth headphones.
Wearables
My Fitbit Ionic was a beautiful device until a release of Android in around November last year; after which I could no longer pair the Ionic with the Pixel phone. Getting support for this was incredibly problematic; it was difficult, time-consuming and very poor after-sales support from Fitbit. As a result, I ditched Fitbit and made the switch to WearOS, and have been on the Mobvoi TicWatch Pro ever since. The device is too chunky for most women, but well, I’m not most women, and it fits on my giant fat wrist just fine. The battery life isn’t great, but I’ve found that the heart rate monitor is the largest drain on battery.
One gotcha with the Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro is the charger. I bought two chargers with the device, and managed to “fry” – short circuit – them both by running higher than 1 Amp current through them (with a high current charger). This is well documented on Reddit. This was pretty poor poor IMHO for a high-end smartwatch.
WearOS has been an unexpectedly smooth experience; it doesn’t have the ecosystem or the integration that FitBit has, but that’s also a positive. I can choose the apps and watch faces that best suit me, from multiple different vendors. I’ve settled on the Venom watch face in neutral colours.
A smartwatch remains a key part of my toolchain – moreso than ever.
Quantified Self
I continue to use and be very happy with RescueTime and BeeMindr. I’ve been through a myriad of to-do tools in the past few years and seem to have settled on a combination of both Trello and Pomodone this year. Pomodone is beautiful; it’s an electron-based app that’s available for Linux (Woot!). Seriously considering upgrading to the paid version in a couple of months if it continues to prove its value.
For visual planning and diarising, I went to Passion Planner, driven by being a full time student again. I’ve been very happy with the model it uses – iterative goal setting and pattern-forming, and have already bought in my 2020 diary. As a visual person, it gives me plenty of space to visualise, to draw and to map out plans, goals and actions. I used the medium size this year, and found it marginally too small; so have upgraded to the large size for 2020.
Headphones
No change, the Plantronics Backbeat Pro bluetooth headphones are still fantastically awesome.
Streaming Media
No change, still Spotify premium.
Input devices
No change.
Voice Assistant
No change, still the awesome Mycroft.AI
Internet of Things and Home Automation
I’m on residential college this year at Burgmann College at ANU. Their Wifi network is a 5Ghz spectrum, PEAP/MSCHAPv2 authenticated beastie, and nothing much in the IoT space speaks to it, because IoT standards and security, what are they even? 🙁
It feels really weird to have to physically turn my light off now – my default behaviours have been changed by home automation.
Gaps in my toolchain and how they’ve been plugged
In the last edition of State of the Toolchain, these were my key bugbears:
- Visual Git Editor – I’ve given up on this and learned to love the command line. In hindsight it’s been a great learning experience, and my
gitfluency has improved out of sight (hah!). - Better internet – ANU is on gig internet. *laughs in TCP/IP* I’m going to be in dire straights though if/when I have to go back to a copper-based NBN FttN service *cries in copper*.
Have I missed anything? What do you use?