My Setup 2024

I’ve always been curious about what is people’s “daily carry”, because everyone has their own style, and what they use daily reflects that. It evolves over time, with things being changed in and out due to conscious decisions or changes in their life. So here’s mine, this is my selfish End 2024 / Early 2025 contribution.

It’s a small catalog of the what and why of what I use everyday, and why.

Computers - Laptops

Let’s start off with the extravagant… My three laptops.

Why three laptops? Well, firstly I have more than that (wow flex) , but those are all old or for testing purposes and aren’t really worth much (oh). As a extremely distracted person, and I find having different laptops for pleasure ( YouTube, Web browsing, Editing videos etc), for dev work, and for planning helps me get in the right head space and provides focus. Additionally, each one of them are on different operating systems and platforms. This helps me keep up to date with what’s out there and also tickles my fancy.

1. Macbook Pro 13 (2020 - M1)

We start with a Mac. I grew up on Mac, due to parental exposure, but I’ve not always been a Mac guy.

There were two reasons I bought this machine. In fact, one of them made me pre-order this MacBook as my first new machine in over 9 years.

I am a Final Cut Pro ( a video editing software made by apple ) editor who switched from the Adobe suite back in 2016. I ran Premiere on a PC on Windows, and switched to editing on a hackintosh on the same machine. In that switch, I’ve was awed by apple’s optimization techniques that made FCP fly on lower end hardware. It was smooth with footage that Premiere lagged with on the same machine.

Additionally, I’ve been impressed by their chips on their phones for a few years now, as they’ve been well ahead of the competition in terms of eeking out performance and efficiency from small batteries. As such, the idea of Apple finally bringing their own hardware and software on the mac made me giddy. I couldn’t wait to see how well my edits would perform on that new laptop.

And I speced it out – I went all out with 1TB of storage and 16GB of RAM.

I was impressed. Some effects that previously required my timeline to pre-render to playback smoothly could be played back instantly with no dropped frames. My render times was cut by 4+ times. I no longer needed to render my footage to an easier editing format before I could start cutting. It was amazing.

Granted, I had an old PC. Even so, that was a desktop pulling in hundreds of watts and this was an thin and light laptop sipping power. Nothing that thin and light could compete at the time.

It made my editing back in late 2020 to 2022 a cake walk. I could edit anywhere, be it on site at a shoot or at a friends place, on a small laptop where the fans rarely turned on and for a long time too. It. was. awesome.

It wasn’t perfect, some video effects that were GPU heavy still chugged a bit or still required some pre-rendering… A beefy GPU would help. During renders, I could see the GPU being pegged at 100% at exports while my CPU was almost idling. But at the time, you couldn’t find anything better in that specific form factor. Plus, come on, it’s a low wattage chip.

Yes, I did know back then that a huge redesign was coming, but I couldn’t wait with my current setup. It was a massive upgrade over my combo dinky used Thinkpad x250 I had at the time and my desktop. A timely upgrade too for my Uni Life. The battery life on it allowed me to go to the library and classes without worrying about needing a seat near a power plug. I could work and study all day while without performance throttling or being conservative on my part.

Four years later, it’s still performing pretty great. I do feel the pinch of 16GB of RAM if I’m editing and browsing the web concurrently, it’s one or the other else before I am greeted with out of memory warnings. And I can’t be NOT jealous at the 14, 16" new macbook pros. Additionally, I would love a laptop that would allow me to get back to 2 external monitors and give me back HDMI and SD card slots. My eyes will feast on those bright 120hz HDR displays, and look better on those 1080p webcams… all that jazz.

But currently… I can’t really justify getting an upgrade. I haven’t touched video editing in a long time after I got burnt out on creative work in early 2022. And I don’t do anything heavy enough to justify getting a new laptop. Those things I mentioned are nice, but are not needs as I’ve been living without them fine. The only thing that nudged me to consider a new laptop was the possibility to get into streaming, but this laptop isn’t truly what’s holding me back anyway (time haiz)… Plus, I don’t want to stream off this computer as I use it for my personal stuff nor do I do much development work on it – more on that later.

Selling it and getting an upgrade on the used market is not that economical either, my 16GB of RAM setup isn’t much of a selling point ever since apple (finally) made 16GB base now across all their currently sold macs.

Maybe when I dip my toes back into video production, hit a milestone of some sort or find an insane deal will I upgrade… Till then, this MacBook Pro still serves me plenty well, with a great screen and speakers, macOS with great 3rd party apps and iOS integration… I’m still a happy camper.

I’ll talk about my software picks in another post, it the midst of updating it right now :).

2. Dell Latitude 5300 2-in-1

This is my used development laptop.

After I started working, I used my Mac purely for relaxing: be it watching videos on youtube, mindlessly scrolling on socials and other distracting things. As such, being on that computer made me auto-pilot to such, especially after a long day of work.

Thus, I wanted a machine that when I was on, I would be in a more productive mindset. Additionally, I wanted something where I could daily drive Linux, to be more familiar with Linux on a day to day basis.

This were my thoughts back in mid 2023. Only being a few months into my job, I was not looking to spend big bucks on a new machine that could be a white elephant. So, I started my search on the used business laptop scene.

I wanted four things:

• Intel 8th gen or newer machine (quad core and thunderbolt is a must.)
• USB C Charging.
• Upgradable RAM.
• A 2-in-1

It needed to be modern enough to handle slightly heavier loads if needed – in fact, I wanted a machine where I could live stream coding sessions on. I wanted to experiment with a two in one, and I wanted upgradable RAM – I was thinking that further down the line, maybe I would want to upgrade it to 32GB…

I came across multiple options, and finally landed on this Latitude 5300 from 2019. It had the upgradable RAM that the Dell Latitude 7400 and the Thinkpad Yogas did not, and it wasn’t too expensive at around $400 SGD after all my upgrades (16GB RAM, new battery, stylus.)

And I’ve no regrets getting a development laptop. A white elephant it has not been. The extra experience in Linux (I am a scrub, I use ubuntu because it works) helps me be more proficient at my job , and it’s compact enough for me to bring it almost everywhere.

And it works wonders for removing distractions. I am way less distracted on this dedicated laptop be it for studying, coding, writing or whatever.

But this laptop is far from perfect.

Firstly, it is a touch heavier than I would like at 1.5kg… It is part of the course for 2-in-1s as it’s still considered pretty average for its class. If I was just carrying this laptop, that’s fine, but I sometimes carry one or two work laptops with me to work, which makes the weight more noticable.

Secondly, while the 2-in-1 form factor is nice, but honestly I haven’t used it enough to justify spending extra for it. The laptop has no pen silo, nor a good place in general to attach a pen. As such, I rarely use it in tablet mode for writing. Additionally, Linux support for pen notes is rather weak which makes it a downgrade for note taking in comparsion with an iPad. On the other hand, I have 0 regrets on getting a touch screen, it’s really nice to be able to reach out, touch, zoom and scroll around the web with your fingers.

In the future, I might just get a laptop with touch, but without the 2-in-1 to cut down the weight.

Thirdly, she throttles. My dreams of streaming on this machine were dashed once I realized it couldn’t keep a stable frame rate encoding in OBS at 1080/30p. The CPU spikes to 100c rapidly, and the single heat pipe + small fan struggles at expelling heat. I tried repasting the CPU, I tried different power profiles – nada. Intel’s Coffee Lake is just hot. To be fair, I don’t notice it too much in day to day use, especially on Linux, but if anything that pushes both the CPU and GPU hard together – It’s throttling and fan hiss all day.

Lastly, it doesn’t support a seperate SSD even though there is an silo for it. There is an empty 2242 PCI.E/M2 slot on this machine, but for some reason it is software locked to only work with WWAN/4G/5G cards. My inital hope was to dual boot with Linux on one SSD and Windows on another, but alas. I’m not dual booting on the same disk, that’s just calling for trouble with overwritten bootloaders. I can’t even repurpose the slot and put a WWAN card either without replacing the screen, as Dell doesn’t ship antennas with non-LTE versions like mine.

Oh, and I miss the red nipple from thinkpads. I also wished the screen was 16:10, it has the bottom bezel for it.

Here are some other small annoying quirks of this laptop in no particular order:

• The fingerprint sensor frequently registers false negatives and requires a middeling manually installed Linux driver.
• If the battery is at 0% and I use USB-C to charge, I have to let the computer charge up from 0% before it actually boots
• The latest linux kernel driver with intel’s keyboard HID driver breaks Hibernate and requires some kernel module disabling to get hibernate working again…

But, the keyboard is pretty nice, the touchpad tracks well and is extremely responsive even if it’s not a ClickPad, and battery life is also decent (especially in low power mode.) Overall I’m still satisfied.

I do sometimes wish that I opted for the Dell 7400 instead. It had a bigger screen in a similar form factor with a bigger battery and better build. Sure, it doesn’t have expandable memory and allow me to hit 32GBs, but I realize that 32GB with 4 cores doesn’t really make much sense for most of my work. But, it was more expensive either way.

However, either way, now that I know I thrive with a seperate development machine, I’m more open to replacing it in the future…

On my wish list, if I had to replace this machine now, I would want something modern with more efficient, powerful cores (more too would be nice!), better battery life and better screen.

I have been looking at possible newer used business laptops to replace this with, but it’s hard to find one that ticks my boxes at a price I want. Intel 12th gen has not been out for long enough for prices to come down, and I have had nightmare experiences with throttling on dell laptops with that processor. AMD thin and lights are overpriced in the used market ( Seriously, a 10% faster i5-8365u is cheaper than a 3500u for some odd reason) and as someone with a thunderbolt dock, AMD means USB 4.0 is a must, something that really isn’t on many older laptops.

Neither is it enough for me to justify dropping another $600 or more on a laptop when this works fine… other than streaming. But, I might just get a desktop for that at this rate.

3. Acer Chromebook 311 (MT8183, 2022 edition)

Yes, a third. I bought this back in mid 2022 for $150 SGD ($115 USD) from Amazon SG.

Yes, the price was the main reason why I bought that thing.

It’s a limitations ridden cheap ChromeBook:

• The screen are those bargain bin 11.6" 768P TN
• 4GB of RAM and 32GB of emmc storage powers the system with NO expandable microsd card slot.
• The USB C port only goes does 1080p 30p or 720p60
• It’s slow.

And the touchpad is inaccurate. I can’t believe that Acer in the year 2022 could put out such a poor tracking device.

So why do I keep it? Because the ARM processor inside, even with specs from 2018, allows the battery to go forever. When it does need a top up, it charges quickly via USB-C. It’s light at under a KG, and most importantly – it has a fantastic keyboard.

Additionally, Chrome OS updates are small and happen in the background quickly, so even though I only use this laptop a few times a month, updates don’t bog me down like a Windows computer would.

And with that, it’s my journaling machine or my lightweight travel machine on short trips.

I love journaling on it with its fantastic keyboard. It integrates great with my android phone, allowing me to quickly transfer files and turn on the hotspot straight from the laptop. The cost + ChromeOS’s security also allows me to be carefree when traveling with it. If it get’s stolen or broken, it won’t hurt much, it was cheap and Google’s pretty fantastic security makes me not worry about my data. It grants me the ability to write anywhere.

Sure, it chugs when opening too many tabs, but it still boots quick. Plus, as a machine I use only for journalling or for traveling with, these are cases where I shouldn’t be browsing the web that much anyways.

I didn’t find the android runtime that useful, especially not for the amount of RAM it eats up and slows down this machine by.

I detest ChromeOS’s keyboard layout… it removes keys and is another layout whose keyboard shortcuts I have to remember. Urgh. Thankfully, I don’t need to think of it much when journalling in Vim lol.

The battery has unfortunately degraded a fair bit, but it still lasts me a day or more of full use, and a week or more of occasional use. I’ve no reason to replace it as anything I replace it will be ultimately more expensive and defeat the purpose of such a device for me.

I only use this laptop with chrome + vim controls (this makes the touchpad bearable as I rarely need to touch it) and use Linux containers + neovim for journalling.

Computers - Desktops

Currently I don’t really have a desktop that I use regularly. I gave my old gaming desktop to my sister about 2 years ago (not exactly as planned, it’s a long story), and I haven’t played much games since.

I do plan on building another gaming desktop soon to get a bit back into gaming and streaming, but I will probably give that to my sister too since the old one doesn’t support Windows 11. Oops.

I have a few desktops I use a servers, but I haven’t done much useful with it to really write much about it.

Currently, I do have a small Dell Optiplex 3040 running as a server… It’s nothing much, just a small ubuntu server that I ssh into over tailscale and do testing that I don’t want to run on my main laptop. It was a $80 purchase and sits silently next to my router. Nice.

I also have a Dell 5060 SFF that honestly… I don’t find that useful. In fact, I might sell it. It’s the only Wintel device that I have that is semi-powerful and runs Win11 officially ( and currently ), but half height PCI-E + limited storage bays makes it not super useful for me. I bought it because it was cheap lol. 6 decent cores for $140 bucks.

I also have a 2017 iMac 21.5" 4K that I scored for $50 on carousell. The screen is shot (haloing all around), but it works. Ironically enough, it’s the most powerful GPU device I have now. And with that I plan to use that for streaming HAHAHA. I’ll elaborate more once I’ve actually set it up.

Computers - My desk and it’s accessories

Alright, now to the desk. The desk itself is nothing special. It’s the Ikea special, a cheap Ikea desk and office chair.

The center piece of my table is my 32" 4K Acer monitor. It’s huge, it’s full of pixels, and cheap. It’s not fancy, none of that high refresh rate, curved stuff, but it’s at least not an awful TN panel (It’s VA). It’s not the most color accurate or vibrant, but good enough for me to cut videos on and save the final color stuff on my MacBook.

Prior to this setup, I used 2x bargin bin 1080p laptops. I upgraded to a big screen due to my M1 Macbook limited one external display support. I did try displaylink with those two monitors, but found the limitations (no DRM content, slight CPU hit) too annoying to live with. When looking around, I wasn’t too sold on ultrawides, as I like my vertical real estate and my pixel density when editing videos. I finally landed on a massive high-res screen and “splurged” on it.

For the price I paid 3 years back, which was $360 SGD, I am still very happy with my purchase. I did wish I went for an IPS panel instead, as I do like the darker colors of it, but hey, I was a poor student at the time. 4K at 32" also means I can use close to 100% scaling and still see everything. Desntiy wise, it is equiviliant to 4x 1080p 16" screens. With a quarter of my screen being equivalent to a 1080p monitor, I could have a 1080 preview normal screen resolution at the corner of my screen and still have plenty of space for my code or my video editor timeline.

I love the 4K 100% (-ish, 100% looks terrible on macOS becuase of macOS choices) lifestyle.

If I do get back into gaming or streaming, I would like a secondary 1080p or 1440p HRR screen… Having such a large screen and streaming makes it kinda annoying, as you can’t share your whole monitor without making everything super tiny for stream or too big for you and sharing a portion of your monitor is slightly annoying even with window management tools.

I also have a light bar above my screen for some down facing light. Light is so imporant to the vibe of a place, having it on gives me way more energy.

My Dock

Nor do I have the desk space for it right now. My right side is occupied with my connected laptop with a stand and a thunderbolt dock. My stand isn’t anything special, it’s a cheap one that I got as a free gift somewhere, my thunderbolt dock was an adventure though.

My previous dock on my Macbook, or rather hub, was finicky AF. It would cause random black outs of my screen at random intervals (once an hour at times, more frequently other times) with no answer in sight. I’ve had poor experiences with docks prior as well, one even managing to brick my laptop two weeks before exams. Additionally, even though this hub supported 4K60hz, it would only do so on specific laptops, specifically, this laptop must support DP 1.4, else you would be stuck with ye old 4K 30p.

I was done, I bought a used thunderbolt dock. And my experience was so so much better.

No more random blackouts, no more random disconnects, everything just … worked.

Sure, my displays took slightly longer to turn on, but 4K 60hz was stable, my peripherals were stable, things charge without a hitch, and everything worked well. I could even use this on older thunderbolt devices and keep 4K 60hz! Yes, it being an old dock meant that I couldn’t use non-thunderbolt devices on the dock ( newer thunderbolt chipsets fix this), but I didn’t care at the time. No blackouts meant I was happy.

Xiaomi Google Home

On the other side of my desk is a XiaoMi Home Speaker, it’s a nice speaker for me to play tunes from spotify easily from and helps me find my android phone when I lost it somewhere in the house. I bought two in fact! This is on my side of the desk, and another one is somewhere else in this room. Stereo sound baby. And it was hella cheap at $28 a speaker two or three years back.

Chargers

I also have a traditional multi-port USB A charger here. It’s old, it’s slow, but it works for those microUSB, USB C, or whatever peripherals I have lying around. For anything higher powered, I have a 65W USB-C PD charger close by, useful for all my other “heavy duty devices”.

I am definitely tempted by those 200-300W desktop chargers with plenty of PD USB C ports though.

My KVMs

Under my desk are two KVMs. Why does one need two KVMs you might ask? Well, firstly, neither handles video. One is connected to my webcam and my microphone, allowing me to switch those between my docked laptop and a supposed stream PC, and the other sis connected to my keyboard and mouse. When I was doing some small private streams, it was a lifesaver as I could switch inputs without disrupting my microphone and webcam on my PC. And in other cases, I needed my mac to have the microphone and webcam, and that was a simple button click away. Complicated? Yea, but it works well!

Keyboard and Mouse

Okay, we talked about keyboard and mouse, so let’s talk about that before we get into my webcam and mic.

Keyboard wise, I don’t have anything fancy. It’s a pre-built (yuck I know) Machenike K600G. It’s a 96%, with yellow linear switches. It’s chocky sounding, it has a classic orange, white and black theme going on, and types decently smoothly. I bought it on sale for $60 SGD, and overall I’m pretty contented with it. It doesn’t have anything fancy like foam dampening, many layers etc, but it is wireless.

However, I do have a nicer and cheaper keyboard that I use in my office that I bought off TaoBao off a friend’s recommendation. It uses *** switches and it’s so quiet and nice to type on. I hit my best WPM (120 ish) on that keyboard. I am tempted to bring the switches over to this keyboard or get another one… but we’ll see! It still serves me well and I like the splash of orange that this gives me.

My mouse is a Logitech MX Master 2S. I just bought it for the horizontal scroll wheel. The software is good, the hardware on the other hand… the side thumb button broke on me about 2 years in, making the mouse basically unusable as it locks up mouse movement when that button is depressed. I had to repair it about 4 months back, and now it’s back to working… The mouse is awfully HEAVY, but it fits my hand well and I’m not particular with mice in general. As long as a mouse has a back and front button, generally I’m happy. I’m also very happy with trackpads as long as they are decent. I do not ever travel with a mouse and am perfectly content with a touchpad.

My Mic and webcam

I use the old trusty C920 that I bought way back in 2014. It still works great. Only thing I’ve changed Is that I’ve a bit of cardboard on top of it to shield it off from flares reducing contrast lol.

For my mic, I use a Samson Q2U, it’s a dynamic mic on a cheap arm, meaning it just picks up my voice. Super useful for my setup with glass all around me and a noisy family. Yes, I have to “eat the mic” unlike a condensor microphone like a AT2020 or a Yeti, but my environment simply doesn’t fit such a setup.

My Camera Arm.

My Mic arm is to my right, and my camera arm is to my left. Yes, I have another arm, on it, I have a phone mount, allowing me to do cool top down shots with my phone or just have a nice camera shot with my phone. It’s an awesome addition to my setup, and with the drop down light, it looks awesome.

Phones / Smart Devices

I’m a dual eco-system weilder, one pocket contains an Android phone, the other an iPhone. The two in my pocket right now is an iPhone 15 Pro Max and a Nothing Phone 1.

iPhone – also why I carry two phones.

My “main” phone is an iPhone 15 Pro Max, bought last year to replace my iPhone XR. And the main reason why I upgraded? USB-C. No more special chargers to bring around!

The camera is pretty damn good, especially compared to the phones I came from (LG V50, iPhone XR.) With it, on vacation, I’ve stopped carrying my camera around as it is versatile and reliable enough to get good enough shots. The screen brightness is amazing too, hitting the high thousands of nits makes it so easily visible outside. The action button is additionally really nice to have, and I’ve used it as a quick shortcut to launch payment apps.

The speed improvement is noticeable, but not life changing (before iOS 17 that is, iOS 18 did slow it down my XR more). Additionally, in multi-tasking, I do notice less apps getting killed.

The big screen is really nice for reading as well.

However, battery life has never been great since the beginning, just alright, not as impressive as I hoped. I need to top it up every night, sometimes by evening too.

It gets hot way too easily too.

Other than that… it’s an iPhone. There are the usual iOS quirks… iOS not being able to take full advantage of a big screen, the middling keyboard, the animations are slower and the scroll speed is annoyingly slow. But honestly, that’s most of my biggest issues with iOS these days. A lot of customization options that used to be Android only has come to iOS, be it due to the EU or android competition. Specifically, the app drawer, being able to place apps anywhere, widgets, default browsers, has made me a relatively happy camper.

But, just the camera alone, having most of the newest iOS features to try out, great video capabilities has made me a fairly happy customer. Even if it was sooo expensive.

Okay, but why do I have two phones?

My iPhone is my distraction free, reliable phone. I try to keep the social networking apps on this phone to a minimum, specifically, YouTube, twitter, and reddit are not on this phone. Instead, I’ve tried to supplement it with more “productive” things, be it news feeds, reading books (though this has been mostly futile)… It has somewhat worked, though I have mostly replaced scrolling twitter on this phone to scrolling Mastodon (which to be fair is a hell much more productive than twitter as I’ve curated my feed extensively). However, reading has been a hard habbit to pickup when I’m bored. It’s just easier to get a dopamine hit from scrolling short articles or shopping instead.

Additionally, iOS has boring hardware, while Android is more diverse. I might want to swap around my Android phone around as my fun phone, but probably keep my iPhone for a really long while. Thus, I keep everything I need for day to day stuff which are annoying to transfer on my iPhone, and I want a decent camera with me (as the android phones I switch around with may not necessarily have good cameras.)

Which brings me to my current Android daily driver: the Nothing Phone 1

Nothing Phone 1

I’ve not gotten as many comments on a phone I carry as much as the Nothing Phone. Even though so many people called it an iPhone 12 clone when it came out, the glyphs really do stand out and people really do comment on how cool it is.

However, on the phone 1, Glyphs for me are generally a gimick with the exception of the essential glyph. Normal glyph notifications are like a really loud notification light which prompts you to flip over the phone to check. In comparison, typical always on displays or wake on notification devices, allow you to quickly glimpse over to see if it’s important to attend to. Nothing on the other hand, just nudges you to flip it over to check what that was. So much for using it to disconnect, but god damn if it isn’t an attention grabber.

Essential Glyphs are a little more useful, as you can choose to flip it over only for messages you care about. I do like that it works with third-party messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram.

Outside of the glyphs, the physical design is pretty sweet, it feels very industrial without being too heavy. The bezels, while thicker, are uniform. The buttons feel clicky with the right amount of feedback without being hard to press. The details, be it through the see through glass or the overall feel of the device, is spot on. You can really tell that the nothing team put a lot of effort into it. I love it a lot, and it’s one of the few devices I use without any case.

On the UI, it’s pretty great. The fonts are futuristic, widgets are distinctive yet clean, and the overall UI is very clean with minimal bloat. But, consistency is really not there. You get these Nothing dot matrix fonts, but the moment you jump into any other app that isn’t Nothing’s, the distinctive “nothing” look is gone.

Additionally, with their clean UI and little bloat philosophy, it’s not like you can rely on Nothing apps to have apps that are more nothing ’esk.

Can Nothing do anything about this? Not really, this is a problem that only Google really doesn’t have since they control Material UI. Even Samsung apps look so distinctive compared to other apps.

This is just how the Android Ecosystem is.

In comparison with Stock/Pixel Android, it feels very familiar to the Pixel 6 I had, just with a more distinctive Nothing theme in apps. Pixels, with their better haptics, do a better job with tying that with the UI, nothing Phone 1 haptics aren’t bad, but don’t feel as great. My prior V50 and Pixel 6 had noticably better haptics.

Camera wise, it’s fine. The Pixel 6 I had prior and the iPhone I have are just better from UI to sharpness and color. I was initally excited by the 50MP ultra wide, but it’s soft and I feel like my 12MP ultra wide on my iPhone tends to shoot better shots.

Perforamnce on the other hand with my browsing habbits are still great. I do notice frame drops in heavier apps, but overall, I’m extremelly happy with how well this phone has aged.

Software updates are also coming in decently, it is slower now that Nothing has the 2A out, but it’s still on the latest Android version.

In terms of other things that I do wished it had:

• Brighter screen, I’m spoiled by my iPhone
• eSIM - eSIM is quite useful when traveling abroad. However, it is at least dual sim.
• Better battery. It’s just alright. I’ve been too spoiled by my previous XiaoMi Phones lol

Now that it’s almost a year in, I am looking to see which phone I’ll try next… I am tempted to try the 2a, as I do like the UI, and the 2a fixes the screen brightness issue. I’m not too drawn by the 2, as I actually prefer the design of the 1 over the 2.

But we’ll see… I loved my flip phones, so I am tempted to pick up a used Flip of some sort instead.

Galaxy Watch 4

Meh. Currently, I only like it for the health tracking. Android wear is only really nice for for the customizable watch faces and the circle screens… everything else (Google Wallet, app support and quality, battery life) is not that great.

Thankfully, Samsung seems to be supporting this device pretty well… But I’m not sure if my next smart watch will be and Android Wear one.

I’ll write about my qualms with Android Wear soon.

Kindle

I have an old Kindle Paperwhite 3 that I occasionally use, again in my fashion, bought used. I’ve been trying to get back into reading, it was something that I was better at in 2023, but I fell off the momentum last year.

However, I might want to replace this in the future as Kindle annoyingly doesn’t support our local library here…

Addittinaly, when the text is set to the smallest size on both my kindle and my iPhone, while the text is smaller on the iPhone, there is more content on the screen at once.

I’m also tempted to get another tablet to replace both. Laptop + kindle + phone works for now. If I’m studying more, I might get another one for pen writing, but no point – laptop works great for typing and everything else.

But e-ink is just so comforting to read on.

We’ll see how it goes, you’ll know in my next update.

Sound

Good sound is expensive man. I’ve tried as much as possible not to fall down that endless rabbit hole lol.

To prevent myself from falling deep, I just have a pair of good IEMs, TWS, and a bunch of cheap but good for the price Chi-fi IEMs and TWS as backups.

Why backups? I am forgetful, so I keep a TWS and wired headphone in each bag lol.

My mains:

Eytomitc 2SE

These are a balanced, neutral pair of IEMs that are like earplugs, designed to be shoved completely into your ears. As a result, these isolate sound so damn well, better than all my TWS sets with ANC. They have fantastic clarity, though average seperation (but they are IEMs, what can ya do.) As they sound super neutral, I love using this for editing, or just listening to anything casually.

However, due to the highly intrusive nature of these IEMs, I don’t like the feeling of them when I’m walking around, as such, these are my at desk headphones or if I’m on a shoot and need monitoring earphones.

Galaxy Buds 2 Pro

For all the times where I’m not at my desk, these are my daily drivers. I bought these mainly due to them having fantastic audio quality without having too crazy of a V tuning. Throw in a great sale as Samsung always has, these were a snag.

Plus, I have seen Samsung’s previous buds and was impressive by its decent repairability. A lot of TWSes aren’t repairable, basically making them consumables. Having something somewhat replacable batteries mean that 2 years down the line, when the battery is shot, I can replace the battery for cheap rather than the whole set.

I also love the easy volume adjustment by double tapping the ear.

However, their active noise cancelling is middeling at best.

It’s almost 2 years in, suprisingly, the battery life still holds up decently. We’ll see how long more the battery lasts!

My spares:

Moondrop Space Travel - Fantastic sounding for it’s price, cute desgin, but not amazing UX.

Redmi Buds 6 Play - No ANC, but light as a feather with 7.5 hours of battery life. Very very cheap and sounds decent.

Moondrop Quarks - A basic pair of wired earphones with decent isolation and more neutral sound. Mine doesn’t have any mic on it.

KZ ZSN, KZ ESX Pro - Other cheap earbuds that sound decent, but very V curvy. It’s nice when I want a bit of pop in my music, but I generally prefer listening to my other ones. These do have a mic though!

Other daily accessories.

MAH Backpack:

In terms of where I carry around my stuff, I generally like backpacks, with this one being my current typical backpack.

It’s bright, colorful and big. That was the main reason why I bought this 17" MAH Backpack. Even though it has way too little compartments for my liking, I still carry it and supplement the issue with small organizer bags. Sometimes, it just feels more like a huge drawstring bag with a laptop pouch.

It’s a splash of color among black backpacks.

65W USB-C charger:

It’s a somewhat small charger that I bring everywhere, it’s fast enough for my needs and has saved my friends and my bacon so many times. The newer ones are so tiny, but this one still works and is portable enough that I can’t justify replacing it. I was really tempted to buy the recent UGreen Chargers though, their new Uno lineup is SO CUTE with that little face screen.

50W Xiaomi powerbank:

I got it SUPER cheap, basically the price for a standard charging one for 50W instead. It’s good enough for charging the ultrabooks I carry. 100W would be nice but not necessary for the stuff I use, especially considering those were 3x the price. I can stick with 50 watts, it’s not like my laptops regularly pull any higher than that anyway.

Strength training gloves

My hands peel with weights otherwise.

Airtag clones

These don’t work well. They turn off randomly and having crappy reception, pinging my phone that it’s been left behind when I hold my backpack in a specific way. I don’t use them anymore.

Mini Tech Bag

I carry around a mini tech bag in my main bag with the following:

• Cheapo USB C Hub
• 2x USB C to C Cable
• Lightning cable for my apple friends
• MicroUSB cable
• USB 3.0 Thumbdrives, super useful for quick transfers, some of them are loaded with OSes for quick troubleshooting.

3 in 1 USB cable

Each bag I own has a short usb charger thingy, I’ve gotten too many of these things from conventions and I just put them in every bag now.

Screwdriver kit

It’s a lil portable cheap one from Aliexpress that has a spring mechanism. Alas, the spring mechanism has come loose a few times, so I am forced to keep it in a bag to keep it from accidentily unbuckling and spilling all over my bag. It was cheap though and has come in useful a few times.

Medicine pouch

I fall sick way too often, thus I carry a medicine pouch in my day to day bag in cae anything happens. I’m well known enough to have medicine now lol.

And with that I carry masks and sunscreen too.

Rechargable Fan

We have two weathers in Singapore, summer and summer. In other words, it is hot. On most days, we do have decent wind, but on days with stale heat, this fan, even as underpowered as it is, provides wonderful relief.

And that’s a wrap I think!

Yep, that’s what I carry everyday hardware wise… I would describe it as a thoughtfully extravagent on a budget, if that makes sense. It’s not minamilist, I could consolidate my things, but I’ve chosen not too as each serve a purpose. At the same time, I do so while keeping my expanses light by hitting the budget markets.

At least for now… Till the next update.

Also holy crap this is a long text article with too little images. I’ll write better next time lol.

I’ll talk about software another time :)