Lotus Notes is a must for me for offline mail and documentation (in an own database which contains all sorts of stuff, notes, schedules, etc) and I do really swear by it (and on it sometimes), whereby I love the replication mechanisms most. Whenever I have to edit a bit of text be it plain, HTML, XML or whatever, Florian Balmer’s Notepad2 or Vim are my tools of choice. Firefox is a must of course (although I also use Safari) as are Thunderbird for all things IMAP. When I don’t have access to my beloved and purchased copy of NetNewsWire I use Sage for Firefox as an RSS reader. Being a Unix person, all things Linux and FreeBSD are good; well most anyway.
On my Windows laptop, I use Xampp, an excellent environment which supplies an Apache web server avec PHP and a few other things that I don’t really care for. OpenLDAP is of course a must, and I use Berghmann’s OpenLDAP on Windows port when in an hotel. When it gets a bit crunchy, I like CygWin for testing things when I don’t have a Linux around, and otherwise I launch the fabulous VMware workstation.
I program a fair bit and exclusively use vi or vim as an editor; anything else is a waste of time. When on Windows, I try to live with MingW to create native Win32 binaries from the C language, falling back to MS Visual C (but just the C bit) when that isn’t possible. Anything webby, I prefer PHP or Perl as a platform, both being very suitable to most jobs, whereby in 2005 my focus shifted from Perl to PHP (don’t ask why). Oh, and before I forget: Java sucks.
Online (you are probably reading that here), I use DokuWuki because “it just works”. What I like best about Dokuwiki is that it stores plain text in plain files (vi remember?) which can be rsynced in and out of places. I’d also hate to have documentation about getting the database going in a wiki which stores that information in a database... (Catch 22?) When I blog I use WordPress which also just works. Lovely. Curl is the best tool to get data from or to an HTTP server and I use that a lot (I even published an article about it in a German magazine).
Mail? Exim (I used to love sendmail, but I’m getting too old for that shit), Courier IMAP and Mutt or Thunderbird, whereby at home I use Mail.app. Telnet or SSH I do with Putty on Windows and with ssh on the rest, for copying pscp on Windows, Fugu on Mac and scp on the rest.
Office work, you ask? Well: vi if I can, and OpenOffice.org if I can’t. And if I get some dumb MS-document which I really think I’m going to want to see and OOo can’t read it, I might use one of the MS readers; but don’t count on it. The DEL button is the one I use most with mail.
When on the road, I use a Dell Inspiron 510m which suits me very well. At home I have several machines, most of which are also Dell, and since May 2005 I also have a Mac Mini which I immediately loved. I’m ADSL-connected to the Internet with a Draytek Vigor 2500We Linksys WRT54GL wireless LAN router and I usually carry a Nokia 6230 in my right pocket. I use a Linksys NSLU2 with two 250GB USB drives for backups, and for longevity I use a DVD recorder.
In my jackets I used to always carry a Palm IIIx but I haven’t used that in over two years (and they make Windows PDA now!). Instead I have a notebook in my pocket. No, not the 510m! A real notebook. You know, bits of paper held together with a spiral binding. And a green pen.
When I listen to music it is with a Terratec Noxon, a superb little thingy which is hooked up to my stereo and receives MP3 tracks wirelessly. The tracks are served by the inconspicious Twonkyvision Musicserver running on Mac OS/X