My Tools

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For any 21st century cyborg, our tools will be practical and productive until neural implants actually outperform voice and text interaction. In this post, I’m taking the “productive cyborg” approach over the idealist one. This list is less for the emacs magicians and more for cyborg-aligned internet natives.

This is not a complete list and doesn’t include all custom tools (AI agents, trackers, network monitors, etc.), specific websites, information filtering strategies, developer frameworks, brain hacks, or programming languages.

Hardware

Any good cybermorphist needs good hardware. Here’s the essential gear:

Visual Displays

  • XREAL Air 2 Pro: These AR glasses give you three virtual monitors with Nebula MacOS software, connecting via USB-C like any monitor. Eye strain is a slight issue but you’ll adapt.
  • Portable monitors: 15.6 inch lightweight screens under 500g. ZenScreens are generally solid.
  • FLEXSTA portable monitor stand: Invaluable for vertical screen real estate. I pair this with my 16” Macbook for a 32.6 inch vertical monitor anywhere. Horizontal setups always fail on the go—I never use that second monitor if that’s the setup.
  • Paper displays: Sometimes your eyes need a break from the blue light. I own the Remarkable 2 E-ink tablet, but that company’s been hamstrung by E-ink IP owners. Daylight looks like your best bet now. Eyeing that one myself.

Computing Devices

  • Laptop: Switched from Lenovo to Macbook M1 Pro and haven’t looked back. Apple’s chip innovation sold me, and the deal-closer was getting HDMI and SD card slots back. For Windows emulation, just use Parallels. Slightly pricey but if your time is worth more than $2/hour, just buy it.
  • Raspberry Pi: These micro computers offer some of the best FLOP/S per buck and can do anything. My previous home’s EnigmA machine ran wireless speakers and displayed crucial info (like D20 rolls based on today’s date) via a Raspberry Pi.
  • Tinybox: If you’ve got the cash, get a Tinybox. We don’t want our AGI API requests going through Big Stats, and having your own supercomputer ready to deploy 1T parameter models means your future won’t be infringed upon. Alternatively, you can build a data center out of Mac Studio M4 units.

Input Devices

  • Keyboards: First advice: don’t get too into keyboards—it’s a money pit. Just go to Keychron and pick one. I have the K11 Alice 65 layout with MX Brown keys and love it.
  • OP-1 synthesizer: If your cyborg experiments extend to digital synthesizers, another warning: this also gets expensive. The OP-1 is my current weapon of choice.

Audio Equipment

  • HiFi: Audio is crucial. I’ve had the Bowers & Wilkins PX7 and recently got the PX8, but I’d only recommend them if nothing better exists. At that price point, consider Airpods Pro Max. Never found better earphones than Airpods Pro 2.
  • Home audio: Wireless synchronized speakers and LED lights are key to a true cyborg home. One certainty: don’t go for Sonos. Their connectivity is horribly buggy, even worse than AirPlay. For RGB LEDs, choose ones with diffuse covers, WiFi connectivity and IR/bluetooth.

Mobile Devices

  • Jelly Star: My absolute favorite phone, the Jelly series from UniHertz. I’ve always sought the smallest smartphones, and as everything got bigger, I found the true small form factor in Jelly 2. Currently on my third Jelly (with an iPhone 12 Mini backup). They released a new Jelly Go which has a larger screen. I was invited as the first commenter to their Kickstarter campaign and my only question was why they would make the screen larger. Very sad.

Virtual Reality

  • Oculus Quest: For working in VR on the dusty plains of Mars, the Quest line is the cheapest and most capable option versus HoloLens and Apple Vision Pro. Connect with a wire and you’re set for cyberspace.

Networking and Security

  • Hardware network boxing: When you buy a 塞伯坦 Vacuum Cleaner 5000x and it begins turning on its WiFi access to send voice recordings to West Taiwan, it’s a great idea to box off your network and use hardware monitoring and filtering of network traffic. This should let you block outgoing traffic from WiFi-connected devices and for that matter, install hardware ad blockers. Check out the ASUS emulator and the open source pfSense.

Software

The software you use is crucial for productivity and tech integration. Here’s my curated list (✱ = app, 🌎 = Chromium plugin).

Productivity and Workflow

  • ✱ Alfred: An open Spotlight replacement giving you extreme access to complex tools through cmd + space. It’s a magician’s wand in the right hands. I run custom workflows (like one that launches a chatbot when I type ch), text replacements (e.g., ::apart becomes https://apartresearch.com), and far better file navigation than the crime against humanity called Finder.
  • ✱ RescueTime: Cross-platform app and Chromium plugin that logs all activity with easy stats on productive vs. unproductive time. Tried others, RescueTime wins.
  • ✱ Obsidian: My note-taking weapon of choice. Outranks every alternative by being open source, centrally staffed, and designed for human cognition. It connects concepts across topics rather than burying notes in hierarchies you’ll never revisit. Also runs this website!
  • ✱ Notion: Most versatile tool for structured documentation and operations. Has advanced database management, strong automation (solo or with Zapier), and great user management.
  • ✱ Google Drive: Notion’s only weakness is collaborative editing and document prep. For this, use Google Docs. It’s just that good. Financial experts claim you need Excel for those 25% missing Sheets features. Maybe I’ll feel that lack someday, but not yet. Function calls in Sheets already do plenty.
  • ✱ Discord: Nearly free Slack alternative with more features, better user management, and no Slackbot spam. What more could you want? The only feature gap is Connections, but it’s not enough to justify switching. My work still requires a few Slacks, of course.

System Enhancements

  • MacOS: A lackluster OS due to weird design choices and control limitations. Maybe that’s a gift, as I can’t waste hours customizing it. At least it’s UNIX.
  • Fixing MacOS:
    • ✱ Magnet: Makes window management bearable.
    • ✱ Middle: Enables middle mouse clicks on the touchpad.
    • ✱ Lightshot: Fixes MacOS screen capture shortcomings. Shottr is another option I haven’t tried.
  • ✱ Rewind: Records and compresses everything on-screen, on-device so you can search what the hell you were working on last night when you got no sleep and those hours vanished. Also does meeting notes, but that’s less useful to me.
  • ✱ Parallels: A MacOS Windows emulator that’s damn good. One of those rare cases where an incumbent actually delivers better solutions year after year. Highly recommended if needed. Warning: some DirectX-dependent software may still fail (like BAR).
  • ✱ Nordpass: You need a password manager, and at Apart we use Nordpass. Works well, though most alternatives probably do too (heard good things about 1Password).
  • ✱ Cloud Backup: Essential to have proper cloud backup. All my devices are backed up using a custom solution from a Danish provider. Google Drive excels here while iCloud seems like an Apple ecosystem trap.
  • ✱ Email app: I’ve used the default Mac Mail app for ages but I’m eyeing newer solutions like Superhuman, HEY, and Fyxer. I host my own email, though business emails mostly go through Gmail.
  • ✱ Google Photos: Superb experience backing up photos and relatively cheap. The search is amazing, and alternatives can’t match it.

    Browsers and Extensions

  • ✱ Edge: Switched when Sydney launched and still enjoy it. Being Chromium-based, it works with all Chrome plugins, has a free AGI, and neat side-browsing. Might try Opera or Brave eventually.
  • 🌎 Vimium: I learned vim like a proper software nerd and found it horribly inefficient with my 15+ daily programs. Vimium is my copium—a Chromium plugin letting you ditch your mouse, click links, bookmark locations, and more with just your keyboard. Delightful for keyboard natives.
  • 🌎 Leechblock: Best social media blocking plugin with lots of clever features. I love the option that makes you write a paragraph before unblocking sites.
  • 🌎 Video Speed Controller: Controls video speed beyond player limits. I use it to bump YouTube videos to 2x-3.5x.
  • 🌎 Privacy Badger: Blocks known trackers. Sometimes websites won’t let you login because you’re blocking their ridiculous trackers, but it has an easy unblock feature.
  • 🌎 Thumbnail Rating Bar: Shows the likes/dislikes ratio on YouTube thumbnails. Helps you skip hundreds of useless videos.
  • ✱ LokiNet: Connects you to the onion network. ‘Nough said.

Development Tools

  • ✱ VSCode: My programming tool of choice alongside zsh command line. I use them together and handle most git interactions in CLI. For VSCode, I use the high contrast black theme.
  • ✱ Docker: Devops tool for standardized virtual servers—essentially making pretend-computers with specific hardware specs. Used for building cyber challenges for Abydos.
  • ✱ Filezilla: Mainly for easy sFTP server access, but works for general file synchronization across servers too.
  • ✱ VNC Viewer: Connect to our Raspberry Pi like you would with Teamviewer. Very useful for standard Debian RP setups, saves hassle.
  • ✱ RStudio: Still the best R IDE, and since I love tidyverse and ggplot2, I use it for many projects. These days, I try to standardize to Python since R is mostly academia-bound.

Creative Software

  • ✱ TouchDesigner: For your inner artist who wants to connect nodes and create generative beauty. Spend a night with it and use it to drive your projectors if you nerd out too long. Cyborgs need aesthetic quality for tomorrow’s interfaces.
  • ✱ Canva: Impressive how many features fit in one app. The AI integration and template management make it top-tier for efficient team graphics.
  • ✱ Unreal Engine: For hyperreal VR applications or just fun, use Unreal. Blender is its open source companion and an amazing piece of software.
  • ✱ Unity: I learned programming and art with Unity, and back then it was amazing. Today, management has driven it into the ground, but it’s still a top game engine with a special place in my heart.
  • ✱ OBS or Loom: Any good cyborg knows information is freedom. Set these up to record your screen, webcams, or external cameras. Amazing for all kinds of live video transmission across protocols and services.
  • ✱ The Adobe Suite: Despite being robber barons, Adobe has created amazing tools. My first freelance gig was as a concept artist painting in Photoshop daily. What a tool!
  • ✱ DaVinci Resolve: Amazing video editor with a super capable free version.

The AI Tools

Here’s my personal AI toolkit (excluding websites, specific research project use cases, or custom research assistant implementations).

Language Models and Assistants

  • ChatGPT: Canceled my subscription after Claude Sonnet 3.5 but reactivated for o1. It’s highly capable—offload most tasks to o1 if possible. Unfortunately, the UI lacks many AI-native features Claude has nailed.
  • Claude: Use it for most tasks—nice balance of capability, artifact editing, and workspaces. We also experiment on Claude models, and it’s most helpful when I’m building custom software.
  • Edge Copilot: Edge comes with a web Copilot that explains console debugging output or anything on a webpage. Pretty great.
  • Alfred chatbot: My Alfred 5 Workflow for an N-context window chatbot via OpenAI API. Just runs GPT-4o but incredibly useful for quick queries.
  • Replicate: Unified API to most open source models. Used in many of our experiments.
  • TogetherApi: Another unified API to open source models. Powers most of our open source model experiments.
  • MistralAI: Mainly for our experiments via their APIs.

Development and Coding

  • ✱ Lovable.dev: Probably the best single-prompt app development tool today. I use it for research papers, audio visualization experiments, and more.
  • Github Copilot: Use it in VSCode—immensely helpful, mostly for in-context programming. Tried Cursor and derivatives but still missing that “aha!” moment.
  • Agents: AI agents should be designed for your specific use cases, and base models are capable enough now that agents work. I’ve built multiple assistants for research, Discord server interactions, and custom CRON job operations through my server.

Search and Interface Tools

  • Perplexity: AI-powered search engine with summarization. Usually finds obscure things I’m looking for, though sometimes falls short.
  • Godmode: Open source interface for working with multiple AI apps simultaneously.

Creative Tools

  • Midjourney: As an art and design lover, I use it frequently for brainstorming and creating cover images for random projects and ideas. We use it for work too.
  • Udio: I’m part of Utilibeats where we create AI-generated, AI-mastered tracks enhanced by humans. Grab the dirt-cheap subscription and play with music. See what the future looks like.