Thomas Upton

Coffee

January 7, 2012 at 14.37

Coffee

Like most of the world, I love coffee. I usually drink a cup or two a day, and sometimes more. I’m lucky enough to live close to places that sell great coffee: Whole Foods roasts their own coffee, and there are numerous local places with great beans.

I usually make a full “batch” of coffee in a French press (or сafetière), but sometimes that’s too much. I know it’s considered blasphemous, but I got a Keurig single cup brewer for Christmas, and I absolutely love it. I was apprehensive about Keurig machines until I found out about refillable “K-Cups” that you could fill with your own, delicious coffee. I use the official Keurig “My K-Cup”, but that requires that you replace the entire holster mechanism each time. It’s not time consuming, but it is a bit annoying.

I discovered the Ekobrew, which is a filter that fits in the existing cup holster. Two of them are on their way to my house from Amazon right now.

Regardless of how it gets there, coffee from the Keurig is (perhaps surprisingly) pleasant. It’s not the best cup of coffee, but it’s quick, easy, and clean.

I still use the French press when I need to make a bigger batch of coffee or if I want to relax and enjoy a really great cup. I use the seemingly-ubiquitous Bodum French press and burr grinder and keep the coffee warm in my Zojirushi carafe. Coffee stays hot for hours on end, so I can make coffee in the morning and still enjoy it later in the afternoon. How I make coffee just depends on how much I need and what kind of mood I’m in.

One last thing: I also got a small stovetop espresso maker for Christmas, and it is amazing. When I want a treat, I make myself a café Americano: a bit of espresso in a normal-sized coffee cup and filled the rest of the way with hot water. Yum!

Full disclosure: I’ve linked to a number of products on Amazon in this post, and most of them contain my affiliate link. I’ll get a small kickback if anything is bought via these links. I will only ever post links to products that I use and love, and that is certainly the case with everything here. I’m passionate about my coffee, and I don’t want to mislead anyone. I have not included my affiliate link to the Ekobrew refillable K-Cup because I have not received or used it at this time.

By Thomas Upton | Posted in Drinks | 2 comments

My Essential Tools

January 5, 2012 at 16.16

In light of some recent excellent posts about tools that smart people use, here are my essential tools that I used in 2011.

Hardware

I use a 15″ MacBook Pro i5 with 8 GB of RAM. It’s quick and does everything I need it to. It’s not too bulky, but it’s certainly bigger than my older 13″ MacBook. I keep toying with the idea of a MacBook Air, but I can’t justify the cost and I don’t want to use two machines.

I connect to an Apple LED Cinema Display when I’m at my standing desk, and I use a Logitech wireless keyboard and an Apple Magic Trackpad.

I do daily, local backups to a smallish volume on a 1 TB hard drive. The rest of the drive holds my music, photos, and other media.

Software

I do all of my work (both professionally and on this site) on VMs in “the cloud” that I ssh to with iTerm 2. I love that it can copy-on-select and the customizable colors are more robust than in other terminal apps. I used the built in Terminal.app for a long time, but the latest iTerm 2 is stable and excellent.

I also use HTTP Client to test our API, as well as both Firefox and Chrome.

When I write code, I usually use vim, but I’ve been testing out the recent alpha builds of TextMate 2.

When I write for this website or for my own personal notes, I’ve started using Byword to write and preview Markdown. Its fullscreen and “paragraph focus” modes are nice touches. I’ve heard good things about Marked, which allows Markdown previews from any app, but I haven’t used it yet.

I’m not a huge calendar user, but I do keep track of shows I attend and personal events on Google Calendar. I interact with my calendars with Fantastical. Its natural language event input is pretty great and lets me add events really quickly.

I work on and use a browser-based email client at work, but I also like to use Sparrow. The minimal interface stays out of the way, but all my mail is available quickly. Shortcuts for reply and reply all make it easy to respond to threads. A nice little touch: Sparrow automatically picked up the fact that I had an IMAP folder called Archive in my work email and started using it when I press Delete to archive messages.

I use Alfred all day every day. My usage statistics say I average 13.6 uses per day, but if you didn’t count weekends, holidays, or days that I don’t actually use my computer, I bet it’d be a lot higher. I love the clipboard management.

I occasionally use Cloud to quickly upload screenshots, but I don’t use it for much else.

I use Dropbox to manage files, share some music with friends, and back up certain documents. I also store my (encrypted) 1Password data on Dropbox so that I can access my passwords from anywhere.

Divvy and Stay are two window management tools that I use all the time. When I disconnect from my display, Stay puts my windows back to where I want them. It doesn’t quite work with Chrome, but everything else works well. Divvy lets me resize windows on a custom-sized grid. You can even define shortcuts – I use “c” for a centered window and “6″ for a window taking up 60% of the right side of the screen.

I recently started using Evernote, but I haven’t gotten into it just yet. I’ll have more to write about that when learn how to use it and actually start using it more. I do use Evernote’s Clearly browser extension to read articles on line.

For my musical pleasure throughout the day, I still use iTunes a lot of the time. However, Rdio (with Airfoil) is usually how I listen to music these days. Airfoil makes it easy to listen to music in my living room via my Apple TV.

By Thomas Upton | Posted in Software | No comments

Uptonian Thoughts on Twitter

January 4, 2012 at 22.50

You can now follow Uptonian Thoughts on Twitter! I’m using the Lessn Shortlinks and Simple Twitter Connect WordPress plugins to tweet my posts to @uptonin.

I might still occasionally link to my own posts on my @thomasupton account, but all posts and articles, along with information about the site, will be available on @uptonin.

By Thomas Upton | Posted in Announcement, Webapps | No comments

Lessn

January 4, 2012 at 22.37

I recently installed Lessn and then Lessn More to take control of my own short links. Lessn is a very simple URL shortener that is hosted on my own domain.

I registered upton.in to serve my short links. I chose the “.in” TLD because it’s short and common. I do wish there was an “.on” TLD so I could register upt.on, but I like the connotation of “in”. As I said on Twitter the other day, it can mean “Internet, inside, come in, infinity, interesting” among other things.

Lessn also integrates nicely with Mint, which I recently started using. I plan to write more on that shortly.

By Thomas Upton | Posted in Webapps | No comments

Unplayed

January 2, 2012 at 19.23

Santa brought me The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword for Christmas (thanks Mom!). I’ve enjoyed playing it, just as I’ve enjoyed playing video games for nearly my entire life.

In recent years, however, I’ve abandoned or not fully played all of my video games. I attempted to maintain a Google Docs spreadsheet to keep track of my unplayed games, but it quickly became more neglected than the games themselves.

I recently found out about Shaun Inman’s Unplayed, and it seemed perfect. It’s like a much simpler, lightweight Shelfari for video games. You can now see which games I’m playing (or not playing) at my Unplayed page. For now, I’m going back to Skyloft!

By Thomas Upton | Posted in Gaming, Webapps | No comments