Computer Stuff
I came up in the age of the personal computer (PC). My father had an IBM XT Clone with a keyboard you could clobber someone to death with. He was fascinated by computers, as am I. I remember when my parents were separated, he lived in a warehouse with some friends. He brought his computer home from his office at Cedar Center. He introduced me to a game called Starflight. It was a procedurally generated universe, an open-ended space exploration game that fit on a 720-kilobyte five and a quarter floppy disk. The programmers of that day were incredible—they were probably coding in assembly to keep the program size down.
REAPER, My Digital Audio Workstation
I've been using reaper since 2018. Before that, I was using GarageBand to get down basic musical ideas back when I was trying to teach myself guitar and songwriting simultaneously.
REAPER Session Auditor
I vibe-coded a Lua script that keeps track of a lot of things while recording. It's a kind of digital black box recorder for sessions. Visit the project, clone the directory and put it to use in your tracking sessions.
REAPER Session Auditor on GitHub
Useful Applications
Stuff I use over and over again.
NOTE: Most of the software listed here is free. Or at least free to try with full-features.
Vim, tmux, git, iTerm2 for coding tasks. I'm wrestling with whether or not to ditch the command line for VS Code. The downside of VS Code is it's monolithic, opaque and heavy-handed. I like the neat little command line utilities that do one thing and do that one thing really well. REAPER for my digital audio workstation, Plex Media Server to listen to my own library of music—completely cut off and firewalled from commercial streaming services and their "algorithms". Darktable for photos, Inkscape to design logos and graphics. Tailscale which set up a private VPN for all of my devices.
Useful One-Liners
If you're doing it manually—you're doing it wrong.
One liners are elegant bits of commands and regular expressions. Harkening back to the days of assembly programming, when code was elegant by necessity. I try to save as many one-liners as I can, the good ones save so much time.