30+ years testing tech, working the trade show floor, and running my own studio. This is what stays on the shelf — the gear, tools, books, and places worth your time. Nothing here is here by accident.
The picks I've been recommending most in DMs, on calls, and to friends this week. Rotates as things change.
The mic that finally made me retire my SM7B. Built-in preamp means one less box in the signal chain — no more Cloudlifter to plug in.
The signal light in my studio. On-air status, current show, live viewer count. Feels like magic every time it flips.
Ran mine hard for 3 months. Quality is Prusa-tier at a fraction of the price. Actually the printer I recommend to newcomers now.
Cameras, mics, capture, lighting. What runs when the ON AIR light is on.
The mic that finally made me retire my SM7B. Built-in preamp means one less box in the signal chain — no more Cloudlifter to plug in.
32 keys. Every scene switch, every effect trigger, every VO drop. Hardwired to Ecamm. Never going back.
The B-roll camera, scratch recorder, livestream second-screen, and on-the-go editing rig all in one. The newest Pro shoots ProRes; everything else is downstream.
Aputure's creator-focused line — color-accurate LED lighting with app and Bluetooth control. Clean key light for talking-head and product shots without the cinema-rig budget.
Records portrait and landscape simultaneously from the iPhone's dual rear cameras — one take, two synced files, no reshoot. Built by Derrick Downey Jr.
The desk setup that survives 12-hour build sprints. Ergonomics, cable management, focus.
The workhorse. Handles 4K multi-cam Ecamm streams, dev builds, and Notion at the same time without breaking a sweat.
The signal light in my studio. On-air status, current show, live viewer count. Feels like magic every time it flips.
Ran mine hard for 3 months. Quality is Prusa-tier at a fraction of the price. Actually the printer I recommend to newcomers now.
Tech that makes daily life better. Nothing that just adds another app to check.
Learns your patterns without being creepy about it. Alexa-integrated. Works with the HomeKit setup I actually use.
Lightweight AR glasses that float a display into your field of view — for spatial computing experiments, second-screen monitoring, and testing wearable tech before it goes mainstream.
Capture POV photo and video hands-free, take calls, and run Meta AI from your face — in a frame people don't clock as tech. The most wearable on-ramp to camera-glasses content.
Books that shaped how I think about tech, business, and craft. Non-fiction only. No airport-bookstore nonsense.
Andrew Chen. If you're building anything network-effect-driven, this is the map. I re-read parts of it every time I hit a growth wall.
Basecamp's product methodology. Changed how I scope my own build sprints — 6-week appetites, no roadmaps.
Software subscriptions worth paying for. Free tools that punch above their weight. What I actually use — not what's trending.
Where TEK INTEL lives, where meeting prep lives, where The Shelf's database lives. Not for everyone, but I'm all-in.
Open-source Calendly alternative. Embeds cleanly on my own site — visitors book without leaving hicksnewmedia.com.
Multi-scene production, guest interviews, remote callers, lower-thirds, NDI inputs. Everything you'd build in OBS, but actually pleasant to use on a Mac.
Each participant records locally at full quality, then tracks auto-upload and align. No more "sorry, my Wi-Fi cut out" as a quality excuse.
Transcription-based audio and video editing — remove filler words across an interview in one click, generate captions, rough-cut from the transcript. Biggest time-saver in the studio.
Reels, Shorts, TikToks — the templates, captions, and AI tools turn a 20-minute episode into a week of social cutdowns in an afternoon.
Research, scripting, strategy, content frameworks, code review. Handles long-context reasoning where most LLMs lose the plot — and it doesn't hallucinate citations.
Keyword research, competitor benchmarking, thumbnail testing, and outlier discovery — the difference between guessing what to publish and knowing.
On-device AI dictation that turns talking into clean, formatted text anywhere on the Mac. Drafts and prompts at speaking speed — audio never leaves your machine.
A personalized AI assistant that plugs into your calendar, inbox, and tasks to handle the busywork — scheduling, reminders, follow-ups — so the day runs without manual triage.
An AI assistant that integrates with the tools you already work in — surfacing context, automating steps, and cutting the app-switching that fragments a workday.
Calendar runs the weekly rhythm. Gmail keeps the work moving. Drive holds the archive. Workhorse tier, never glamorous.
Every HNM property's source lives here. The deploy pipelines run from here. Version control isn't just for developers — it's for anyone who edits anything important.
Keeps track of the people in your network — context, last touch, and follow-ups — so important relationships don't go cold. The system behind staying connected at scale.
Social media management and scheduling across every platform from one queue.
Storefront, payments, fulfillment, custom domain — all out of the box. Powers merch.hicksnewmedia.com. Zero ops overhead means more time on the products themselves.
Auto-captions, AI editing, eye-contact correction, and AI avatars for short-form. Turns raw talking-head footage into platform-ready clips fast.