It’s New Year’s Eve 2018, and my original post about my battlestation from August is out of date.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: