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People email me all the time to ask how I do this. It's easier to talk about tool than methods, so while I can't really explain how I do this to you in any meaningful way -- beyond saying, I just write, take pictures and combine them into stories, which I recognize is not particularly helpful -- here's a look at the tools I use instead. Because, consumerism!
## Hardware
### Notebook
My primary recording device is my notebook, which is generally a Moleskin (I know, I know) though it could also be whatever I happened to grab on my way out of the bus. I'm not all that picky about notebooks, but I could devote thousands and thousands of works to pens. At the moment I'm pretty happy with the Uniball Vision which fills my two primary requirements: 1) it writes well 2) I can buy it almost anywhere for next to nothing.
### laptop
My main laptop is a piece of still-somewhat-functional junk I bought off eBay for $300. It's a Lenovo x230 from, uh, maybe 2012 or so? I upgraded the hard drives and put in an HD screen, which brought the total outlay to $500, which is really way too much to spend on a computer these days, but my excuse is that I make money using it.
Why this particular laptop? It's small and the battery lasts quite a while (like 15 hrs when I'm writing, more 12 when editing photos). It also has a removable battery and can be upgraded by the user. I packed in almost 3TB of disk storage, which is nice.
Still, I could get by with less. I should get by with less.
### Camera
I have used many cameras at different points in time on this site. I went around the world the first time with a Canon point and shoot of some wort. Then I got a Panasonic GF-1, which I loved. There's also quite a few pics taken with cameras I was testing for Wired. That said, since 2016 I've been shooting primarily with two cameras, both Nikon.
The first is the digital, a Nikon D600 (eBay, about $600). About 90% of the time I have a very fast, lightweight Nikon 35mm f/2 lens on it. This is what I use for taking pictures of the kids and walking around towns. For landscapes I generally use the Nikon 20mm f/2.8, a manual focus lens that I really, really love. Other lenses include a Nikon 70-300 zoom I use for the occasional wildlife shot, and a Rokinon 12mm Fisheye lens for shooting in tight spaces like our RV.
The other camera is 35mm film, a Nikon FE that I picked up off eBay (notice a running theme here? Buy used) for $75, which blows my mind since once upon a time as a teenager I worked for months to afford nearly the same camera. Anyway, I worry that all the digital photos will disappear one day so I wanted to leave behind some physical artifacts for my kids to dig through later in life. I typically process the color film at costco in the U.S. and send off of the black and white to a lab. But the b&w is really expensive so I mainly shoot color these days. A handful of the prints stay with us in the bus, the rest are shipped to relatives for relatively safe keeping.
### Phone/Tablet/drone/wrist tracking device thingy
Don't have one. Yeah I know, I'm one of those people. We pay for everything in cash too. Terrible.
## Software
The laptop runs Arch Linux because once I set it up I never have to think about it again. Because I test software for a living I also have a partition that hosts a revolving door of other Linux distros that I use from time to time, but never when I want to get work done. When I want to get work done, I use Arch.
I don't run a desktop, just a window manager (Openbox) with a menubar (tint2). I launch appsand other stuff with dmenu.
Almost everything I do is done inside a terminal (urxvt) the command line. I write in Vim. For email I use mutt. I read RSS feeds with newsbeuter and I listen to music via mpd. I also have a command line calculator and a locally-hosted dictionary that I use pretty regularly.
I do use a few GUI apps: Tor for browsing the web, Darktable and GIMP for editing photos, Stellarium for learning more about the night sky, and LibreOffice Calc for speadsheets.
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