Joshua Topolsky's setup | Hacker News Reader

Joshua Topolsky's setup

joshua.topolsky.usesthis.com

30 pointsg3orge15 comments

Utterly unremarkable. Most of the non-tech posts can be reduced to "MB(A) plus Photoshop/text editor".

The point of the usesthis.com site is to show what tools people use to really get things done. Josh's post (and some others on the site) proves that you don't need massive or custom setups to get ridiculous amounts of work done.

proves that you don't need massive or custom setups to get ridiculous amounts of work done

unless you're running 3d rendering farm or massive biologic/physics simulations, why would you?

most stuff most people do can be done with any <10year old machine.

I like how Mr. Topolsky's dream setup would be something even more minimal. I wish I could be fully productive with just an iPad (arguably the most minimal device). iOS is not quite there yet, but it's getting closer every year.

The most interesting thing to me was the lag between the interview and posting it. The post date is February 15th; in the interview, Topolsky mentions that he is looking forward to the Galaxy Nexus LTE version.

The LTE version was widely available at the end of December. That's when I bought one, in a physical store.

I expect that they're managing the speed of release of interviews so that they don't run dry unexpectedly... but it feels like newspaper journalism to me, rather than web speed.

'They' = me. :) I feel bad there's such a lag, but publishing three a week (and as a side project) actually ends up being a lot of work, so I've got a backlog I'm trying to work through. Frustrating, but there it is.

Most surprising part: he's a journalist, and he uses TextEdit. (Although he uses something else for longer pieces, he mentioned TextEdit first).

I love TextEdit. I even use it for creating PDFs. Of course it is bare bones but I like that and I don't need fancy features for writing simple text. When I do, I just use vim.

Lack of ability to display margins (whitespace) (when editing plain text) kills it for me.

Lurkers: you know how the occasional web page has text that starts right at the left border of the window? That.

Since TextEdit is open source, I could add margins to it, but . . .

Wow, I didn't know TextEdit was open source.

/Developer/Examples/TextEdit

Since it mostly just wraps the closed-source standard Cocoa text system, it isn't that big of a deal.

Wow, I didn't know it was open-source. Just looked it up and I had no idea it could read/write Word XLM, Office Open XML and OpenDocument Text either! Learn something new everyday...

I'm not sure that's too surprising. Unlike someone writing papers or books, a journalist generally just hands over text to an editor, and someone else deals with layout, typeface, and so on.

If you are looking for a backpacks try Delsey. I used one fromaInsect series for more than 5 years, but recently the zipper died (replaced later), so I changed it for new one. It has very sturdy material, absolutely minimalistic design, (although new one has a bit too much sections), expansion possibilities (whenever you need to shop or travel).

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