Hardware (Silicon-Based and Otherwise)

This blog post was typed on a Macbook Pro Core Duo, circa August 2006, that I have named Athena (after the Greek goddess of technology, cleverness, and, um, heroic endeavor). Say hello, Athena.

Hello!

Athena is a cheeky vintage, a few months before the processors made the jump to 64-bit, but I needed a computer for law school, and both the time and price were right (thanks to a friend/Apple Ambassador).

A brief aside: this is my first Mac in two decades — the last being my family’s old Apple IIGS. Whilst I contemplated a Mac for law school, the aforementioned Apple Ambassador handed me his own laptop (a G4 Powerbook running 10.4) and said, “Play with this, see if you like it.” Two minutes later I was sold. I made the switch and I never looked back — well, except for that Windows Boot Camp partition for the academic necessities of Electronic Blue Book (school-sanctioned exam software) and Half-Life 2 (Brian-sanctioned sanity-retention software).

Thanks to a mighty helping of luck, I have never suffered any sort of catastrophic data loss. Despite this fact, I am still terrified of hard drive failure, and I back up compulsively. Every night, SuperDuper! creates a fully bootable clone of Athena on a G-Technology G-Drive. A second partition on that same external drive serves as a Time Machine backup for super-quick recovery. Finally, all of my documents are backed up offsite using Amazon’s stunningly affordable and rock-solid S3 service. For something on the order of a buck a month, I get full offsite backup, accessible from anywhere. This backup occurs by way of Panic Software’s stellar Transmit file transfer application. My rule? It’s only paranoia if the data is replaceable.

Athena travels in a Timbuk2 custom messenger bag (black/navy/black), protected by a Timbuk2 laptop grip sleeve (no longer available, but it fits perfectly into the messenger bag). I’m a big fan of Timbuk2’s stuff — tough ballistic nylon on the outside, laminate on the inside. I’ve carried my bag through a rainstorm and the inside has remained perfectly dry. No zippers to get caught or through which water can leak, the strap is wide and comfy, and there are plenty of little pockets on the inside to store your stuff. It’s not particularly huge, so you can’t carry around five of those enormous casebooks, but it has more than enough space to carry a couple books, a charger, the computer, and a few other necessities (see below).

Software I Swear By

I’m a bit of a software fiend. In a former life, I was a hardcore Linux user, and that obsession with newer/faster/cooler software has stuck with me to this very day. For the sake of brevity, I’m going to primarily focus on the applications that get me through my law school day. But there is one applications that holds a special place in my heart (and on my hard drive), and that resides slightly outside the scope of this article:

Quicksilver

Despite its likely demise, Quicksilver remains the single most important application on my computer. It’s my application launcher, my quick e-mail sender, my file management tool, and even my primary method of interaction with iCal. It’s the first thing I install on a new computer, and opt-space is probably my most commonly pressed key combination. There are many, many tutorials and articles on this amazing piece of software, but none of them do it justice. It’s free, and it will change the way in which you interact with your computer. Go download it.

Back to the law-school-related stuff. It turns out that all of the applications I most often use live in my dock. Big surprise there. Let’s take a look at the relevant part:

Whew, ain’t that exciting?

The Humble iCal

It’s my appointment manager and calendar (but not, importantly, my assignment tracker. More on that later). You know, my favorite thing about using a Mac is the high level of integration among its various data structures. Addressbook integrates with Mail integrates with iCal integrates with Spotlight. Especially with the new data detectors in Leopard, iCal and Mail combine together into a beautiful whole. I’ve yet to find anything that operates better, and iCal is FREE!

OmniFocus

I’m not a big GTD (Getting Things Done) kind of guy. I don’t slave over my inbox, I don’t compulsively check and recheck my list of to-do’s . . . hell, all through undergrad I never even kept an assignment planner. But law school is different. Between the dozens of reading assignments, the journal work, and the necessities of daily life, it’s a lot to hold in one’s head. I’ve tried about three thousand of these organizer programs, and OmniFocus is my favorite. I used Kinkless GTD (by way of OmniOutliner Pro) back in the day, and OmniFocus is just its smarter faster brother. My favorite aspect of the program is its retention of the outline model. Does a project or assignment suddenly have intervening steps? It’s no big deal to add children (sub-steps), or promote the assignment to a full-fledged project. Moreover, it has a neat idea of “Perspective,” in which you can save sets of window views (e.g., just-completed assignments, assignments due in the next three days, etc.). Some folks might find OmniFocus a little rigid for their tastes — for them, I suggest the also-excellent Things, by Cultured Code. It’s a little loose and tag-heavy for my brains, but it is very pretty, and in some ways slicker than OmniFocus.

OmniOutliner Pro

This is the first program I bought for my Mac, and probably the one that I’ve used the most. Mostly it’s my note-taking application (after a brief stint as organizer, by way of Kinkless), but I also use it for generating end-of-semester outlines. Someone, somewhere once called OmniOutliner Pro the “Photoshop of outlining applications.” I think this does the program a disservice. OmniOutliner knows its limits and operates strictly within them. It doesn’t bludgeon you with features, and at the same time it’s as customizable as anyone could want. But most of all, it works. Unlike, say, Word, it won’t screw up its margins, it won’t get confused about levels of indent, it just operates smoothly from beginning to end. Oh, and its documents are a) spotlight searchable — a godsend when it comes to looking up that barely-remembered case, and b) tiny — most of mine are on the order of 8-16 kilobytes.

TextMate

I love this program. I love plaintext. I love the idea that the file is the absolute minimum size it can be to contain its information, I love the flexibility plaintext + regular expressions give you, and I love its ability to serve as an editor for ANY Cocoa-based text field. Of course, TextMate is also a programming environment, so if you ever find yourself writing HTML, shell scripts, C, or anything like that, its colorizing and code-folding will be godsends. But even as a lawyer’s tool, it’s just a fast, lightweight, incredibly powerful text editor, and I can’t imagine using a computer without it.

Scrivener

The best-designed piece of software I have ever, ever used. It’s created for writers, by a writer, and it has an amazing philosophy behind it that should be familiar to anyone who has used LaTeX: separate the content from the form. Scrivener has a built-in mini-outliner, a corkboard (for shuffling virtual index cards), a full-screen mode, and the ability to import PDFs, images, and movies. Couple that with incredible search functionality, automatic saving (there’s no such thing as a “save” button in Scrivener), snapshots (for rolling a project back to yesterday’s genius), keywords, labels, color-coding tool, and too much more to count . . . and you’re left with a tool aimed directly at helping you write. Once the writing’s done (and yes, Scrivener can footnote, too), it’s a trivial matter to export into many useful formats (from Word to RTF to MultiMarkdown to LaTeX), with all of it formatted perfectly. I’ll be writing a more detailed post about my usage of Scrivener at a later date, but suffice it to say it’s one o the most important things in my toolbox.

DevonThink Pro

In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that I have a total love/hate relationship with DevonThink. Its interface is clunky, its database of information is proprietary, and half the time it just doesn’t act like an Apple application. I’m about 90% convinced that the designers took the Apple Human Interface Guidelines and lit them on fire before writing a single line of code. That said, DTP does its job better than any other program I’ve found, and that job is collecting and organizing massive amounts of information. In a sense, it’s a digital junk drawer. Just throw any type of file at the program, and it will happily store it for you. But it can do so much more — its searching abilities are exceptional, way more detailed and powerful than Spotlight. Further, it can analyze huge sets of documents and find concordances among them. Most importantly, it allows for immense flexibility in the organization of its documents, allowing you to replicate (that is, co-locate) documents into as many folders as you wish. When researching for articles, it’s where all of the PDFs, web-links, and the like are dumped first. That said, Reinvented Software’s Together also looks promising, though it does lose out on the searching and flexibility, its interface is light-years beyond DevonThink’s.

Other Things I Cannot Live Without

  • Small Notebook: I use a Moleskine, but any pocket-sized notebook will do. As great as computers are, sometimes it’s just faster and more efficient to open that small notebook, scribble down a note, and transfer it later. Not to mention a) it will never run out of battery power, b) you won’t feel bad if you leave it out in the rain, and c) it’s way more resilient. A brief anecdote: a friend of mine had just acquired a brand new shiny iPhone. We were making plans for some sort of mischeif, and he whips out that shiny piece of metal and glass and starts tapping away at it, explaining in (exhaustive) detail its wonderful calendar functions. I pull out my notebook and say, “Hey, mine can do all of those things too, and one thing your iPhone absolutely can’t.” He replies, “Oh? Like what?” Without a word, I toss my notebook ten feet into the air and let it hit the ground. I pick it up, dust it off, and stick it back in my pocket. The moral of the story: never underestimate the power of resilient, analog technology.
  • Fountain Pen: Call me an effete nerd if you will, I love writing with a fountain pen. The ink flows more smoothly and my handwriting is better. Also, it lets me write smaller, essential for those cramped margin notes in my casebooks.
  • Multitool: My Leatherman Charge TTi lives in the messenger bag. Likely the single most useful thing I own, it’s good for everything from tightening the screws in sunglasses to trimming one’s nails. It’s the kind of thing that you never realize you need until the day you find yourself searching for a knife, pair of pliers, screwdriver, and wirecutter all at once. I prefer the TTi, even though it’s heavier, because the steel for the knives is just plain better and keep an edge longer. Also, the titanium finishings just look cool.
  • Clif Bars: Breakfast. Lunch. Afternoon snack. Midnight snack. Library sustenance. Law school is good at many things, not the least of which is utterly annihilating any semblance of a healthy lifestyle. (Un)surprisingly, I often find myself in the library at odd hours with my brain shutting down from lack of calories. For my money, Clif Bars are the only energy bar that doesn’t taste like compressed sawdust. Good for recovery after long runs, too.
  • Locking Carabiner: I cannibalized a Petzl William Locking D Carabiner from my rock climbing rack after the fifth or sixth time I found myself wanting to clip something to my bag for easy access. Mostly I use it for running shoes, but it’s also been known to secure camera cases, water bottles, keys, and even the bag itself to a handy tree limb. I recommend a full climbing-grade locking ‘biner a) because it’s larger and fits more easily around wide bag straps, b) because the size makes them harder to lose, and c) because non-locking ‘biners tend to open at the worst possible times.