Lichendust

I'm Harley, an artist, animator and programmer.
I make all kinds of useless stuff.

Uses

🌲
💼
garden
My hardware and software stack
CONTENTS

Inspired by uses this, I've written down all the stuff I use to do things.

I try to only buy most things once, preferring to save up to buy a somewhat future-proof thing without overspending or buying gear beyond my skill-level, but also without wasting money on a crappy version of the thing I'll need to replace. I prefer fewer pieces of kit which are chosen to be repairable or easily replaced/swapped out with alternatives if necessary. I call this practice 'atomic dependency'.

More than half of the items shown here are between 5-10 years old and well looked after. I purchase one or two of these items a year, and after about twelve years of doing this — the current length of my working life — I've ended up with a robust, high-quality arsenal without wrecking my bank account or needing to be independently wealthy.

Image

Hardware

Computers

I insist on having one main computer. I can't do the thing where I dedicate a particular machine to a particular task (like a PC for gaming, a laptop for music, etc.), it just winds up being a mental blocking factor for me.

Hyperion

To that end, I built Hyperion back in 2020. I knew I wanted to throw heavy tasks at it, like 3D work and rendering, hosting samplers for composing, so I set my baseline to be 'I want to be able to do at least two of these at the same time' and built a machine that quite literally does not blink in the face of multiple, parallel tasks that each would have annihilated my teenage hand-me-down laptops.

I've written more about this drive structure in workflow.

Pandora

Pandora is a Framework 12 laptop.

A picture of a small, open laptop on a desk surrounded by plants

It's here! I wrote a small review of it. Pandora runs Linux, presently Ubuntu Unity — but so heavily modified as to be unrecognisable — and will stay that way. It started life on Windows, but a bad update from Microsoft and this machine's lack of critical dependency on any OS finally killed my desire to deal with it any more.

Prometheus

A photo of a Steamdeck with only the red boot logo on-screen, reflecting green plants in on the black display

My Steamdeck, which I use for playing almost all of the controller-based titles I want to be able to pick up casually instead of sitting at my desk. Think Hollow Knight, Hades, etc. I've also been using it to emulate all the old console titles I never got to play as a kid, mostly Zelda games (but plenty of others) because I didn't live in a Nintendo household. I'll also be playing Shadow of the Colossus for the first time on it.

Homelab / Network

The Desk

The Fully desk is massive and I currently have it crammed into a too-small room in my current living situation, which is very funny.

I build my own keyboards too, a ridiculous practice that no one should ever do.

Audio

I bought the monitors several years ago because I was in the habit of turning up my headphones louder and louder throughout the day. I quite like my hearing, so I figured I'd dip my toe into some entry-level monitors. I haven't felt the need to swap them out yet.

I use the Scarlett for recording and re-amping through a small collection of outboard gear I've started, which doesn't merit mention in this list yet.

The DR-40x is a much more recent purchase, as I've started building a library of field recordings and sound effects, similar to the texture library I started a few years ago with my camera.

Notebooks

I use this very specific Leuchtterm as both bullet journal and sketchbook. Pages or partial pages dedicated to work, personal items and art pursuits are all intermingled.

A photograph of a desk with a Kaweco Steel Sport fountain pen, a pot of Iroshizuku Shin-Ryoku ink, a mint green Leuchtturm 1917, a pack of plain craft Moleskine Cahiers and a set of Stabilo natural pastel highlighters

In 2026, I switched from the standard 80 gsm to the 120 gsm Leuchtterms because I had begun splashing sketchy watercolours into them and they hold up just a little better from bleed-through. They're absolutely not designed for watercolours, but I use them lightly so it usually works out.

I load my fountain pens with Iroshizuku inks because I really like them. I tend to change colours to match my notebooks — it was Yama-Budo for my very long-lived magenta cover and Shin-Ryoku with my 2026 green/lichen cover. My camera is sitting on the magenta Leuchtterm somewhere in the next few sections.

Art

In addition to the 0.5mm 2B Rotring, my EDC sketching tool, I also have these on my desk —

While sketching and painting digitally in Krita, I use the Wacom. I got it on a ridiculously cheap Black Friday deal several years ago and it's served me very well. I actually have the 'ink' model, which can record vector versions of sketches done on top of it using a special Micron-style ink pen, but I think I've used that feature exactly one time. It's neat, but very gimmicky in practice.

Camera

A photograph of camera sitting on top of a burgundy notepad on a bamboo desktop. It's a modern camera, but features a wooden grip and a manual lens made of steel with a visibly wide aperture.

When I was a teenager, my Dad gave me his old Nikon D3200 DSLR he wasn't using anymore and the autofocus was so terrible that I ended up teaching myself to be faster manually on the barrel. I figured it was good practice for focus-pulling as a filmmaker, but now I just prefer using fully manual lenses.

The camera itself is generally in manual mode with the shutter speed on the thumb ring, and Sony firmware lets you customise almost all of the physical buttons, so I can drive the entire camera with my right thumb on the back and my left hand on the lens, without taking my eye out of the viewfinder.

I have an additional collection of thrifted second-hand Sony E-Mount lenses, but the 7Artisans are the two I reach for the most. I love the challenge of shooting with them, especially 'difficult' subjects like animals that don't sit still for their close-ups. I don't use burst shooting either, not least because this camera doesn't have a particularly fast burst mode, but also because then I either get it or I don't. I like that.

Software

Daily Use

I use Zen on desktop and Safari/Firefox on mobile. I have a Mozilla account for syncing my history/open tabs — mostly used for 'send tab to device' — and then Raindrop for cross-platform cross-browser saving.

I don't generally like cloudy tools, but my Mozilla account, Inoreader and Raindrop are essentially my only data-mining surface area, which I feel pretty good about.

I'm not in love with Obsidian, but it does the job of managing and tenuously connecting my massive library of rambling essays, snippets of information and project notes and keeping them offline and local-first.

Film

I use Blender for a tremendous amount of things, not least making films, and most of my pipeline is built around it. I use DaVinci for live-action work, and everything else here is in support of both of those.

ffmpeg and ImageMagick get written up into lots of pipeline and delivery scripts. I have a tonne of shortcuts and snippets and aliases for getting things done with them.

Audio

Reaper is a super thin and powerful DAW, which I chose primarily because I admired how much more stable it was at scale than any other DAW I've ever tried. It also handles video extremely well, a thing I was shocked to discover that neither Cubase nor Digital Performer were very good at, given that they're supposed to be the first choices for scoring to picture.

Be warned that it sucks when you first install it and you need to put some time in to customise it to your liking, but the advantage is that everything about it can be customised. If you have a workflow you like in another DAW, you can probably conform Reaper's configuration to it.

Art / Design

I draw and paint digitally in Krita, which, for all its flaws, has the neatest 'I just want to draw' workflow — the same joy of just jumping into an artwork you get when you open Procreate. Krita, with a handful of settings changes and some tidying of the interface, becomes my favourite desktop painting tool.

The Affinity Suite is really good! It's literally the only serious Adobe competitor on the market, and a suite in which I've delivered all kinds of marketing, print and photographic materials in my day job. I've even found that Publisher and Designer handle big, asset-heavy documents like magazines and catalogues far better than InDesign and Illustrator too.

I've enjoyed the transition to the monolithic 'Affinity' from the trio of V2 apps, but I remain cautious of the new pricing model.

Aseprite is for pixels. We like Aseprite a lot.

Writing

I write in Sublime Text because I hate linters and correctors that shout about syntax errors, incomplete declarations or spelling mistakes after only one keypress, something that Sublime's ecosystem has mercifully managed to avoid entirely.

I use a self-authored tool called Meander to print screenplays, manuscripts and other production documents written in the plain-text Fountain format. More on this in Workflow.

Programming

I write most of my software in Odin and Go, with my games landing on Odin, while I write non-graphical tools in Go.

I dislike Go, but it has a particular advantage in how universally cross-compilable it is, so I use it for non-GUI utilities — like Meander — that I want to make massively available.

Games

I started out making little games and tools for myself in Love2D (Lua) and Ebitengine (Go), and have since graduated down to lower-level, handmade implementations of my own design. Lena is my little software-rendered game framework, while Forest is my personal engine toolkit, both built in Odin.

Almost all of my active games and software projects are directly implemented with or rely on components from Lena or Forest.

Web

I author my own tools for web development. I prefer simple, plain HTML and CSS, with minimal Javascript, just like the site you're reading now.

Utility

Bucket List

There's not much I want for at the moment. Hyperion is due a next-generation upgrade (mostly because I want faster RAM and SSDs) but there's nothing majorly wrong with any of the hardware just yet.

I do want a resin 3D printer for some work I want to produce, but right now I don't have a space I can easily vent resin fumes from, so I'm stuck without one. Unfortunately, an FDM printer can't hack what I want to do either, so I just have to wait a while.

WORD COUNT
2470
LAST UPDATED
2026-02-06
BACKLINKS

About

Games

Hollow Knight

New Website New Me

August 2025

Slashpages

Are we Linux yet?

Git