Who are you, and what do you do?

I'm Chris Finazzo. A library and communications guy by day and web technology nerd by night (and weekends). I go by @chrisfinazzo in the usual places online.

What hardware do you use?

Since 2007, I have almost exclusively used Apple computers and devices. My primary machine these days is a 2020 13" MacBook Pro. It's one of the 4 port USB-C models whose only customization was a 2 TB SSD.¹ I still keep around the hard disk from a Dell Latitude D610 - the first laptop that I took to college - for those rare instances when I need to need to do something with Windows.

I carry an iPhone 14 Pro with me wherever I go. An iPad Air 2 fulfills my browsing and reading needs when I'm away from the laptop. After a few years with an Apple Watch SE, I traded up to the Series 9 in December 2023.

Local backups are done through Time Machine and a Western Digital drive which is connected via USB. Backblaze handles sending bits safely to the cloud.

My current router is a Linksys WRT 1900 AC. Although I try not to use them, any printing is done through a set of HP printers - an OfficeJet Pro 6978 or an OfficeJet Pro 9015, both of which are connected via Wi-Fi to the 1900AC.²

And what software?

To the extent that I can, all writing and coding is done in BBEdit. I run this site using Jekyll and a combination of other scripts, written in zsh inside a Rakefile. For most things, Homebrew is my package manager of choice. The lone exception is if I am working on a Standard Ebooks project, which uses Python for its toolset. This particular set of scripts is accessed via a virtual environment managed by PIPX.³

Just in case, I still keep around a version of John's Markdown script for those times when I need to transform something on the fly. All of this work is versioned using Git.

I browse the web using Safari, but keep Firefox and Chrome around for their excellent development tools.

On iOS, most of my time is spent in Audible, Mail, NetNewsWire, Overcast and a constantly changing selection of games.

What would be your dream setup?

I have so many complaints about the tools I use that it's absurd. That said, the biggest improvement I would want is a faster network connection. In an ideal scenario, this would be a wired connection for any computer and all other devices would use the fastest wireless connection that they support.