This is a little homage to ‘The Setup’ which is “a collection of nerdy interviews, asking people from all walks of life about the software and hardware they use.”
So here’s mine, complete with awesome looking profile photo. ((coming soon))
Who are you and what do you do?
Hi, my name is Mathew Packer. I’m a husband and father primarily, I also work as the distribution and operations manager for a cardiology-based medical company called SCHILLER Australia. In my spare time I like to shoot photos and videos, mostly of my son at the moment because there are so many 1st’s, and on weekends I like to play golf which I am occasionally good enough to win our local comp.
What hardware are you using?
At home I currently use a 13" MacBook Pro that I’ve thrown an SSD into, along side that I have a Mac Mini that mostly works as an iTunes server sharing music, movies, television shows, photos, etc. to a couple of AppleTV 2′s, as well as it being where my wife, my son, and I sync our iPhones and iPads.
All of this is backed up locally with a 2TB Time Capsule, using Time Machine, and on a weekly basis I copy the latest Time Machine bundles to a USB drive which I store off site at a top secret location.
Input wise I use Apple bluetooth keyboards and Magic Trackpad where needed.
At the moment I don’t have any speakers set up for listening to music whilst tapping away, but I use a set of JVC noise cancelling headphones that I picked up duty free in Brisbane Airport…they were cheap, but they do a good enough job.
Photo and video wise I mostly use my iPhone 4S as a quick point and shoot, and in lieu of a proper dSLR I shoot most of my photos on the glorious Panasonic Lumix GF1
At work we use Apple gear too, on my desk I have a fairly new Apple 27” LED Cinema Display where I plug my MacBook Pro into.
I like Apple products because there’s no screwing around when setting things up, everything just works together nicely…..and just works. The obvious barrier to entry is often the price, but if you want gear to just work then I always recommend you buy Apple.
And what software?
Aperture for managing my photo and video library, with Final Cut X used for the video editing part of that equation along with a load of different editing and effect plugins for both applications.
For the few websites I build and maintain for people I use a combination of Textmate, Transmit, and Coda.
I’m a big fan of both Simplenote and Evernote for keeping my little scraps of notes and random information organised. Omnifocus keeps me on top of my tasks and projects, 1Password gives me secure passwords, and other than that it’s just the built-in apps like Mail, iTunes, and iCal.
On my iPhone and iPad I use a myriad of photo apps, Camera+, Autostitch and TiltShiftGen being my favourites. Evernote, Simplenote and Omnifocus are must haves for me seeing as I heavily use the desktop versions. I love love love Instapaper for reading long form articles, and for keeping up with the daily blogs I use Reeder.
Just before Christmas I bought myself a new Amazon Kindle as I found that I just kept getting more and more distracted by other apps on my iPad that I was barely getting any reading done. So far I’ve demolished 3 books in 3 weeks ((at the time of writing)) as I’ve been able to eliminate the distraction of Words With Friends, Ascension, and a couple of iOS apps that just seem to suck me in.
At work we use Lightspeed for all of our quoting and selling, Daylite for managing customer information, and the other standards like the iWork suite, Mail.app, etc. though recently I’ve been playing around with 37 Signal’s Highrise as I’ve had issue after issue with syncing our Daylite database across our VPN.
Both at home and work I store lots and lots in Dropbox, I have separate accounts for both so that I don’t get tempted to do work work at home. Anyway, Dropbox has saved us huge amounts of money at work as we were able to scrap a server and a back up device. It’s made our team so mobile that most of us don’t travel with laptops anymore as we’re able to do pretty much everything with our iPhones and iPads through the Dropbox app.
What would be your dream setup?
The only thing I’m missing at the moment is a beefy computer for editing photos and video, the MacBook just doesn’t cut it when I’m pushing a bulk load of pixels around, so the next Mac coming on stream will most likely be the 27" iMac Quadcore i7 with 8GB of ram, an SSD to boot from, and a 2TB hard drive for storage.
Once I can get my hands on one of those I think I’ll have all my bases covered.
Oh and I’d also like a set of Bose Companion 5 speaker sets.
