The Rig: New Year's Eve 2018 Edition

It’s New Year’s Eve 2018, and my original post about my battlestation from August is out of date. My setup has been upgraded, downgraded, and sidegraded, so let’s take a look.

Before we get any further, I really only write these posts for my own documentation, so unless you have some special interest in my computer setup, please go read something more interesting. If you’re a Ruby programmer, consider reading this instead.

Without further ado, here’s what I hack on now.

Here’s what we’ve got:

1. Grip trainer: I love this thing. I started grip training after I had my hockey stick knocked out of my hands twice in one game. I’m on the XX-heavy weight now, which is 13 pounds of weight per finger, and I can do that pretty comfortably. I don’t drop my stick anymore.
2. Kirin FIRE: Japanese coffee that comes in a can. FIRE is sweeter and creamier than a lot of the other options. You can read the review over on Sprudge. Spoilers: they ranked it fourth worst of the Japanese vending machine coffees they tried. I still love it.
3. Big jar of water: It’s just water. I drink tons of it. Alternatively, this arrow could be pointed at my pictures of Amy.
4. My Planck: I been using this rather than the Ergodox EZ I was using in the previous post. This thing forces me to stay close to the home row and use different layers, which I find easier on my wrists sometimes. Also it’s really cool looking, so there’s that.
5. Kensington SlimBlade: Love this thing. It’s the best trackball I’ve used. The twist-to-scroll feature is the killer feature.
6. BenQ Monitor: The same 32" 4K monitor I was using before. I had some issues with it flickering, sent it to be repaired, and now it rarely flickers. I wouldn’t recommend buying it, but 16 milliseconds of digital static once or twice a day doesn’t really bother me enough to want to replace it.
7. 15" 2018 MacBook Pro: Alistair is using my old laptop, so I needed a new one. This is the 6-core i7 model with 32GB of RAM, plenty fast.
8. Gigabyte eGPU: It’s the same eGPU as I was using last round. I don’t really need it since the MacBook Pro has a plenty good enough GPU to power a single 4K monitor, but it allows me to plug all my peripherals in with one cable. I need to buy a dongle to replace it though, as it has some trouble cleanly unmounting at times.
9. Multiport charger: This thing is great. It’s got a 60W USB-C port, and some fast charging USB-A ports on it.
10. PlayStation 4 Pro: The big screen is great for playing Blackout.

That’s it! Happy New Year, and here’s that picture of Amy that was hiding behind the water:

Here’s a better picture of the Planck for get measure: