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How I Compute (2026)

  • #blog-challenge-2026
  • #computers

See also: /uses

Personal

Unfortunately I think the computer I use the most is my iPhone 15 Pro Max. It’s a really great phone. The OLED display is probably the best screen in my house. I like that it’s completely waterproof so I can get great pics of the caustic action at my local swimming pool. The speakers are great. I really like the telephoto lens, it’s just super versatile. I’ve been slightly tempted to upgrade to one of the newer phones but I just see no reason. My battery health is getting down to around 80% so it probably needs to be replaced soon. I don’t use a screen protector or a case and there are some scratches and dings but I’ve been actually blown away at how durable it is. I’ve dropped it from my lifted Land Cruiser directly to the concrete floor in my garage more than once and it’s just fine. I guess we’ll see what phone they come out with next. I’m slightly tempted just to have the latest and greatest and that orange color on the current pro model looks pretty slick. Now that the MacBook Neo has proved that the phone chips are more than capable of running macOS, I would really love it if Apple added the ability to dock the phone with Thunderbolt. If that happened, I could probably get rid of my personal laptop.

My primary daily driver is a 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M3 Max and 36 GB RAM. Before that I had a 14-inch M1 Pro, and before that I had a 13-inch MacBook Air M1. My job provided me a 16-inch M4 Pro with 48 GB RAM. I asked for a 14-inch since my desk and dock are set up nicely for that size, but they sent a 16-inch anyways. Oh well. The laptops are docked about 90% of the time. Having a single cable to switch between my work and personal machine is pretty slick. If you want to know the exact specifics of my dock and everything connected to it, see my /uses page diagram. I’ve noticed an annoyance with my current dock which is that if the battery is low and is actively being charged by the dock, it will disconnect and reconnect on its own. I’ve had the dock for a few years now, so I suppose the computers are trying to draw more power than it can provide. I’m mildly in the market for a new Thunderbolt dock but I haven’t seen anything that seems really excellent yet. I’d love it if Apple made a decent dock. I think it would be super cool if you could use an iMac, Mac Mini, or Mac Studio as a dock for your laptop somehow.

I use an Apple Studio Display (not the newest version that adds downstream Thunderbolt ports). I use its speakers and camera for work calls. For music, I’ve got a pretty decent HiFi desk setup. Having “good” speakers at my desk is really amazing. It’s crazy how much clarity and detail good speakers add to music I’m already familiar with, even at very low volumes!

I’m using an 8BitDo “Retro Keyboard” and “Retro R8 Mouse”. I really like the keyboard, I own several variations and I’ve used quite a few mechanical keyboards from various providers over the years. The keyboard comes with big “super buttons” that plug in with a 3.5mm “headphone” jack and can be mapped super quickly to any key. I use this a lot when gaming with my 5-year-old son. We’ve been playing the Master Chief collection and I’ll map shoot and jump to buttons for him and it works out super nicely. The mouse is a newer addition. I had been using Logitech MX Master mice for about 10 years and the latest Master 3S I owned just really did not work very well. The connection seemed incredibly weak. Logitech’s software is also awful and wants to run all the time. I cycled through a Magic Mouse but it hurt my hand. I even tried 3D printing an ergonomic grip and it was better but still not great. I don’t trust Bluetooth for peripherals, and it also throws a wrench when I try to dock multiple computers since it is paired directly to the laptop and not the dock. I think there is actually a way in macOS to use an external Bluetooth dongle and pair a Bluetooth mouse to it, but the Magic Mouse is bad enough I decided it wasn’t worth it. For a while I used an extremely cheap no-name two button wireless mouse and I actually liked it, but it was a little small and used a AA battery that was annoying to deal with. Being a fan of the 8BitDo keyboard, I was intrigued by their mouse so I picked up the transparent green OG Xbox variant when it went on sale. It has two buttons on each side that can be mapped to anything, very similar to the side buttons on the MX Master. I was surprised to see that the 8BitDo software actually worked well enough on macOS to get them mapped. On the MX Master I mapped the thumb button to Mission Control (the same thing that a three-finger swipe up is mapped to on the trackpad). On the R8 mouse I have one mapped to that, and the other mapped to shift which allows me to scroll horizontally using the scrollwheel. It works very well for me. The mouse is designed to be symmetrical for lefties so the buttons on the other side aren’t used or mapped to anything.

I also have an iPad Mini that doesn’t get much use. I’m just not an iPad person. I use it to connect to a TV to show a Keynote slideshow (using my phone as the remote) when I teach Sunday School at church. That’s pretty much it. I’ve used it as an external display for my computer sometimes but it didn’t stick.

Homelab

I have a custom-built NAS/media server. It lives down in my networking closet. It has an Intel i3-10105, 8 GB RAM, and 4x 8 TB HDDs in a RAID 5 configuration, for a total usable size of 24.00 TB. After playing with a few NAS operating systems, I finally settled on OpenMediaVault. It strikes the right balance of convenient web UI on top of a basic Debian host that I can still SSH into and do whatever I need to do. The kids in the Bullpen are all hyped on Proxmox and I’m kind of envious but for now I’ll keep it as is. It primarily hosts Plex, but also hosts WireGuard for a road-warrior setup (run all traffic through WireGuard when connected to a remote network). WireGuard has served me quite well and I feel a lot better about using foreign networks to do “real” work. I’ve even upgraded the firmware on my home router remotely which was quite thrilling! I also run a few other Docker containers such as Caddy (reverse proxy so I can just go to https://server.home instead of IPs and ports, which is mostly to get Safari to remember unique credentials better), dynamic DNS worker for WireGuard, Immich to backup iCloud photos, and Syncthing to automatically pull in my latest DVD rips when I add something to my primary machine. I find OMV’s Docker offering to be good enough. I used to use Portainer to manage it with a web UI, but OMV added their own and it works well enough for me. It’s been fun to play around with random Docker containers for various things like a Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force server.

For several years I ran OpenWRT on a MikroTik Hex S RB760iGS and overall liked it. However about a month ago I was noticing my speeds weren’t anywhere near the 1 Gbps connection I pay for and I was getting an F on the waveform bufferbloat test. It’s realistic in my household to have online gaming, video streaming, and work video calls all happening at the same time, so I decided to upgrade it. After spending way too long trying to find the “best” OpenWRT router (router only, no WLAN needed since that is handled by dedicated wireless APs), I found an open-box GMKtec NucBox G9 on eBay for about $180 shipped so I pulled the trigger. It’s basically a bog-standard Intel N150 box designed to be used as an NVMe NAS with 4x NVMe slots, but as Jeff Geerling found out the thermal performance in that scenario just isn’t up to snuff. For my use I didn’t need any of the features besides the dual 2.5 Gbps Ethernet ports powered by two dedicated Intel i226Vs. My home network isn’t actually 2.5 Gbps yet, but my NAS supports it and having a nice wired connection between my MacBooks and it feels like something that will be cool eventually. Obviously this little machine is absolutely and completely overkill for OpenWRT but it really seemed like there wasn’t really anything good in between the ~$50 MikroTik I had been running and a ~$200 single-board computer. I also told myself the NucBox could be repurposed more easily than some ARM-based networking equipment. After getting OpenWRT installed and moving all my configs over, I was super happy to see my bufferbloat test go from an F to an A/A+, in addition to going from about 150/200 Mbps download to 900 Mbps. I’m using about 120 MB of the 12 GB RAM the system has, and the built-in 64 GB eMMC storage is plenty for OpenWRT. I really couldn’t be happier with my choice, the price I paid, and the upgrade in general. I’m still learning OpenWRT so I’m eager to optimize and tune it even more as I learn!

Unfortunately WiFi is extremely closed source and proprietary. I’m actively investigating hardware that I could flash OpenWRT on for a multi-AP mesh network, but currently I use an off-the-shelf Chinese brand of APs for this. I don’t even want to say the name because I don’t trust them at all. I could go Ubiquiti but I’m not rich enough yet. Yes, I could get used enterprise stuff, but I don’t want to. Trading closed-source Chinese hardware for closed-source American hardware isn’t even really an improvement in my eyes.

Software

The company I work for is super hyped on “AI”, as most companies currently are. I’ve been using Claude Code at work a lot. It’s fine. I don’t pay for it and I’m holding my breath for the Great Rug Pull, but a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush I suppose. I don’t want to talk about AI anymore.

I like GNU nano. I’m writing this in it. I like Ghostty with a “quake-style” dropdown window. I use Homebrew for package installation, but I’m kind of getting the itch to do something crazy like replace it with something I built myself. Just one of those things I have rattling around in my brain. I think using git is not the best decision and it makes Homebrew slower and harder to use than it should be. On the other hand, I really like Alpine Linux and especially Alpine Package Keeper (APK), which OpenWRT (thankfully) recently switched to. It’s super fast. I tried Nix, etc. and got lost in the complexity.

When I started software development professionally in ~2014, I used Sublime Text because it was really fast and clean. Then I used GitHub’s Atom because I wanted to be edgy. Then I drank the Kool-Aid and used VSCode, but it got slow and bloated. Then I tried out Panic’s Nova but it was too buggy for me and also not that fast. Then I remembered how nice Sublime Text was so I went back and I haven’t looked back. Whenever I can, I use Apple’s SFMono font and Apple’s Xcode Light and Dark themes. If Xcode themes aren’t available, I’ll use GitHub’s. If those aren’t available I’ll just use nothing/the default.

For pretty much everything I can, I use Apple’s software. This includes things like Logic Pro, Keynote, and Safari. I even use Mail.app. For a lot of Electron-based apps, I’ll open the web version in Safari and “pin” it to my desktop so it uses a Safari web view instead of Chromium. This is true for things like Discord as well as ClickUp (which we use at work and is by far the worst software I’ve ever had to use). An exception is GitHub Desktop, which has been my preferred git client for quite a while now, and is Electron-based.

Etc

I don’t want my vehicle to have a computer in it. For this reason, I drive a 1994 Toyota. It technically does have a “computer” but I think the amount of “computing” that “computer” does by today’s terms isn’t really a “computer”. I did put an Apple CarPlay head unit in it, so my phone computer can show me navigation and music.

I have a few Apple HomePods around my house. My kids like to listen to podcasts and audiobooks as they fall asleep. They’re not amazing, but I trust them a little more than Amazon’s and Google’s options. I really like Apple TV (the hardware product, not the streaming service). A few months ago some kids threw a drumstick at my TV and it shattered. Apple TV made replacing it very fast and simple. No logins, no app downloads, and my TV doesn’t have access to my network.

For a while I tried to use HomeKit smart switches for everything but found them to be terrible. I don’t trust Bluetooth, I don’t trust WiFi, and I especially don’t trust random third parties to make network-enabled devices. I recently uninstalled about 30 WiFi smart switches that after a few months all disconnected and reset themselves. Specifically they were Meross brand WiFi HomeKit switches. Absolute garbage! Total waste of money. They were cheap though, and you get what you pay for! I’m mildly interested in the Inovelli White series, which use Matter over Thread. Thread uses some form of Bluetooth Low Energy and needs a “router” but HomePods and Apple TVs are Thread routers. The result is that they are wireless but shouldn’t congest the 2.4 GHz network nearly as bad as traditional WiFi switches. At the same time, I’m not running out to buy them.

Conclusion

The amount of software and computers I encounter day to day has never been higher. It feels like everywhere I go, there’s some computer controlling the interactions I have in the real world. Whether it’s waiting 5 seconds for a payment to authorize before I’m allowed to walk away from a cash register, or simply being unable to check in for a doctor’s appointment because “the system is having issues today”, I feel slightly cursed. I feel a weight because I myself am directly responsible for at least some of those computerized systems that have bugs and lower the quality of people’s days. I really do my best to ship high quality, meaningful, bug-free code. I try to always think about the end users. But I’m also a small cog in a big machine.

Rather than being obsessive about technology, I attempt to be deliberate. I imagine how many lines of code are required to power my everyday life, and I try to minimize it. “Do I really need this? Do I want to have a dependency on this box for my personal wellbeing?” I wouldn’t even call it minimalism. It’s more like pragmatism. I’m biased against computers. Computers are like my friends - chosen carefully but deeply engaged. I’d rather have fewer, stronger friendships than more weak friendships. When my water heater unexpectedly goes out, I want to be able to call a friend who answers on the first ring. Computers are exactly the same. Empower me, don’t distract me. Reliability is more important than hype and constant change.

The best computer I have is my brain. This is where my ideas begin, where they take shape, and where they die. Everyone has a brain. When I defer computing from my brain to some silicon, things get worse. Imagine receiving a push notification every time you needed to take a breath, or beat your heart. Machines can’t think. They can’t come up with ideas. They can’t tell us the answers, and they aren’t a crystal ball. It doesn’t matter how much data we feed into them. My brain is the ultimate computer and I want to make sure I’m using it as effectively as I can.

My friends and I decided to do a weekly blog challenge for the month of April, 2026! Each week, one of us chooses a prompt and we all write posts.

For week 3, I chose the prompt:
"How do you compute?"

My friends' posts this week:

My other posts in this series: