revealed: the (sex) writer’s tech arsenal

• Tweet

I’m excited to tell you that I’ve joined Jonathan Coulton, Gina Trapani, Alex Payne and more uber-geeks in The Setup — a tell-all about our personal hardware and software habits and tools, and our dream setups. Here’s a snip from mine:

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m an author, columnist, speaker, sex educator, pro-porn pundit, media disruptor, pinup model, sex ed nerd, sex and technology futurist, and tech fetishist.
What hardware do you use?

At home I run a Mac Mini (Intel Core 2 Duo) with an aluminum Apple Cinema Display circa 2007, with a Porsche LaCie hard drive as backup, plus an extra Mini from 2006 that I use for slave tasks. That setup, my Lumix camera, and my home music setups are the only pieces of hardware (currently in use) that I’ve purchased: the rest are gifts from anonymous individual sponsors, or from company sponsors.

Mobile troublemaking is my preference. I lovingly mistreat my black MacBook 13″ (4G, also w/mini-dvi to VGA). I use old junk Logitech headsets when I feel like doing a podcast. There is an iPod dock of some kind in every room of my house for audio: in my living room I stripped the casing off a first generation dock that was junked (it looks great with everything exposed) and that’s hooked into a subwoofer and Bose speakers; in my kitchen I have an old Sony wood-case CD player that is also broken and stripped, with an audio in jack to run iPods to its “PC” function for music in my kitchen (…)

What would be your dream setup?

I live in a constant state of wishing all hardware would catch up to my needs. My dream home setup would be two large (like 26″) LCD flat panel displays and one smaller ancillary flat panel: two for main work projects and having multiple docs, photo/video projects and all the simultaneous work I’m always doing, and the smaller one to parse out my communication and social apps. This way, I could focus on work and keep distractions absolutely separate — great for when I’m on a book deadline. Under the desk I’d have a Mac Pro tower 8-core Xeon with 12G of RAM, for pure processing pleasure. And a projector, medium quality, for entertainment but also for group projects where I need to teach or demo something technical to non-technical people (something I do a lot with sex ed).

I’m still in love with my MacBook, but for travel and when I lecture I’d love to have — believe it or not — a black Dell mini 10″ (1.6GH, 1/160, Bluetooth) running Ubuntu — but I’d run it with a hacked version of Leopard. (…read more, violet.blue.usesthis.com)

Violet Blue

The London Times named Violet Blue "One of the 40 bloggers who really count" and Self Magazine named TinyNibbles one of the “Best Sex Resources for Women.” Blue is an autodidact and pundit on sex and technology, hacking and security, porn for women, privacy and bleeding-edge tech culture. She is a journalist for ZDNet, CBS News, CNET; she's an educator, speaker, crisis counselor, volunteer NGO trainer, and the author and editor of over 40 award-winning books.

More Posts - Website - Twitter - Facebook - Google Plus - Flickr - YouTube - Reddit