tools i use

Writing

Increasingly, I'm a pen and paper girlie. When I do things with the 'puter, I love using plain text whenever possible.

• nano
The greatest and the best. Real ones only.
• Notational Velocity
Specifically, the nvALT fork. Saves as plain text (which we love) and syncs with Simplenote. On Windows, I use Resoph.
• Final Draft
NARRATOR (V.O): (sotto) it's pretty good
• VSCode
...begrudgingly...

When I want to feel real fancy, I'll use the Schneider fountain pen I got a few birthdays ago. Other than that, I'll use Staedtlers or Microns, a Copic here and there and whatever ballpoint I have on hand.

Audio

One day I'll fulfil my DAWless analog tape dreams. Until then, there's these funny programs and the 90s sample CDs page on archive.org.

• Logic Pro
Mostly for the binaural panning.
• Ableton Live
• Reason
A really old version (5.0.1) but it has the best ambient presets.
• Dexed
Check out the Sysex archive which includes some of Brian Eno's patches.
• Minimoog Model D App
• DM1
• Audiokit Synth One
• Audiokit House Mark I
• Rekordbox
• Many, many plugins and libraries by Arturia, Spitfire, Valhalla, Native Instruments, Noise Engineering, Plogue (check out Musical Artifacts for soundfonts to use with their sforzando plugin!) and more.

On the hardware side of things, I got a Zoom H2n for spatial, an sE7 for booming in mono, a Zoom H5 for all the other things and some shake eggs and percussion and whatever guitars and keyboards I can find lying around.

Video

Either animation or footage shot by talented friends.

• DaVinci Resolve
Better than FCPX and Premiere. Yeah I said it!!
• Animate
.swf until I die and that is the nuel promise!

Hardware

My main machines are a 2013 MacBook Air (Lychee), a 2018 iPad Pro (Cyph) and a custom PC (Moya) for when I want to have some Gamer Moments.

Static site generators

The best is doing it all by hand and tending to it like a garden.
But if that's not practical:

• Hugo
Faster Jekyll. Globoform ran on this for a while.
• Shell scripts
Some things on my website like Will nuel be on time? are updated using small shell scripts that sed static files directly.

The visitor counters and the guestbook write to plain text files using — are you sitting down — PHP scripts. That's right.

Hosting

Shoutout to all the wonderful people who hook up a Raspi to a solar panel. I will join you some day! But for now:

• Neocities
The final hope for the web.
• Netlify
I hosted Globoform here for a while. Really good free tier!
• Vercel
Slightly faster than Netlify, but also a lot more Peter Thiel adjacent. I always smile nervously at how weirdly fashy their design language feels.
• Surge
Great for archiving things. Upload a folder via command line and it sticks around forever.
• Mega
The Melon Computer archive is on here. Lots of storage for free.
• DigitalOcean
The New Melon server, which hosts the page you are reading right now, is a DigitalOcean droplet.

Graphics

Some 'dobby stuff (HCiSO and TNT Group braver than the troops) and some Affinity, other than that:

• Procreate
Real iPad babies use Procreate. Dreams also installed but I haven't really looked into it yet.
• WebGL
For funny swirls like on Will nuel be on time?
• Glyphs
Once every half decade the spirit of Fonts takes over my body.
• TAAG (Text to ASCII Art Generator)
Online editor with lots of great ASCII and ANSI fonts.
• ASCII Art Paint
Paint but with unicode brushes.
• brusj

Misc

• ImageOptim
It's literally magic. My beloved nuel island went from 15MB to <2MB using this. On Windows, I use pinga.
• Transmission
Arr! Set sail for the open seas!
• xACT
For converting FLAC to AAC (VBR Constrained) 256 kbps, you know, as one does. fre:ac is a good Windows alternative.

Additionally, here are my dotfiles.