Where am I working and what do I do there?

• Edinburgh Napier University.

• I am an Associate Professor, teaching modules in festival and event management.

• I also lead the BA (Hons) International Festival & Event Management programme suite.
  

Where do I live and what’s it like there?

• I live in Edinburgh, Scotland. This has been my home since 27 September 1997, when I moved here to start university.

• I was awarded an MA (Hons) Politics and Economic & Social History from the University of Edinburgh in 2001. I went back and did a MSc in Economic & Social History in 2004-2005.

• Edinburgh is an excellent city, with many qualities that I cherish and value.

• It has history and character. It is walkable. The festivals attracted me to the city, and they continue to enthral me. Having built my career around festivals and academia, I feel at home here.

• Contemporary Edinburgh is very interesting, with cultural spaces, a rich social mix, and a healthy, creative interest in new technologies.
  

How do I spend my time (that isn’t work)?

• My time is generally spent between work and family these days.

• When I have discretionary time, I tend to fall back on familiar interests: watching cycling on the TV; watching Nick Cave documentaries; listening to podcasts (when away from my desk); listening to music (when at my desk).

• Many of my podcast listens are from Relay. You can see what music I’ve been listening to on my Last.fm page.

• What would I like to be doing? Reading more for pleasure. Walking and cycling more for pleasure. Seeing more of Scotland. Working on my blog and website.
  

What technology do I use?

• I am an Apple user.

• In no particular order, this includes: an M1 Pro MacBook Pro; a Studio Display; an 11” M2 iPad Air; iPhone 16 Pro (in white, with an almost Yves Klein Blue silicone case from Apple); AirPods Pro 2; a Series 10 Apple Watch; a Series 6 Apple Watch (that sits on my desk as a little clock, encapsulated in a little rubber fake iPod case); two HomePod Minis in the kitchen.

• I like the way the devices complement each other. I like the aesthetics of it all. It works for me.

• I have a UGREEN 208 dock to help join some other bits and pieces to this setup. This includes a couple of Samsung SSDs for Time Machine backups. Also part of the mix is a 15 button Stream Deck from Elgato; it’s fun to have.

• My music reaches me via Apple Music. When at my desk this is run from my Mac, then through the dock, and one of these, before heading to a 2009 Denon 1910 AVR. The AVR sends the audio out to three Bowers & Wilkins speakers of the same vintage. I think it all sounds pretty good.

• I use a work-issued Windows laptop for a lot of my university stuff these days. I have found an effective way to switch between laptops, using the Studio Display with whatever is front and centre at that time. With my Apple keyboard, and a Logitech MX Master 3S mouse switching between them at the same time. It’s fine.

• Since summer 2025 I have been paying for web searches and AI models via Kagi. It’s working well for me so far.

And software?

Here’s a load of software that I make use of most days, on my personal devices:

• Email: I used Apple’s Mail apps on all my devices. Mail is more than enough for my needs, particularly with its range of coloured flags that I rely on to keep track of important emails in different categories.

• Notes: Apple’s Notes app for life notes. Craft for work related information; partly to keep things separated out, and partly for Craft’s flexibility to rearrange information within a note, add notes within notes and so on.

• Task Management: Apple’s Reminders.

• Photos: All my photos are taken with my iPhone. I use the iOS camera app, linkled to my iCloud Photos Library.

• Calendar: For calendars, I pay for Fantastical. I like its flexibility and rich set of features, as well as its widget options. For a long time, I also made liberal use of its more corporate focused features, such as quick tool bar links to Teams and Zoom calls… but now that my work has capped off access to Teams through my personal devices, this doesn’t apply. I may well cancel my subscription, and switch to Apple’s Calendar app. My regular calendars are all hosted on iCloud, except for a subscription to my work Outlook calendar which I have read-only access to outside of work machines.

• Cloud file storage: iCloud Drive works well for me. It was particularly useful when I was working across both an iMac and a MacBook Pro. Now that I’m MacBook Pro for my personal computer it is still a good way to deal with files that I might access on my iPhone and want to save for later use. I also have the option to access iCloud Drive through a browser on my work laptop.

• RSS: I have used Feedly for RSS. It works fine and I’m used to it. Also, it has a green icon on my phone home screen, which fits with the colour based organisation system I’ve implemented!

• Contacts: The stock contacts app from Apple works fine for me.

• Search: Since summer 2025 I have been paying for my web searches, through Kagi. I became interested in this through hearing the CEO on various podcasts, then giving it a go.

• Browser: I use Orion on Mac, iPhone and iPad. Orion is from Kagi, and their ethos and approach informs its features and development. I used Safari for many years, and it is still my secondary browser on my personal devices. Sometimes I switch back to it, if payment or password details are not readily accessible through Orion. When Safari was my primary browser, I was a frequent user of Safari Technology Preview for secondary/work browsing, but with the clamping down of access to work sites, and the switch to Orion, I don’t make much use of STP any longer.

• Read It Later: I started using GoodLinks in the summer of 2025, just before the public launch of Tahoe, iOS 26 and all the rest, as a way to store up OS reviews.

• Writing tools: My long form writing is done in Scrivener. I’ve been using Scrivener for many years, through articles, book chapters, and ultimately my PhD. I also make use of Pages, TextEdit, and then Word for documents that need to be shared with others.

• Reference management: Bookends is my current reference management base. It receives frequent updates, which gives my confidence that my library of references won’t evaporate through the developer’s neglect.

• Time tracking: Timery, powered by Toggl.

• Music: Apple Music. If I’m at my desk, the path from Apple’s servers to my ears is roughly (as above): streamed to my MacBook Pro; SoundSource directs it towards my Denon 1910 receiver (via the UGREEN dock); and from there to the B&W speakers.

• Podcast listening: Castro, on my iPhone. It was neglected for a while, but got bought up and has been increasingly solid.

• Audio on the move: I really like my AirPods Pro 2. They survived a trip through the washing machine, but I might still upgrade them now that the third generation model is available.

The header image on this page is from Basic Apple Guy.

Thank you to Stephen Hackett for his 512 Pixels “Gear” page for inspiring the software listing.