Hardware

Mobile Devices

  • 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

Audio

  • 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

Camera

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

Computers

  • 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

Peripherals

  • 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

Software

AI Tools

  • 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

OCR 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

Productivity

  • Homebrew Package manager — can also install desktop apps
  • VSCode My primary IDE. Plugin ecosystem and setup cost are minimal
  • iTerm2 Free and great terminal
  • Flexoki Easy-on-the-eyes reading color scheme
  • Powerlevel10k Fancy terminal bling
  • Meslo Nerd Font Coding font
  • Alfred Productivity tool with simple workflow capabilities
  • Rectangle Window management
  • Keka Free, easy-to-use archive utility
  • NetNewsWire Free RSS reader
  • Reader Classic The cleanest RSS reader on iOS

Multimedia

  • IINA Clean, easy-to-use video player
  • Infuse Go-to player for Apple TV
  • VLC Feature-rich recording tool
  • BlackHole Audio routing tool
  • yt-dlp YouTube video downloader

Debugging

  • Fastfetch Terminal info tool
  • Btop Server monitoring
  • Stats Open-source, minimal monitoring tool
  • Mockoon API mocking tool
  • Wireshark Packet analyzer
  • RapidAPI Free API management tool

Notes

  • Obsidian Clean local Markdown editor
  • Apple Notes Simple and straightforward
  • Typecho Powers this blog