My Setup

I love looking at other peoples workspace setups. You can pickup some great tips by studying the way people configure and use their hardware and software. One of my favourite sites for this is Sweet Mac Setups hosted by Shawn Blanc. Following in Shawn’s style here are the details for my own personal setup:

What is your current setup?

My primary computer is a mid-2010 uni-body 13” MacBook Pro maxed out with 8GB of RAM connected to a 22” LG Flatron monitor. Internally it has a stock 256GB hard drive. I would love to upgrade to a SSD but the cost is too prohibitive at the moment. Hopefully this will change in the future.

I dislike mice so I use the Apple Magic Trackpad, the swipe, pinch and rotate gestures feel very natural to me. Previously, pointing duty was provided by a Logitech Marble Mouse.

For typing I use the thin Apple Wireless keyboard without the keypad, which matches the trackpad perfectly. I don’t use a keypad very often and I dislike the way it forces your hand to move further to use the mouse.

I love listening to music whilst coding so I also have a pair of Logitech X230 speakers connected to a sub-woofer for when the wife and children can stand the noise, otherwise I use a pair of Denon in-ear headphones for when a more stealthy approach is needed.

Network connectivity is provided by an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station connected via a dLAN plug to an ancient Draytek Router. Just works, although I wish my village exchange provided a wider pipe to the internet.

For backup, I use a Hitachi 1TB USB 2.0 simpledrive connected to a Dell Mini 9 running the FreeNAS operating system (it’s cunningly hidden behind the LCD panel). FreeNAS is wonderful way of setting up a NAS without paying a fortune for a Drobo, I can’t recommend it highly enough. It supports both hardware and software RAID, JBOD and ZFS. It also plays nicely with Mac’s via the AFP file protocol. It literally took 5 minutes to setup.