My Setup | Lachlan Harman
Who are you, and what do you do?
I’m Lachlan Harman. I’m a senior high school student, aspiring journalist, writer, and serial procrastinator. Sometimes I pretend to be good at games. Occasionally I record that.
What hardware are you using?
My main computer is a 13” MacBook Pro (2.3 Ghz Core i5, 4GB RAM) hooked up to a 23” Acer X243HQ Display (discontinued). This is pretty much the computer that I do most everything on. Browsing, email, music, writing, gaming and tinkering all happens right here, on this machine.
As a school student in New South Wales, I also have access to a Lenovo s10e (since evolved) 10” netbook with an old Atom processor and 2GB RAM, which our government laughably thinks can run the entire Adobe suite comfortably, when in fact it can barely run Microsoft Office. I use it to take notes in classes and seminars, and when I need more space in my bag for my metric crap-tonne of textbooks.
Other notable pieces of hardware include my 4th generation iPod Touch (8GB) that feeds tunes throughout my daily commute through a pair of Sennheiser HD 202’s, and an iPhone 3G that exists solely for text messaging. They all sit a $70 Belkin laptop/messenger bag (and my pockets) throughout the day.
And what software?
My MacBook is running Mac OS X Lion. My netbook is running Windows 7 Enterprise (urgh). Web browsing happens in Chrome. I’ve tried many times to switch to Safari, particularly when Chrome had no real Lion support, but I could never get used to using anything but Command+NUMBER to switch between tabs (What the hell even is CMD+Shift+Arrow? At least IE on my netbook has Ctrl+NUMBER!)
All my emails find their way into Sparrow on my Mac. I refuse to touch email on anything else, unless my iPod tells me it’s important and I’m walking in the door. I read my feeds in Reeder, on my Mac and my iPod. It is, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful pieces of software that I ever use.
I check Twitter using the official Twitter application on my Mac, and TweetBot on my iPod. Music plays in iTunes, movies play in VLC. There are a few tiny utilities on my Mac that deserve a mention, including JumpCut (clip boarder), Remind Me Later (quick entry to iCal), and Yoink (file moving helper).
Arguably most important in my life is the writing. On my Mac, I write stories in WriteRoom (which has become ten times as amazing on Lion), and essays in Pages. Things that I write for the web (read: my opinions that I want to throw at people) are written in MarkDown thanks to iA Writer, and homework and school notes are written in TextEdit. Anything that needs to go to school is either exported as a Word Document or a plain text file, then thrown on an 8GB SD for a file transfer into either my Documents folder or Microsoft Office OneNote (my favourite note-taking application ever).
Finally, the applications I run on my iPod: Agenda Calendar, Due, PasteBot, TakeFive, ReadMore, TripView and Attic.
What would be your dream setup?
A MacBook Air and an iPad, with decent email and web browsing applications (read: Chrome and Sparrow), native OneNote support and Scrivener. I honestly don’t see myself wanting much more than this, besides an external display for the MBA. I love light computers, but I love pixels.
