Writing
Increasingly, I'm a pen and paper kiddo. When I do things with the 'puter, I love using plain text whenever possible.
- nano
- The greatest and the best. Real ones only.
- Final Draft
- NARRATOR (V.O): (sotto) it's pretty good
For heavy-duty coding, I have VSCode, Chocolat and Nova on rotation. But nano still wins.
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.
Video and graphics
For storyboarding in Photoshop, I'm on an ancient build of CS6. It's so fast! (We used to be a country, etc. etc.) I draw on an Intuos 4 L PTK-840.
I'm also using CS6 for opening dusty projects from the 2010's in Flash Professional. (.swf until I die and that is the nuel promise!!)
- DaVinci Resolve
- Keeps me sane. It's so stable!
- Procreate
- Real iPad babies use Procreate. Dreams also installed but I haven't really looked into it yet.
- LibreSprite
- For sprite sheets and pixel art.
- 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
Audio
On the hardware side of things, I have a Mother-32, a K.O. II, a Zoom H2n for spatial, an sE7 for booming in mono, a Zoom H5 for all other things and some shake eggs and percussion and whatever guitars and keyboards I can find lying around.
In the box, I work with this motley crew of funny programs:
- Ableton Live
- Logic Pro
- Mostly for the binaural panning.
- 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.
- Many, many plugins and libraries by Arturia, Valhalla, Native Instruments, Noise Engineering, Plogue (check out Musical Artifacts for soundfonts to use with their sforzando plugin!) and more.
Computing
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.
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
- Most of the Globoform episodes are on here. Really good free tier!
- 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.
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
sedstatic files directly.
The visitor counters and the guestbook write to plain text files using — are you sitting down — PHP scripts. That's right. The header and footer on most parts of this website are PHP includes as well! Sorry, hope that wasn't too scary.
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.
