The Setup - My Setup

1) Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Matt Baty, I’m a student and entrepreneur.  I founded a company called tech & theory which is a technology and design firm.  Oh, it’s safe to say I’m a coffee addict as well.

2) What hardware are you using?

I spend most of my time starring at a Dell 24” 1080 monitor.  It’s been reliable, but I’m in desperate need of a real monitor, not a small TV.

Those pixels are pushed by a custom built Windows 7 desktop with a Hex-core AMD processor, 8GB of ram, a 256GB SSD and an AMD 5870 GPU.  The audio Is pushed to my ears via a set of M-Audio AV-40’s.

I have a 2010 MacBook Pro 13” with a 2.26Ghz Core 2 Duo and 8GB of ram.  I hardly ever use it, except for test Mac related IT stuff or Apps.  Now that I have a new iPad 32GB with LTE the laptop gets even less use.

For on the go computing, my iPhone 4S is always with me, I’ve had every iPhone since the first one, and actually sold some Apple stock to help justify buying it (they didn’t offer contract discounts back then).

For home media my Apple TV gets used a lot and I love the device, but I wish it wasn’t so dependent on iTunes.

When I am traveling or working on the move I use my Timbuk2 Control bag, which I just traded in my bigger messenger bag for to down size.  It is stress relieving to cut back on all the crap one stuffs into a messenger bag.  I keep my Moleskin notebook and HI-TEC C pen in the bag at all times along with a Pogo Sketch pro stylus for sketching on the iPad.  For audio I lug my Bose TP-1’s and photos are snapped with a Sony NEX-5n which takes awesome pictures and video.

3) And what software?

On my computers, all my backups are handled by Crashplan and blasted over to a friends server, which is awesome because it’s local and free.  For documents I use Dropbox, and photos are managed in Lightroom 4.  For browsing Chrome is my primary choice, and calendars and email I made a switch from Gmail to iCloud.  I use Postbox for an email client and I absolutely love it’s UI and various features.  For presentations I exclusively use Keynote now, it’s simple and makes great looking slides, and has an iPhone remote with notecards, which is sooo helpful.  Oh and Fingerprint for universal AirPrint is a must.

On my iPad I use Mr. Reader for RSS, Instapaper for content hoarding and Goodnotes for note taking and PDF annotating.  I slapped this post together in iA Writer and Draw can make all of my crappy sketches somehow look like real art - just ask my fiancé.  These at least are my standout Apps.

4) What would be your dream setup?

My dream setup would be a new custom built desktop with an Ivy Bridge processor, 16GB of ram, dual SSD’s and an Nvidia 680.  All this will be pushing out to a 27” HP IPS display.  Oh and I will be running an OS X Lion VM from the task bar.  All household data management would occur on a Mac Mini Server, which would always run iTunes for the Apple TV.  It would also run Fingerprint 24/7 and a few other services I don’t need, but would be fun to have.