Things

Updated April 2026

Compute

• Alienware Area-51 (Windows) — Intel Ultra 9 285K, 64GB RAM, RTX 5090 32GB. Primary machine for development, local LLM inference, and games. Loud under load, but nothing else comes close for local model work.
• Mac mini M4 — 16GB RAM. Runs headless 24/7 via SSH. Handles background agents and anything that needs to stay on. Silent and invisible.
• MacBook Air M3 — 16GB / 512GB. Travel and coffee shop machine. Good enough for writing and light dev, never gets hot.

Displays

• ASUS ROG Swift PG32UCDM — 32" 4K OLED, 240Hz. Main monitor. Colors are excellent, motion is flawless, burn-in hasn't been an issue so far.
• LG 27" 4K HDR — Secondary display. Nothing special, but reliable for reference windows and chat.

Mobile

• Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge — Primary phone. Thin and light, surprisingly comfortable for a daily driver.
• iPhone Air — Second phone. Camera, notes, and Apple ecosystem things.

AI

The Windows workstation runs Ollama with the RTX 5090 when I want inference local. The Mac mini connects over Tailscale as a client for agents and automation. Heavier work routes to MiniMax in the cloud.

Models rotate frequently. A mix of Gemma, Qwen, and other open-weight models from 2B to 32B, depending on the task. The 5090's 32GB VRAM handles up to ~30B at full speed on pure GPU inference.

Software

• Editor — Neovim, though most coding now goes through Claude Code. Neovim for quick edits, Claude Code for everything else.
• Terminal — Windows Terminal on the workstation, zsh on macOS. Stock is fine.
• Shell tools — Starship prompt, zoxide, fzf, eza, bat, ripgrep, fd. Modern replacements for the classics. Once you switch, you don't go back.
• AI — Claude Code for nearly everything — writing, debugging, refactoring, planning. Gemini for brainstorming, Perplexity for research.
• Version control — Git + GitHub CLI, lazygit, git-delta. lazygit makes staging and rebasing painless.
• Languages — Python, JavaScript/TypeScript. Pick whichever fits the problem.
• Knowledge — Obsidian with local Markdown files. Portable, greppable, future-proof.
• Writing — Typora for long-form Markdown. Clean WYSIWYG without the bloat.
• Sync — rsync over Tailscale. No daemon, no subscription, just scripts when I need them.
• Networking — Tailscale. Makes every machine reachable from anywhere without port forwarding.
• Input — Rime (中州韻) for Chinese. Fully local, fully customizable.
• Browser — Comet as daily driver. Chrome only for Google Workspace.
• Hosting — Cloudflare Pages for static sites.

Subscriptions

• Claude Max
• MiniMax
• Perplexity Pro
• Gemini
• iCloud
• Google Workspace

Previously Used

Hardware

• Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7
• Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra
• MacBook Pro 2019
• iPad mini
• Pixel 9 Pro
• AirPods Pro (1st gen)

Self-hosted

• Vaultwarden, Gitea, SearXNG + Perplexica, Portainer, Syncthing — tried them, then cut them when simpler tools did the job with less to maintain.

Software

• Notion, Bear, Dropbox