Uses This
I used to love reading through people's setups on usesthis.com. It's kind of fun to see what equipment people love using. I'm going to skip the first question (because it's awkward) and just ask myself "What hardware do you use?", "and what software?", and "What would be your dream setup?". It's unlikely anyone will find this interesting, but I might do this again in a few years and it'll be interesting to see how things change over time.
What hardware do you use?
For work I use an M1 MacBook Pro, partially by choice, but only because the alternative was a HP EliteBook (running Windows). I rarely travel for work, so this spends 99% of its time hooked up to a HP Thunderbolt dock going to two HP monitors. I use a Logitech MX Ergo trackball and a Happy Hacking Keyboard ("Professional Classic"). The trackball sits at a very comfortable angle, but its outer rubber coating is starting to go sticky. I love the keyboard so much that I bought a second one, which I'm keeping as a spare. The 60% width allows me to use the trackball comfortably to the right of the keyboard, or in front of it.
My personal laptop is a ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 12) with 64GB of RAM, which is definitely more than I need and is definitely a reaction to having put up with 8GB for too long. I recently also bought the base model of the M4 Mac Mini, which is pretty much just for (trying to do) CAD. Both of these computers use the same dock, mouse and keyboard when I'm at my desk.
Most of my music listening is now using Austrian Audio Hi-X60 headphones with a Topping G5 portable amplifier. The pair sound great and I rarely use my big amplifier and speakers these days.
For some reason I keep finding myself with old computer (DEC, mainly) manuals and like to digitise these for the Internet Archive. For this I use the PFU ScanPartner SP30 sheet feeding scanner. It's fast and produces excellent scans.
After some bad luck with SLA printing, I finally bought a Bambu A1 Mini, which does everything I'd want from a 3D Printer with excellent reliability and speed. For the price, this thing is hard to beat. I'm not interested in 3D Printing, I just want it to work.
To keep things secure, I use a pair of YubiKeys. One is usually on my desk and the other is usually hidden in my backpack. Speaking of my backpack, I use a Maxpedition Falcon III, which can hold an incredible amount of junk. For nerdy reasons, there's usually a Flipper Zero, a Radiacode 102 radiation detector / spectrometer, some moulded ACS PRO27 earplugs, and other bits of junk.
My favourite notebook is made by DizzyInk and uses a rubber band to hold the pages and cover together. This works amazingly because I can remove the rubber band and separate the pages or lay them out to see multiple things at once. For tooling, I really like the Miniware TS101 USB-C powered soldering iron. I recently also upgraded my screwdrivers to Wiha VDE SlimVario bits - they have a great locking mechanism and are a pleasure to use. The rest of my tools are fairly standard off the shelf / eBay things.
When it comes to ham radio, I absolutely love the Kenwood TH-D74e. I think it's the only ham radio with a built in KISS packet modem, so what's not to like! When it comes to more experimental stuff, the ADALM PlutoSDR does everything I need and more!
and what software?
I'm most comfortable and efficient using Fedora running Xfce, if I could use this for work it would be my preference there, too. I spend a lot of time in Emacs, which is pretty much the only text editor I voluntarily use. I also use it as my email client. Emacs was for a long time also my IRC client, but the convenience of IRCCloud has won me over.
Git is used almost every day, and I prefer this through the CLI than through some desktop interface, although occasionally use magit in Emacs. For my browser I use Firefox, which is also where I run IRCCloud, Discord and Spotify. For keeping track of blogs, I use yarr (Yet Another RSS Reader) - I run this in the background via systemd and just load it in my browser, it's simple and reliable. My preferred password manager is Bitwarden.
For work I mostly end up doing stuff in Emacs or Jira, frequently prodding things in Terraform and keeping track of it all with git.
What would be your dream setup?
A bit more separation between work and personal stuff would be nice, maybe separate desks would be a good start. I'm pretty comfortable with the equipment I'm using for work and will probably keep using it until it breaks. For my personal machine I really like the idea of a fast ARM based ThinkPad, but getting something that competes with a MacBook seems like a challenge. The portability of a laptop probably means I'm unlikely to use a desktop as my main computer again.
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Comments and feedback are welcome by email (aaron@nospam-aaronsplace.co.uk).