November 9th, 2026

Technology That Brings Me Joy

I’ve long-considered doing a “Real Setup Tour” sort of post, eschewing the impossibly clean, tidy, cable-less desks you tend to see in those for a more, er, realistic showing of the work setup I have here. However, once you shovel your way through the iPod parts, cables, and failed 3D printing prototypes I have on my desk, I don’t really have anything that interesting to show.


I swept this dismantled iPod aside to start writing this post.

Yes, I have a fancy keyboard, and a nice monitor on an arm, and some cosy LED strip lighting, and an expensive chair (never skimp on things that separate you from the ground, folks), but other than not living or working in a show home, there’s nothing particularly groundbreaking here. And, well… work is boring.

However, as time inexorably turns me into an old man, I feel like I’ve been getting better at buying things that bring me joy in a long-term way that the fleeting happiness of a slightly faster iPhone can’t begin to match1 — several of these items are multiple years old, yet they make me smile every time I use them. That, I think, has the potential to be something interesting to share.

So, why why don’t I share those, instead? In no particular order:

Sony Walkman

This is my [checks notes] Sony NW-A306 (never change, Sony). It’s effectively a modern-day iPod, and although it does run Android, all that’s on it are music and podcasts. No social media, no email, no web browser — no internet connection at all, actually, unless I explicitly turn on WiFi to do a software update. It’s a teeny-tiny box of music whose battery lasts for days.


The physical playback buttons on the side are really useful.

Let’s face it, while “But I can just not use Instagram while I listen to music on my phone?” is a perfectly sensible sentence, that’s not how it goes. You know it. I know it. A phone is full of colourful icons, notifications, and numbered badges all vying for attention, and that attitude lasts twenty seconds before you give in to the device and take a quick peek at something.

I call my Walkman a box of joy. Or sadness. Or, if I’m feeling particularly grumpy, angst. I can leave my phone in the other room — or at least out of reach — and rock out to some Evanescence after a crappy day, and all the device is doing is providing the tunes without the constant desperate cries for attention that a phone constantly interrupts you with.


It’s lovely and small, too — this is next to a “regular” iPhone 15 Pro (i.e., the smaller one).

Meze 99 Classics Headphones

Speaking of music, these are my headphones (link is to the 2nd generation - I have the 1st generation).

I’m not going to pretend you don’t lose the creature comforts of a wireless headphone, but for me, the benefits far outweigh those:

  • No batteries means they’re really light and super comfortable. I could wear these all day.

  • They sound amazing, especially for the price bracket — you’re not having to pay for the compute and battery.

  • I love the design.

  • They’re very user-friendly — the cables are detachable, so if you damage it (or just don’t like it, or want a shorter/longer one, etc) you can just unplug the cable and plug in a new one.

I absolutely love these things.

Bonus anecdote: After a while, one of the earcups developed a crackle when I’d jostle the cable around. I thought it was a bad cable, and procrastinated on buying a new one for several months. When I got around to it, I actually found that it wasn’t the cable, but a bad connector in the headphones themselves.

By this point, the headphones were well out of warranty (which is annoying, because if I’d have figured it out immediately, they would still just about have been covered), but I emailed their support anyway.

€40 and three days later, a parts package arrived alongside an email with a YouTube video on how to perform the repair. Fifteen minutes and four screws after opening the package, the faulty part had been replaced and my headphones were good as new.

Can you imagine this happening with an out-of-warranty pair of AirPods Max? Hell no! Meze has a customer for life.

reMarkable Tablet

The reMarkable Paper Pro (to give it its full name) is an E Ink tablet for writing and sketching on. And… that’s pretty much it. There are other, similar, tablets on the market that let you install apps on them (including some Android variants that have the full Google Play Store), but on this one, what they ship to you is what you get (without modding it, at least).

I love this for similar reasons I love the Walkman — it’s a hyper-focused device that lets me be free of distractions and get on with what I want to do. It doesn’t hurt that the pen-on-screen feel is very good — far better than that of an iPad. I was a little unsure about getting it to start with, but it’s ended up being a big part of my day-to-day life — I use it for work, for guitar, for drafting blog posts, for doodling, all sorts. The E Ink screen makes sitting in the comfy chair on a cozy evening to write an enjoyable experience that the backlit glare of an iPad just can’t match.

It’s interesting, in a sense, that some of the things on this list are “just” focused versions of an iPad or an iPhone — rectangles of electronics, glass, and metal. Less is more, and all that.


My numerous rectangles. Top to bottom: Walkman, iPhone, reMarkable, iPad, MacBook Air.

Fountain Pens

These get used a lot less since I got my reMarkable tablet a couple of years ago, but they still come out for special occasions. I even have a special “contract signing pen” that I’ve had for nearly twenty years — a Faber-Castell E-Motion with a broad nib — that’s far too chunky in my hand and on the page to write with for any period of time, but makes signing things a grand affair that’s a lot of fun.

I also believe — perhaps because I’m north of forty — in the power of an honest-to-goodness paper letter. Especially in a time where AI will vomit out pages upon pages of words for you in seconds, there’s a lot of weight simply in the act of taking the time to sit down and write to someone by hand. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes there’s a time to express thanks, or joy, or sorrow, and an iMessage just doesn’t cut it.

Guitar

I’ve been playing guitar on and off since I was a teenager — mostly “off”, until more recently. A few years ago I picked it up again and have been taking it a bit more seriously.

Electric guitar, by its nature, is ripe spending ground for someone who likes gadgets and trinkets. There’s also a huge ecosystem of effects software — you can connect your electric guitar to a computer with an audio interface and build an entire rig just in software, and usually at less expense than buying physical effects units.

However, I intentionally keep my guitar setup airgapped from my computer — I enjoy the “analogness” of it. If I want to record what I’m playing, a mic gets put in front of my amplifier.

The joy here, though, is less in the guitars themselves (although I do have a “for life” guitar) and more in how much they’ve made me push my boundaries. I take lessons remotely with a teacher in the USA, and the first time I visited him in person, I completely bottled it and couldn’t play. I was so annoyed with myself I vowed to him and myself that the next time, we’d get up and play an open mic night. A year later, we did exactly that.

Since then, I’ve tried to play at an open mic night at least once a year. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it sounds like a pile of guitars falling down a staircase, but it’s always an absolute blast.


Playing with a friend at an open mic night in Derby, UK.

The “airgapped” nature of my setup and the fact I don’t need a computer for some sweet distortion means that travelling to visit friends and play guitar is nice and simple, barring getting the thing actually on the plane (difficulty ranges from “Oh cool, sweet guitar! No problem.” and “A guitar??? On a PLANE???” depending on the day for the same kind of plane).


Getting threatened with being denied boarding because a guitar couldn’t possibly fit in a plane only to find an entire empty bin waiting once I finally convinced a particularly grumpy ground agent to actually check was peak comedy. I now keep printed confirmation of this airline’s policies in my guitar bag.

Come to think of it, I’ve never actually played an open mic night in the country I live in. I should probably fix that!

My Stupid Home Computer Setup

My home computer is a Mac Studio, which in itself isn’t particularly interesting (although it is a very nice computer, inability to be upgraded notwithstanding). Unfortunately for a desktop computer setup, I have two places in the house that I want to do computering — upstairs in the home office, and downstairs in the guitar corner.

Of course, the first thing that jumps into your head when presented with this is: “Well, just use a laptop and move it around”. Folks, let me tell you about laptops: they’re terrible desktop computers. A computer is — to steal a joke I heard elsewhere — space heaters with a side effect of maths, and they mostly convert electricity into heat. Too hot, and the CPU has to slow down to prevent it from cooking itself. A laptop surrounds that heater with batteries, keyboards, and screens, and keeping one closed under a desk as a stationary machine is just wasting money on worse performance due to compromised cooling as you slowly cook the battery to death while not using the screen you paid for.

So, desktop computer it is. With two computering stations, each on a different floor, where’s the best place for it — upstairs in the office, or downstairs in the guitar corner?

In the basement, of course.

The basement Mac is connected to those two stations by horrendously expensive optical Thunderbolt cables — 25m for the downstairs station and 50m for the upstairs station — threading through staircases and walls to the appropriate desks. You can see the remainder on reels behind the Mac in the photo above.


A precise engineering diagram of how the optical Thunderbolt cables traverse the house.

The most remarkable thing about all of this is how unremarkable it is when in use. It’s been perfectly reliable for the nine months I’ve been running this setup, and you honestly cannot tell that the computer you’re using is two floors away when you’re sitting down in front of one of the screens — the one caveat being that macOS’ handling of Bluetooth interfaces other than the one on the motherboard is absolutely atrocious, so I effectively don’t have Bluetooth.

I mostly completely forget that the computer I’m using isn’t in the room with me until I sit down for a video call and the software picks the wrong webcam, and my brain takes a good few seconds to comprehend why I’m looking at an empty room instead of my own face.

There’s a couple of apps that make this setup possible:

  • Lunar lets you disconnect and reconnect monitors in software, which is useful so you don’t have a monitor lit up in the room you’re not using. In theory you could just turn the monitors off and on manually, but the LG UltraFine display I have downstairs was built in collaboration with Apple, which of course means that it doesn’t have a power button. Plus, you can turn monitors on and off remotely with this, which is nice.

  • SoundSource is an audio interface management app that sits in the menubar, allowing you to easily switch sound input and output sources.

Both of these apps have very good automation features, which means I’ve been able to build a Shortcut that asks me where I want to use the computer, then configures the displays and audio settings appropriately.

So, why is an unorthodox but, ultimately, practical computer setup on a list of things that bring me joy? Well, I love doing dumb shit with computers — whether it’s wedging a PowerBook G4 open with foam and coins so I could mount an iSight to my bike helmet, or building an LED illumination strip for a Mac mini that’s tied to unit test results, or a myriad of other things, computers are the most fun when you’re tinkering and doing weird stuff with them. There’s nothing more boring to me than a well-executed grey rounded rectangle. They’re great computers, yes, but exciting they aren’t. Connecting the boring rectangle to two separate floors of a house with optical cables? So stupid. I love it.

Framework Laptop

My Framework 13 is the only general-purpose computer on this list (the above is due to the stupid setup, not the computer itself), and, well, it’s a Windows laptop which I use for work. Hardly joyful.

It’s here because of how unique it is in the current consumer electronics landscape — if I I need more RAM or storage, I can just pop it open with four screws and put more in (RAMpocalypse notwithstanding). That in itself is — sadly — special these days, but not particularly different to the status quo from just a few years ago. What is different, though, is how dedicated to longevity and repairability the design of this thing is. Open it up and you’ll find easily-replaceable components, with QR codes everywhere for instructions on how to change this and that. My particular laptop has had CPU and screen upgrades as more modern parts have come out.


When I bought they didn’t have a Swedish keyboard layout, so I ordered a blank one. Now they support Sweden, I was able to easily swap in the right keyboard, too.

Oh, and the ports! The ports are all hot-swappable without tools. Need all USB-C? Cool. Need a DisplayPort instead? SD card reader? HDMI? Ethernet? Just pop out a port module and put a new one in. Easy!

3D Printer

I think part of why I’m so drawn to 3D printing is the fact that I make software for a living — my life’s work, essentially, is something that doesn’t exist in the physical world. You can’t actually touch it.

I also genuinely believe that the ever-increasing accessibility and quality of tools like this (and more recently, CNC milling machines) for home use has the potential to be a big deal for efficiency and the environment. Why manufacture and ship a widget from halfway across the world when I can produce it at home with locally-sourced materials?

These things combined mean that my 3D printer makes the list. Seeing a 3D model I made turn into an actual real-world object always brings me an inordinate amount of happiness, even if 3D printers can still be a bit temperamental at times. I’m even, in my spare time, exploring an idea for a physical product that I might sell in the future. After over two decades of shipping software, I have no idea how to actually produce a physical product — but I sure am having a lot of fun learning!


The H2D is enormous.

I actually have two 3D printers — a Bambu Lab P1S (a normal printer) and a Bambu Lab H2D (a big printer). Do they let me be very environmentally responsible and make parts to repair or improve things around the house with materials and skills I already have? Yes, they do. Do they also let me build stupid stuff like an iPhone Duo hotshoe mount for a camera, so I can trip over and damage $10,000 of company equipment in one fell swoop? Also yes! Brilliant.


An insurance claim waiting to happen.

My Mountain Bike

Similarly to the guitars, this makes the list less because of the bike itself (although also like the guitars, I do love my bike and am very protective of it), but more about the journeys it takes me on. I’ve struggled with fitness and mental health here and there over the years, and going off road, out in the countryside, helps with both in absolute spades.

I’ve had a lot of meaningful moments on a mountain bike. Between summiting an actual mountain for the first time after a really bad time dealing with my sense of self, or going on a five-hour, take-a-meal-with-you ride up a different mountain to my Mother’s final resting place which you can barely get to with a 4x4, or — on the other side of the emotional coin — the sheer joy of the silliness of riding around the Nürburgring on one, or completing a mountain biking race (placing first in my age category!), mountain biking is a very joyful (and sometimes cathartic) pastime for me.


My Mother’s final resting place is extremely difficult to get to by car.

It’s no wonder then, that when I hit 40 last year I decided that my “midlife crisis” trip would be carting my mountain bike halfway across the world to Whistler in Canada to spend six weeks there doing nothing but mountain biking. I had the absolute time of my life.


Whistler is an amazing place for a mountain bike!

This video — How to Buy a Mountain Bike, 5:24 — which is a fun watch regardless, sums it up quite succinctly in its conclusion: It’s not about the bikes you ride, it’s about the rides your bike takes you on.

My Stupid Car

I’ve always been a “car guy”, and owning stupid cars has always brought me joy. Current stupid car is a 2019 Alpine A110.

It’s a little 2-seater with barely any cargo space, and practically the opposite in ethos to most cars on the road today — there’s very little computer anything in here save for an infotainment system that can just about play music and do navigation on a tiny little screen.

A while ago, someone who’d just bought a Tesla was baffled by my non-interest in owning one myself. “It’s the best thing I’ve ever bought,” they said, “It’s the perfect car for people who don’t like cars!”. But I do like cars, and the A110 is very good at being a car, as opposed to an appliance on wheels. I enjoy the process of learning the physics of how a car handles, and have been on numerous track days over the years and hours upon hours of track tuition. The A110 is amazing for learning — it’s light, handles well, and is largely absent of things getting in your way.

When I was deciding on whether to buy an A110, I compared it with a Porsche Cayman, the lower-end of which (at the time) was price-competitive with the A110 with a few discounts. When driving the Cayman, my wife and I marvelled at how clever the gearbox was, and how flat and smooth the suspension kept it through the corners — the Cayman has a lot of active “stuff” in it. When we then drove the A110, we were giggling and turning around after a particularly fun corner to do it again, not really thinking about the gearbox or the suspension at all. The Porsche will give you a faster lap time at a track, for sure, but you’ll be having a lot more fun in the A110 — which is why I ultimately chose it.

However, the reason the A110 is on this list is less about how much of a hoot it is to drive and more about how it’s a reflection of the lives my wife and I have chosen to live. We, by choice, don’t have kids. We’ve also worked very hard — for well over a decade by now — to build a small indie software business. These choices, and the work behind them, haven’t made us bucketloads of cash (our salaries aren’t particularly exciting), but they have given us lives that have a lot of flexibility. We’re able to go on adventures in this silly little car — which, thankfully, settles down quite nicely for a comfy motorway haul — to here, there, and everywhere, whether it’s trackdays and getting a racing license just because it’d be fun, or roadtrips to France, Scotland, and more. In fact, it’s not uncommon for us to hold our ~yearly “Relationship AGM” on a particularly boring stretch of German motorway, in which we discuss our lives and confirm we’re still on the same page regarding the core parts of our relationship.


The drive to Scotland from Sweden is a very long one.

Ultimately, this car is here — and brings me so much joy — because of how well it fits into the journey my wife and I have chosen to embark upon together.

It is also hilarious fun to drive.

Conclusion and Commonalities

This is the first time I’ve really sat down and thought about this, and it’s interesting to see what my picks are. I did try to distill them down into categories, but that gave me nearly as many categories as items in the list itself!

However, if you squint, I do think there’s a common theme here — my picks tend to, in some way, disconnect me from the noise that is today’s typical online-connected day. The single-mindedness of a pen, a guitar, a Sony Walkman, or a pair of headphones that doesn’t need Bluetooth or charging lets all of that disappear and I can enjoy the human connections they allow me to focus on. Even the bike and the car are here because of the connection they allow me to build with my own self.

I mean, except for the home computer setup — that’s just joyfully stupid. And technology is best when it’s a little bit stupid.

  1. In fact, you won’t find an iPhone in this article — as much as it and its ilk are modern miracles, items of joy they aren’t. ↩