from the desk of
The rotating collection of tools, gadgets, and wares that I like and recommend.
photography & design workflows
| NAS + Backblaze + External backup Losing data is an instant gut-punch, make your setup bullet-proof before disaster strikes. First step is to make everything findable. Give every folder name an ISO 8601 date stamp: "2025-06-28 Family Shoot" "2025-05-05 Amazon Order.pdf" Alphabetically sorting your files now gives you a clean timeline. The ISO (International Organization for Standardization) are an independent Geneva-based body since 1947. They're here to settle arguements about everything from paper sizes to time and date formats. Copy the nerd's homework and leave all of your disorganisation behind. Now you must park your data somewhere safe. A NAS (Network Attached Storage) is what you get when you tie a bunch of external hard drives together into one gargantuan megadrive. Plug it into your network and you've basically got yourself a homemade Dropbox. I keep a Synology four-bay box strapped with four 22 TB IronWolf Pro drives. Why not just use Dropbox or iCloud Drive? If you'd bothered to read the Ts & Cs, you'll know that these are data syncing services, not backup services. Files gets silently Thanos-snapped from the cloud all the time. From here, follow the 3-2-1 rule - three copies of your data, on two different media types, one of which should be off-site. The final data flow roadmap for me goes something like iCloud Drive <-> NAS -> external drive + Backblaze. If lightning, coffee, or sticky toddler fingers ether the NAS, the clone and the cloud keep the dream alive. |
 |
 |
Anybox Picture a bottomless digital cabinet, stacked with as with as many drawers as you like. Fill the cabinet with as much junk and clippings as you'd like. Anybox eats every "save-this-for-later" impulse you have: articles, film-photography mood-boards, colour palettes, long form YouTube essays on boro denim, that gift idea you spotted on Pinterest. With one tap, it's filed, tagged, and organised. You don't need to be doing mental gymnastics across 8-12 apps trying to find stuff you've saved, and spare yourself the RSI of scrolling back through your screenshot graveyard. There are plenty of bookmarking/save-it-later apps - myMind, Raindrop.io, Sublime, Nothing Essential Spaces - Anybox has been sticky for a few reasons. Offline ability means the 40-minute commute on the Metro nor the airspace above are dead zones; iCloud sync keeps phone, iPad, and Mac in harmonious lockstep, and your second brain gets to live locally on your drives instead of being gatekept behind an Amazon datafarm prison across the globe. |
| iPad + Apple Pencil + Continuity features Removes a need for a separate graphics tablet for the most part. Plug the iPad in as a wired connection to your Mac, hit 'Screen Mirroring' in the control panel, change to 'Mirror Display' - from here, it's plug n play. |
 |
Shooting in EV priority
Photography hot take incoming - forget aperture priority and shutter priority. If you're either just starting out or you're already well-seasoned, you're in a perfect spot to take a cue from mobile phone photography and shoot EC (exposure compensation) priority. Modern sensors are just too good at shrugging off high ISO, and Lightroom will scrub off extra baked-on grit with gusto. Plus, if the lighting outside is good, then your deity/deities of choice has done the hard yards. Sometimes the situation calls for autopilot - I'll pop all my settings into full auto, then spin the EV down to -2 to sprinkle in a touch of my signature moody off-putting vibe.
 |
Mobile tripod + camera apps Fit pics at the Met or the Black Church of Budir demands a bit of prep. A "touristy" tripod/selfie-stick (I stay strapped with the Joby TelePod) is a total cheat code: it props up my SLR + pancake lens anywhere. Pair your camera to your phone, mirror the view, tap to trigger - nail your composition and exposure in 1-2 minutes and you've got time to spare in your itinerary. Please retire the ancient practice of thrusting cameras into bewildered passers-by, praying they don't proverbially lop off your head or arm during the humiliation ritual/photoshoot. |
Shapr3D
A pocket-sized studio for 3D object design. I use it to get product design ideas out of my head, and generate files ready to send to PCBWay for print - about two weeks between idea to product-in-hand. Make sure you're setting measurements to mm and exporting as high resolution STL.
productivity
Raycast
Computing in the Before Times would remind me of mining; finding the right file or trying to trigger a quick settings change would be a manually laborious trek through infinitely nested folders and menus. Alfred changed the whole experience of using a computer for me. It was the main reason why I stayed on macOS in the first place. Hit a hot-key and a magic blank rectangle pops into view. Type a few letters and almost instantly you can have apps launch, files surface, snippets paste, windows snap, timers start, even light switches turn on and off. Alfred was my ride-or-die for a decade or maybe more. One ill-fated day I fiddled a bit too much with my system, which mangled my finely-tuned preference files so badly the helpdesk suggested a full knockdown-rebuild of my macOS install was my only recourse.
| So now I use Raycast instead. It keeps the same lightning-fast launcher core but layers on modern touches Alfred never quite prioritised: a human-language-friendly emoji picker and a bustling extension marché full of one-click add-ons. A generous free tier lets you discreetly take an exit ramp away from the clustered traffic jam of AI-powered actions. It's the kind of tool you miss within minutes of sitting at someone else's computer. I do strip Raycast to the essentials: |
 |
- Magic Key: Caps Lock becomes a Magic Key (
✦), simulating a simultaneous press of⌃⌥⇧⌘- this unlocks a galaxy of shortcuts. - Pins:
✦ + Spacepops up my most-used folders - receipts, current design work - no more spelunking in Finder.
You could use Raycast to replace any window manager tools and clipboard tools too, but I prefer to separate church and state, keeping Rectangle and Snippety in gainful employment. Other trickshots I've pegged to magic key shortcuts:
✦ + Asummons Slurp: an instant colour picker, lets me rip HEX colour codes from my screen - a design essential✦ + Wfor PixelSnap, an on-screen ruler for dead-accurate pixel measurements to help line up layouts to a T✦ + Fcalls Raycast Menu Search (so useful!) - instead of flicking though the menubar I can just start typing to trigger any menu command; if you've ever used Photoshop, you will understand.✦ + Cpulls up the Paste clipboard from the bottom of my screen, a searchable history of my clipboard to recall any photo, text, link in an instant
 |
Snippety Like Anybox but for text snippets - Snippety is my hybrid clipboard manager + text expansion tool of choice. You might be hip to keyboard shortcuts on your phone (dig through your settings until you can set "eee" to autocorrect into your email address), but Snippety lets you do infinitely more. Anything from a boiler-plate email template to entire blocks of code can be dropped straight into whatever text field you choose. Even more powerful are smart placeholders (dates, cursor positions, fill-in fields), user-defined collections, and dynamic placeholders (typing ";d" for me automatically drops in today's date formatted into ISO8601). Everything lives in a locally stored database that syncs over iCloud, letting it work offline and with confidentiality intact. It outshines the big names like TextExpander or Paste with its "buy-once, keep-forever" model. Power users can chain snippets through Shortcuts or deeplinks, whilst the minimalist can simply enjoy not having to re-type their AHPRA registration number for the 4000th time. |
Pop Socket
Budget-friendly phone grip that does double duty as a mini-stand. I've been using these on my phone so long that the weird step deformity on my pinky finger has almost refilled itself with fresh finger meat.
| iCloud Drive + Apple ecosystem I've tried migrating over to Android more times than Sisyphus has schlepped that boulder up that hill. There's just no substitute for the seamless functionality of iCloud, full stop. Before you start, find me a suitable replacement for Airdrop that doesn't require being on the same wifi, an iCloud Drive file sync replacement that actually syncs without a a second thought, a inter-device clipboard sync that works past Android 16, a universal control clone that lets me fling my cursor across your devices. I'll wait. |
 |
Task Lists & Time Blocking
Maintaining a todo list is a game-changer for me at least. It's a huge relief not having to have 50-100 different tasks on timers of different lengths in my head. I've probably tried close to 50 different apps for this across various platforms, but nothing has come close to Cultured Code's Things 3. It's such a polite and considered design, allergic to bloated and excessive features that I'd never need, and delightful to use. It's been the one I've been stuck on since 2009. Apple Calendars > Google Calendars if you're in the ecosystem, sharing calendars with your partner. The push notifications when there's changes are invaluable.
 |
RSS Feeds Many of the sites you follow (be it blogs, medical journals, news pages) maintain their own RSS feed - a simple, largely text-based ticker of new posts arranged from newest to oldest. Collecting these feeds into an RSS reader of your choice (I'd go with Reeder Classic for iOS, Read You for Android) let's you grow your own garden of news. You only see what you consented to see, minus the ads and algorithms that constantly threaten to pipeline you into something. |
Things
Midori Traveler's Notebook (Passport) + plastic card insert
A rattling overnight train - windows open, the warm air whips by. Perfumed by sweet cardamom. "Tickets, please!" resounding as you fish a palm-sized taco of patina-ed leather out of your pocket. She creaks open like an old sailing shoe, boarding passes gently doffing forward with a Yen-flecked receipt covered in a late-night chicken-scrawled haiku in tow.
 |
The plastic cardholder insert yields nothing. It holds back your lurid fiduciary shame in the same way that the maître d' holds his tongue - discreetly, elegantly, never losing track. Health insurance cards hold the wall, that one $2 coin you use for shopping trolleys still safely tucked behind her ear. In a swift flick she's said what she needs to say and she's left in a flash; elastic band snaps the whole scene shut. In a world of hyper-saturated OLED and swipe gestures, this pocket notebook-turned-wallet is a quiet rebellion. The warm and analogue embrace that keeps scrap paper from breeding its way out of your jean pockets and into the washing machine. Sometimes, the old ways are better. |
| Uniball SXN155 God help me, I'm a sucker for a pen. Do you know how it feels to look at that hole in your chest and think "gee, that gaping existential abyss sure is mighty pen-shaped"? After years of crawling over stationery blogs on my hands and knees, I found this pen through a boyfriend-of-a-friend - it feels like writing with melted butter, costs less than a sheet of citalopram, and never blob-bombs your love letters. I buy them by the fistful. |
 |
Nite Ize S-Biners
Snap keys, hang mugs, fix zips, all in one shift. Teeny tiny carabiners that offer me salvation from my own pockets.
Peak Design Anchors
Locks cameras to straps with a rapid, sure snap. Quick to release, but only if you ask. Let's you hot swap camera straps faster than an F1 pitstop so your camera gear can stray straddling your side, freeing up every other limb for your toddler to hang off of.
Lifehacks
| 10k steps + Vitamin D > 80 + hydration >2L + contextual supplementation If my watch, bloods, and bottle all agree, I'm golden; if not, everything else lags. Taobao + On-Screen Translation Become a drop shippers worst nightmare. If you can brave a little sliver of Mandarin, China's premiere "everything" store - combined with the occasional squint from your trusty on-device live translation app - lets you crawl a bottomless market for trinkets beyond your wildest dreams, at prices low enough to undercut literally anybody else. Why shop local when you can shop global? |
 |
Apps
iOS
|