Sitting here in the Seattle airport in the midst of a very long travel delay. We are working in Anchorage this week and flights there have been delayed and cancelled all day due to a massive windstorm. Our flight was due to leave an hour ago. We have another six hours to wait. All good. Travelling in northern North America in the winter requires endless patience and the occasional bout of creative travel planning. There is nothing better than threading the needle to get the last seat. It’s a much better way to channel energy than getting angry at the weather.
So I was reflecting on some old blog posts and found this one from 2015 where I talked about my working tech set up. Back then it was kind of popular to share things like that on blogs. Ten years later it’s interesting to see what has changed.
Infrastructure
I have a full office now. Since our son moved out in 2020 I have occupied a downstairs bedroom which affords me a proper office chair, an adjustable desk and a space for two guitars, a digital keyboard and books. I need more shelves, as the piles accruing in the corners of the room are starting to give me anxiety.
Our internet comes through Rogers now. Since 2015 when I last documented this set up, Rogers has run fibre to our island, and bought out Shaw. Internet is reliable and high speed and we’ve had very very few problems.
When I’m home on Bowen Island, I often walk the 1.5 kms to village and work in our library which has just installed a booth for taking calls. It’s a good place to write and a fantastic community asset. I think public libraries are as important as schools, water systems, and ferries.
Hardware
My workhorse these days is a 2021 iMac. It’s the first desktops I’ve had in a while, but once the pandemic changed life forever, my MacBook Air could handle the load of a lot of video and the screen wasn’t big enough to host online. The desktop is starting to show its age, and I probably need to give it a good cleaning. My old MacBook Air failed me in 2022 and I replaced it with a new one then.
An Epson printer is mostly used for printing music these days. Almost everything I do is done digitally now.
I have a iPhone 13 which keeps me connected. I’v started weaning myself off it, so it currently sits in another room from where I am most of the time. Even still, it’s remarkable how much I use it. I have some social media presence and I read various newspapers and news sites most mornings. I am studying Italian on Duolingo and I’m a crossword fan. Tripit is how I keep my travel schedule straight.
I have a Kindle which holds documents and ebooks that I find on BookBub, as well as free ebooks from Project Gutenberg and elsewhere. I mostly read actual books, but the Kindle is still always in my backpack.
Basic apps
These days almost everything I do now is in the cloud, using apps and web tools. It’s pretty remarkable. Caitlin just bought a new laptop and it was so easy to open it up, download a few apps and get back to work. Back in the old days, doing migrations was a day of work. Instead of buying software outright these days, we have subscriptions.
Over the past few years I have migrated most stuff to the Apple Universe. If Apple has the app for it, I’m using it. Once Safari acquired the capability to to Voice Typing on Google Docs, that sealed the deal for me. Chrome is on board but very rarely used. For Google I do use Gmail still as my primary email address, but I read all my mail through Mac Mail and the Calendar is kept in iCal. The only reason to enter the Google verse is to set calendar dates and attach a Zoom meeting automatically. I wish Apple would bring that functionality to iCal.
I use Apple Maps for navigating because it has better integration with my calendar, but Google Maps tends to be a better option because I assume it has more data points, so the real time updates are useful. Also for driving in unfamiliar places, Google Maps tends to give clearer instructions with lane selection and the names of streets more constant than in Apple Maps.
Most of my writing is done on Google Docs. Especially since the pandemic, this just remains the easiest and most universal platform for collaboration. I still use Evernote for capturing and clipping web sites, articles and papers. It’s my digital library. However over the years it has become clunkier and clunkier and so I have moved my notes and reminders back to the Apple apps. It makes them easier to share with my partner too.
We use Zoom for video meetings and workshops, and Padlet and Miro as our white board collaborative spaces. Since Google Jamboards were discontinued, we’ve subscribed to Padlet and find their Sandbox app to be a very good substitute, and slightly more powerful. We are using Kajabi to manage our courses. I use NarraFirma for Participatory Narrative Inquiry projects and run a separate NarraFirma server for that work.
Apple Music is my preferred streaming platform. Not Spotify.
Web publishing and Social Media
If you are reading this, you will know that I still use WordPress as the engine for my blog. Folks seem to find posts here through Google searches, reposting to social media and subscription. I’ll do a separate post on my approach to blogging these days, but suffice to say I think that self publishing is probably more important than ever now. I keep an active set of blog feeds in NetNewsWire, which is my feed reader of choice these days.
I was a power Twitter user from near the beginning and build a decent following there. Musk’s take over ruined that as a useful app. The app has long ago been offloaded from my phone and my business and soccer accounts have both been made dormant. They will just sit there now.
Likewise I have gone off Facebook for almost everything but republishing blog post links and a few specific connections to communities I am a part of. I hate Facebook, and as Zuckerberg has firmly entrenched his presence in the gallery of fascist oligarch propagandists, it’s losing its usefulness daily. I despair how many continue people use that site as their entire experience of the web.
I use LinkedIn to share posts and find interesting stuff. It’s tough though. It’s like walking through the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul trying to make friends and have a good conversation while people constantly try to sell you stuff you don’t need.
So these days I have pledge not to invest in building a social network on any platform owned by a billionaire who can just change his mind on a whim. To that end you will find me on Mastodon, and specifically on the mstdn.ca instance which is large and inclusive and has a values statement I can support. On Mastodon I share links and engage in some conversation. I think of it as a true microblogging platform, so it compliments this one. Every month I publish a summary of links I find there on this blog.
My Mastodon feed is bridged to Bluesky so if you can follow me there if you like, if you prefer that app. I don’t engage in conversation there on that account.
You will find me active on Bluesky at my account devoted to my participation in the world of Canadian soccer.
Social Infrastructure
Since that post in 2015, things have changed and things have stayed the same. Still singing in local choirs, one based in our United Church and the other, Carmena Bowena, an a cappella Renaissance choir that performs locally. Things have changed since the pandemic, but village life is still the same. I feel less close to friends these days. I’m not drinking as much, so I don;t show up at the Pub, but I’m not averse to a spontaneous hour long cup of coffee, like I did yesterday.
My volunteer commitments have mostly wound down for now with the exception of TSS Rovers, the semi-professional soccer team that I co-own with 450 other shareholders. We are Canada’s first supporter owned soccer team and play in the Men’s and Women’s divisions in League 1 BC, basically the second tier of Canadian soccer. I’m a member of the leadership group for the Supporter’s Trust which represents the voice of the community owners on the Board. I absolutely love being a part of this.
Chris, great set-up. Thanks for the nerdy post.
Are you not concerned about privacy issues when using Google, as building profiles of people for advertising reasons is their main business model (as compared to Apple or even Microsoft)? I try to avoid Google as much as I can. I wouldn’t trust them not to collect and share my location data when using Google Maps to navigate or even worse, my email and documents. I‘m also using Apple Apps as much as I can. Contrary to you, I’m finding Apple Maps much clearer when driving. For work, I‘m stuck with Microsoft for now as it’s the platform of choice of my employer …
Cheers,
Marcus
I’m old enough to remember when Google’s motto was “Don’t Be Evil”. And I’m highly aware of how significantly they have broken that promise.
So yes I’m concerned. But perhaps I suffer the cynicism of our times and just use the tools minimally but when they suit my needs knowing full well I’m the product.
And for all of their evil, they did manage to figure out webmail. It has made my life immeasurably easier over the past 20 years of having a Gmail account. So that’s where we are. When I got it in 2003 or 4, it was still the Don’t B Evil stage. Friends I know have switched to hey.com.
My most frightening travel experience was flying into Anchorage. Six attempts in high wind. I sat next to a huge marine in uniform by number 4, I wanted to hold his hand.
We are miles apart politically these days but not in my heart and have many many happy memories of our friendship.
Here is to you dear Chris
Rob
My two hardest landings have been Kamloops and Kamloops. Tied with Thunder Bay.
Miles apart politically should just mean we have different ideas about how to live in a kind and thriving world, and I think you want that. I too value your friendship especially across our differences.
R.I.P. Jamboard. I recently discovered that Zoom’s new integrated whiteboard is actually pretty decent and straigthforward. However, its main drawback…. is that people can’t access it without a host (unless they’re part of your organization AND experienced users). That means no small-group work with a whiteboard without a facilitator… ?
Instead, we started using Canva’s whiteboard, which is similar in its features to Zoom; less simple than Jamboard, but accessible nonetheless.
I’ve found Miro to be a little too overwhelming, with too many features available on the screen, i.e. a confusing experience for one-time users in workshops. Maybe I’ve not been using it right though!
For email, when I was freelancing, I was using Proton, but the calendar features were not as convenient as Google Calendar. It may have improved since 2021. They have a Drive too now, but I’ve never used it. Data privacy is their main focus.