About
Hello, I’m Dustin. I enjoy making things for a living—mostly visuals—and brevity.
If I were to expound on that however, I would say that I’m a video editor and producer based in Chicago. I enjoy pondering big ideas, probably to a fault, but that’s part of the idea of this site here. I’m trying to give some of these ideas a home and get them out in the world, maybe someone else likes to ponder these things too. Anyway, that’s out of my head now.
Here’s what I’m up to now.
CONTACT
If you’d like to contact me about anything, you can use this form, or schedule a brief, private voice or video call with me at the link below. I also check twitter about once a week.
You can subscribe to this blog via rss or get a once-a-week newsletter on Saturday mornings with everything new.
BLOGROLL
Here’s some other interesting people publishing online.
Dense Discovery — Weekly newsletter by Kai Brach, mostly about tech and the environment. Originally an extension of his Offscreen magazine about the humans behind modern tech.
The Weekly Review | Chris Bowler — Personal newsletter of an interesting guy in Canada. Mostly focuses on personal productivity, theology, blogging and good beer.
A Better Editor — Chris Salters is a professional video editor and keeps a great, friendly blog.
Creative Video Tips — Chadwick Shoults runs and incredibly helpful youtube channel, focusing primarily on Davinci Resolve.
Chris Zachary — After Effects connoisseur. Also publishes AE Pro Tips newsletter and AE Reference.
Blue Collar Post Collective — A facebook group for post production professionals.
TOOLS
I love seeing how people work, so I thought I’d share some of my tools and processes.
Publishing
- Blot.im — Lovely little tool to make files in Dropbox into a blog.
- Byword– My mobile cross-platform text editor. Room for improvement I feel like though.
- Sublime Text– My desktop editor of choice for in depth editing.
- Backblaze - Backup your computer without thinking about it. (Get a free month of backup with that link!)
Focus
- Bitbar — Shows various bits of data in the menu bar. (Apparently called xbar now)
- Quitter — Manages windows and apps I’m not currently using.
- Alfred — Feels weird using a computer without it. (Read more)
- Workflowy — Almost an understatement to say my life is in Workflowy.
Time Tracking
- RescueTime — Still gets the job done to provide a good overview of how I’m using my computer. Also feeds data to Beeminder, see below.
- Toggl — Pretty much mandatory for client work, and I love that it shows my current task in the menu bar. (Read more)
- Beeminder — Long term goal tracking and monetary motivator.
News
- Feedbin — 100% worth the small cost for a calm place to read the internet.
- Hypothesis — My web highlighter of choice.
- Libby — Read digital library content like magazines and ebooks. Mainly for the magazines. (Read more)
- text only NPR — Only mentioning it here because their text only website and hourly news updates are really what I want the news to be if its not video.
Hardware
- MacBook Pro
- LG Monitor
- Senheisser headphones
- Vertical mouse
- Numberpad apple keyboard
- Canon G7X mkII