rcmnd

Kieran Healy

Sociologist at Duke University who writes about markets and exchange, and about plain-text tools for social science.

16 things

DropboxService Dropbox

loved

DropBox is terrific and I use it more and more.

The Setup (usesthis.com) interview: an essay-length account of his research and writing toolchain.

2010-10-17·usesthis.com ↗

1PasswordSoftware AgileBits

loved

1Password is the add-on I would miss most if it went away.

The Setup (usesthis.com) interview: an essay-length account of his research and writing toolchain.

2010-10-17·usesthis.com ↗

FreedomSoftware Fred Stutzman

loved

Fred Stutzman's two little apps, Freedom and Anti-Social, are increasingly necessary for my well-being.

The Setup (usesthis.com) interview: an essay-length account of his research and writing toolchain.

2010-10-17·usesthis.com ↗

Anti-SocialSoftware Fred Stutzman

loved

Fred Stutzman's two little apps, Freedom and Anti-Social, are increasingly necessary for my well-being.

The Setup (usesthis.com) interview: an essay-length account of his research and writing toolchain.

2010-10-17·usesthis.com ↗

KeynoteSoftware Apple

loved

I use Keynote for lectures and presentations. It's one of the best pieces of software Apple makes.

The Setup (usesthis.com) interview: an essay-length account of his research and writing toolchain.

2010-10-17·usesthis.com ↗

SuperDuperSoftware

liked

I clone disks with SuperDuper. (Their customer support is terrific, by the way.)

The Setup (usesthis.com) interview: an essay-length account of his research and writing toolchain.

2010-10-17·usesthis.com ↗

CrashplanService

liked

After a few failed attempts at finding a good automatic offsite backup solution I recently began using Crashplan to mirror my wife's office computer on mine, and vice versa. It seems to be working out pretty well.

The Setup (usesthis.com) interview: an essay-length account of his research and writing toolchain.

2010-10-17·usesthis.com ↗

LaunchBarSoftware Objective Development

uses

LaunchBar has a lot more functionality than I actually make use of.

The Setup (usesthis.com) interview: an essay-length account of his research and writing toolchain.

2010-10-17·usesthis.com ↗

MacFUSESoftware

uses

MacFUSE makes it easy to have my office machine or various servers conveniently available.

The Setup (usesthis.com) interview: an essay-length account of his research and writing toolchain.

2010-10-17·usesthis.com ↗

pandocSoftware

uses

If a document is going to be simple (a review, a lecture, a letter, etc), I usually write it in Markdown. This can be converted to pretty much any useful format by way of Pandoc.

The Setup (usesthis.com) interview: an essay-length account of his research and writing toolchain.

2010-10-17·usesthis.com ↗

ESSSoftware

uses

ESS is an add-on to Emacs that allows you to do your data analysis inside the editor. It works with several statistics packages, but I do all my data work using it together with R.

The Setup (usesthis.com) interview: an essay-length account of his research and writing toolchain.

2010-10-17·usesthis.com ↗

SkimSoftware

uses

The right-hand monitor is for looking at output, either PDFs displayed using Skim or graphs and figures produced during data analysis.

The Setup (usesthis.com) interview: an essay-length account of his research and writing toolchain.

2010-10-17·usesthis.com ↗

LaCie Starck driveHardware

uses

But it failed miserably and has now been replaced by a 1TB LaCie Starck drive.

The Setup (usesthis.com) interview: an essay-length account of his research and writing toolchain.

2010-10-17·usesthis.com ↗

emacsSoftware

mixed

There are many things I dislike about the writing/data/coding setup I use. Emacs carries so much baggage with it, it's tiresome.

The Setup (usesthis.com) interview: an essay-length account of his research and writing toolchain.

2010-10-17·usesthis.com ↗

BibDeskSoftware

mixed

I tried using BibDesk to manage that stuff in the GUI (and store PDFs alongside the references) but it didn't take.

The Setup (usesthis.com) interview: an essay-length account of his research and writing toolchain.

2010-10-17·usesthis.com ↗

Mighty MouseHardware

disliked

I use the Mighty Mouse, which I don't particularly care for, and Apple's USB keyboard (the flat one, with the numeric keypad), which is tolerable but not great.

The Setup (usesthis.com) interview: an essay-length account of his research and writing toolchain.

2010-10-17·usesthis.com ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.