Tools

I enjoy learning how other people work, what hardware, software, tools, and gadgets they use. Here, I present my tools.

Home Office

Jarvis Bamboo Standing Desk by Fully – bamboo version of the desk in 140 cm with a black frame, a cable tray, and a programmable memory handset
Capisco Chair by HÅG – black leather and a black frame
Black Leather Desk Pad – 75 cm
MacBook Stand – my MacBook Pro 16” rests on a silver aluminum stand. I usually don’t type on the build-in keyboard, but on a mechanical keyboard. For me my MacBook is a second screen.
BenQ Screenbar Plus
Anker PowerConf C200

Mac mini M2 Pro – 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD
MacBook Pro 16” – 16 GB RAM
Two Apple Magic Mouse – one in white and one in black. Don’t ask me why, but it has to do with Apple’s design decisions. 😅
Keychron K1 Wireless Mechanical Keyboard
ZSA Voyager – split mechanical keyboard; still learning to type on it
LG 4K Monitor – 31.5”
Creative Pebble Loudspeakers
Sonos Sound System – 2 Sonos Five, 1 Playbar, 1 Play:3, and 1 Play:1
Apple AirPods Pro 2 – iPhone 16 Pro
iPad Pro M2
Apple Pencil
Apple Watch Series 10 - black titanium version with a black milanese loop
Synology DiskStation DS220+ – Two 6 TB hard drives in a RAID system with Docker containers as a media server, cloud backup solution, and for network-wide ad blocking with Pi-hole.
Raspberry Pi 4 – 8 GB with Umbrel, running a Bitcoin Node, Home Assistant, Penpot, Pi-hole, Tailscale, and other apps

Affinity Suite – Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, and Affinity Publisher
Procreate
Eagle – storing design assets, like images, videos, fonts, and illustrations; I use it every day and have over 40,000 assets saved.
Typeface – font manager

Obsidian – my favorite note-taking app. I use it for all my 5,000+ notes. I pay for the encrypted Sync service to have a backup and to support the developers.
iA Writer
DEVONthink – store documents and reference material
Reeder – read my RSS feeds
Feedbin – my RSS service. From there, I transfer everything I starred automatically (with a self-hosted n8n) to Raindrop.io.
Raindrop.io – my favorite app to save any bookmark and to find anything again in seconds. I have more than 30,000 bookmarks.
Readwise Reader – read articles, ebooks, 𝕏 posts, watch YouTube videos with AI enhanced transcription, or use the AI voice feature to listen to articles. When I highlight something, it’s automatically saved to Readwise.
Readwise - review all my highlights from books, articles, and notes. I love the daily review and the flashcards.

I use many extra tools, too many to name them all. You can read a longer article about all the apps, tools & services I use.

Raycast – Raycast Pro is my most-used app, with its AI feature. I love the app and use it every day. I pay for the Pro version to get access to a lot of different AI models, like ChatGPT, Claude, Llama, and many others. I wrote a long article about how I use Raycast. I also use the iOS and iPad versions.
Things – my to-do app for years; I appreciate its simplicity and design.
Brave Browser – I’m a fan of Brave for its security, privacy, and built-in ad-blocking. I used many other browsers, but Brave is just the best for me. Brave Search is my default search engine.
Proton Mail – all my email communication
Proton Pass – my password manager
Proton VPN – VPN for all my internet connections
Tailscale – Create a VPN network for my home and devices
Anki – I use it to learn Japanese vocabulary and poems
Yoink – store files temporarily. It’s a good tool to drag and drop files between apps.
Karabiner-Elements – remap keys on my keyboards. I use it to remap the Caps Lock key to the Escape key, to use Vim keybindings in nearly every app, and to type the German Umlauts with a single key press.