Well, it's official: I'm no longer an astronomer. Instead I get paid to write computer programs. Here's a laundry list of useful and/or interesting links related to my day-to-day computing.
My Linux box is an 8-year old dual-core AMD64 running at 2.2 GHz with a mere 4 GB of RAM running Ubuntu as a server and sometime development machine. The system drive is a 64 GB SSD with a 2- and a 3-TB data drive which are used to back up all of our photos.
In late 2012 I took the plunge and bought a Mac, a neat little 13-inch Macbook Air with a 128 GB SSD and 8 GB RAM, which has been phenomenal - the best laptop I've ever owned by far. I even didn't hate OS X (now macOS) as much as I expected :-) and I could almost say I now like it, though I miss some of the GNU versions of utilities. It's up to date with macOS Sierra, which seems fine to me. My only real complaint is the screen — it's not good enough for accurate colour work when processing photos.
Which is why, after three years, I bought a nice little 15" Retina Macbook Pro with 16 GB RAM and a 256 GB SSD :-) Oh, that screen... It's nice to have such a powerful machine for a laptop, but man does it get hot on my lap.
Of course, everyone has to have Windows machine somewhere in their closet. It's reasonably specced with an Intel quad-core CPU running at 3.1 GHz, 8 GB of RAM and a 128 GB SSD as the system drive. The 3 TB data drive is filling up fast thanks to shooting raw files with 3 cameras. The monitor is a decent Dell 2209WA, which I trust for colour, plus it's a 16:10 ratio (which is better for me since I have a TV for watching movies!). The graphics card is a puny Radeon 5450 but it's fanless which I value more than performance. It's up to date with Windows 10, which seems OK apart from a couple of irritating quirks (I'm looking at you, auto-updater... :-/).
Mobile computing is handled by Android: a Nexus 7 tablet and a Moto G phone. I quite like the Nexus 7 form-factor, though it's a pity Google has decided it won't qualify for upgrades to Nougat. The Moto G was an experiment as my first foray into smartphones. Safe to say I've outgrown it (plus it really does have a terrible camera) but I don't feel like spending the money to replace it yet, even though Motorola/Lenovo has decided on a terrible security update policy. My next phone will definitely not be a Motorola thanks to that silliness.
Yup - had to happen eventually, but I've quite taken to Java especially when coupled with Spring Boot. It's almost - well - fun (something I never thought I'd say about Java).
Perl was my first love, but Python has its charm.
These pages are all hand-coded, mostly using Emacs (with a sprinking of Bluefish in the early days) and, more recently, Atom. I can be a stickler for details, so I originally wrote strict XHTML - I've recently updated to HTML5, and you may notice that I've used Bootstrap for layout and styling.