Things I Use

I use a Keychron Q11 75% size split mechanical keyboard.

The split form factor makes a notable difference in shoulder tension based on my arm placement and the stress accumulated through the day.

The board is hot swap and I'm currently using Kailh Box V2 Red (40g) switches from Keychron. I'm a huge fan of linear switches for both gaming and typing. The light weight is comfortable and doesn't fatigue me after a long day.

For keycaps I have the long awaited DSA KeroKeroKeys, which are extremely green and frog themed. The frog-child within me is thrilled, and my green-loving side is quite happy as well. I only use DSA profile keycaps because I think they're both more comfortable to type on and easier to use effectively on a keyboard with such a weird layout.

I'm a total freak about mice. I love buying and trying mice. The first gaming mouse I loved was the Logitech MX518, and it's a far cry from what I go for these days. I think my grip style would be classified as "relaxed claw grip", because I don't like scrunching up my index/middle fingers super hard near the top of the mouse, but I also don't put a lot of my upper palm on the mouse. I usually touch the mouse with the right side of my upper palm. I like when the rear of the mouse fits snugly into the base of my palm. I refuse to click the mouse wheel with my finger tip, opting for hitting it with the pad of my index finger.

I find it really hard to decide which to keep using, and unfortunately I go back and forth between mice a lot... I don't think this is the #1 most comfortable mouse I've used, but it's close, and I love that it comes in green.

Honorable mention to the Lamzu Thorn, the Pulsar X2V1, and the Razer Viper V3 Pro.

My computer display is the ASUS ROG Strix (XG27UCG). It's a 27" 3840×2160 (4K) 120 Hz display. I use it at perfect 200% scaling for a large retina quality display. The fast refresh rate is harder to hit in games, but it looks good anywhere you can get it.

I use the Koss KPH40 as my all day headphone for video calls, music, and gaming. I have modded them with the Yaxi Porta Pro earpads, and a 3.5mm audio cable extension.

They are lighter than a feather, never fall off, barely put any pressure on my head, look nice, are durable, and sound pretty good! And that's all for $40 USD on Amazon if you're lucky enough to get them on sale. The replacement pads were $10 USD.

Given that they're on-ear headphones, I can hear myself perfectly for work calls or voice chat while gaming. They sound incredible for music! Maybe for gaming you could want a bit of high end for clarity, but they're very easy listening. My only audio complaint is that certain deeper frequencies when speaking can cause a strange rattle in the driver that's distracting. I never notice it in music though.

A high end prebuilt gaming PC. I used to build my own PCs, but these days it's not that much more money to get a good prebuilt, and it saves a lot of time and headache if parts arrive dead—or worse—crash your PC randomly.

• Intel Core i7-13700KF
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti
• 32 GB RAM

I was an early adopter of VS Code, back when Atom was extremely popular. Atom's slow performance and constantly breaking plugin system made me eager to leave it. Before that I had used Sublime Text, which is the gold standard for fast editors in my experience. My main problem was the janky plugin system.

Before all of that I used vim for like 8 years, but I left it behind the moment I saw multi-cursor editing in Sublime Text. I'm happy to be living in the modern era now lol.

Ever since Firefox showed up and introduced tabs and fast web browsing, I've been a huge fan. There was a while where Firefox was notably slower than Chrome, and I jumped ship. After they fixed performance issues I came back. I love that they're privacy focused and really care about users in a way that Google never will.

I was an early adopter of Discord, just a few months after it was released. Even back then, it was obvious that using Slack for non-work chats was not a good idea. And for voice chat across games, my gaming clan was using... Ventrilo, or "Vent" as everyone called it. Vent had (has?) some awful Windows 95-ish interface, though it did technically get the job done.

Discord is a lot less cool now that it's ubiquitous and desperately trying to squeeze money out of its audience, but it still seems like a relatively unchallenged tool for doing online gaming with folks.

It also ends up being a de-facto global direct message app since so many people have it, even if they're not gamers. Plus, the emojis are super fun.

I started using this because of some friends who use it. Honestly I kinda hate it, but it's cool that it has end-to-end encryption (though it's not open source). I love the sticker packs and privacy, but very few people have it, and it's kind of horrible on desktop.

I was thrilled when 1Password went cross platform, finally letting me ditch LastPass's awful user interface. I know some people are upset with 1Password's rewrite as a universal app using web tech rather than maintaining separate desktop apps for each platform, but I think they've done a good job making it feel relatively native and snappy.

Honestly I don't really love either of these, but I need to use them. I'm a sicko about buying and owning actual music files (like the times of old! remember the iPod?). Sadly, music apps aren't very popular any more with music streaming dominating the landscape. Musicbee for Windows is obtuse but works well. Doppler for Mac is pretty polished, and the only music player for Mac I currently like.

I have a few requirements for music apps: gapless playback, and the ability to browser albums by album artist. It doesn't sound like much, but many players fail to have both of those features. It seems a lot of players are very "playlist" and "file system" focused. I usually just queue up a few albums I like, rather than curating songs for a playlist I will use again.

I love Bandcamp, but they don't usually have big label music. I used to use iTunes or Amazon to purchase DRM free files for those, but their UIs are increasingly shoving music streaming down our throats. I recently discovered Qobuz, which seems to do a good job of just letting you buy DRM free music files in peace.

Extremely cute, snappy, and functional app for making pixel art. It's so fast and easy that I actually use it for general image editing too, as long as the files aren't too large. I also have Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo, but I rarely use either of them.