This page serves as a living document to catalog the things that I use in my tech life. I love trying out new tools and am always looking for ways to improve my workflow.
Last Updated 29, June 2023
OS and Enhancements
- Windows 11 – I’ve used Windows all my life and run Dev Channel Insiders Builds
- Windows PowerToys, especially the launcher (which replaced Wox), they have baked so many great tools into this solution. I love the color picker, which I use often.
- AntRenamer – Easy file renaming
- ARSClip – an incredible clipboard manager
- Chocolatey manages most of my software installs and updates. I also use Winget, but prefer Chocolaty because of the upgrade all command
- FFmpeg for all of my video converting, VLC for all my media viewing
- HoneyView for viewing images quickly
- Private Internet Access – PIA for my VPN
- ScreenToGif is an awesome tool to make GIF’s. I use them to make my own memes, but also make GIF’s when I’m documenting processes at work.
- ShareX for all of my screenshots
- Windows Terminal
Backup Strategy
- I have a Desktop PC that runs throughout the day and contains all of our photos and videos
- I do use DropBox to copy images from my phone into the Camera Uploads folder, then copy them down to the Desktop’s local drives
- I use FreeFileSync to make nightly backups of photos and videos to external drives (using a Scheduled Task that invokes a mirror through the command line).
- I run BackBlaze for off-site backup for the photos
- I also run Google Photos and Amazon’s Photos for redundancy, I pay $2.99 per month for Google storage to accommodate my photos
- Microsoft OneDrive is what I use for my cloud storage. Paying $2 per month for 100 gigs is perfect for my needs (and a big reason why I don’t use Dropbox).
Development, Design, and Creativity Tools
- Visual Studio Code (I enjoy running the Insiders Build), using the Cobalt2 Theme. Some of my favorite extensions include:
- Auto Close Tag
- Bracket Pair Colorizer
- Color Highlight
- ES Lint
- Markdown All in One
- Peacock
- Prettier
- Azure Data Studio has quickly become my go-to SQL interface, although I still spin up SSMS from time to time, but mainly to work with database backups
- I write most of my Markdown documentation in VS Code
- DrawIO is what I use for my diagrams
- Figma for my wireframing and prototype
- Adobe Creative Cloud, especially Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere
- Lightroom Classic to process and edit my photos
- Reaper as my DAW for recording drum tracks, I use a Tascam US1800 which has since been discontinued
Productivity and Collaboration
- I heavily use OneNote for my day-to-day note-taking, as it’s easy to group and organize my different meetings and projects.
- We use Microsoft Teams at work and I’m a big fan of the tool. My band uses Discord for all of our planning.
- Freeplane for mind mapping
- I use Grammarly in all of my writing, using the browser and application plugins.
- Todoist has been my go-to for personal task management, I’ve stayed in the free tier. I use Trello to track band tasks
- Brave is my browser, moving on from Firefox. I also use the Chromium-based Edge for work, keeping my professional and personal bookmarks/settings separate.
- I use KeePassXC for my work-related password management, BitWarden as my password manager for everything else.
Mobile & Tablet
I’ve been using iOS devices since 2015, I was using Android from 2008-2015. I use far too many apps to list them all, but some gems I’d like to highlight include:
- Pocket Casts for Podcasts
- Matter for read-it-later, then save bookmarks to RaindropIO
- Halide for Camera, editing photos in Lightroom Mobile
- Life360 to keep tabs on my family
- Panels for Comics Reading, also subscribing to Marvel Unlimited
- Reelgood for figuring out which streaming service offers my content
- Anylist, integrated with Alexa and Siri (since Google is now jerks about this)