Tools

Hardware

iPhone 17 Super light, and Apple stripped out all the Pro features I didn’t need — a perfect fit for what I actually use
iPhone 13 Pro Max Absolute game-changer — switching from the 12 mini to the Pro Max completely eliminated battery anxiety
iPad Air 3 Swapped my iPad mini with my girlfriend since I can use a keyboard with this one. Now mainly for reading
Nintendo Switch 1 Picked this up secondhand from a senior — a device that brings gaming back to its essence

AirPods Pro 2 Best wireless earbuds out there
EarPods Best wired earbuds out there
Sony MDR-1ABT Bought these in college. The ear pads peel easily. Currently gathering dust
Bose SoundLink mini 2 The best Mac speaker short of Genelec

Ricoh GR3X Picked it up to take photos but still struggle with hand shake during focus. Mainly for capturing daily life with my girlfriend

MacBook Air 13-inch Light, great to use, and reasonably priced
Synology 1621 Great — no more tinkering. Just wish hard drive prices would stop climbing
- WD HC550 16T × 4 Hot and loud
- Seagate Exos 18T Who said Seagate drives are quiet?!
- Samsung DDR4 2666 ECC 16GB × 2 Bought before HBM got monopolized
Mac mini M4 Missed the government subsidy window when I bought it, but still worth every penny
Apple TV Gen 7 TV set-top box, offloads decoding to the client. Been collecting dust lately
Raspberry Pi 4B 2GB My HomeLab starter. Now gathering dust
Chanwang P5 N100 V2 A leftover from my TrueNAS Scale tinkering days. Now runs various services
- Samsung DDR5 5600 32GB Bought before HBM got monopolized
- KIOXIA RC10 2T Thanks to YMTC for making affordable drives
~~PC Once you have a computer that doesn’t lag, you become the one who lags~~
- AKLLA A4 Electrophoretic White Incredible case finish, but prone to chipping. Some tolerance issues after assembly
- Intel 12600KF A little space heater — the downdraft cooler throttled at peak. Switching to an AIO fixed everything
- ASRock Z690M-ITX/ax ASRock motherboards are a steal
- Asus RTX 3080 10GB Couldn’t afford anything better during the mining craze
- Kingston DDR4 16GB × 2 Scored these free from the lab
- WD SN850 1T System drive
- Seasonic Focus SPX 750W 10-year endurance champion

LG 27GP95R Bought for Apex Legends. QC and thermals aren’t great — has some underlying issues
Magic Keyboard 2 & Magic Trackpad 2 Battle-tested. Blow Logitech’s Master series out of the water
NuPhy air 75 Tri-mode keyboard that handles both gaming and typing. My girlfriend uses it too — no complaints
Master MX Anywhere 3S In my opinion, Logitech’s best mouse. My girlfriend tried it and couldn’t stop raving
Logitech X GPW 2 Super light, incredible feel. Recommend using with a micro USB to Type-C adapter kit. Gathering dust since I stopped gaming
Master MX Keys Too long but great feel. Collecting dust
Master MX Master 3S Too heavy, not great to use. Collecting dust
Logitech G304 The price-to-performance king. Battle-tested legend
Logitech K380 Another price-to-performance king. Just wish it supported Unifying
Keychron K6 (Jingzao Edition) Garbage among garbage
HP 1136w Printer Has printed plenty of materials for me, plus a lot of copying and scanning

LobeChat Great developer ecosystem, full-featured. Unbeatable except for NextJS being resource-hungry
Dify The most full-featured AI workflow tool
ComfyUI Stable Diffusion image generation king
Cline AI coding tool for VSCode. Cursor still doesn’t feel natural to me
Gemini CLI For building small tools
Google One Done tinkering — ALL IN on Google 🐶
Antigravity Incredible. Opus quality is off the charts
Claude & GPT First-tier tools

MinerU Best PDF OCR tool out there. Recently added a desktop client and free tier
Bob With VLMs taking off, its moat isn’t as deep anymore