Making the Most of What You Have: Life in the Lithgeek Workshop
There is a running joke among people who know me well — I will always find a reason to need a more powerful Mac. And honestly? They are not wrong. But here is the thing: as someone who has spent years pulling apart, diagnosing, and squeezing every last drop of performance out of Apple hardware, I have also become very good at making do with what is in front of me. Before I spend money on new gear, I put what I have through its paces. I push it hard, find its limits, and then figure out how to work around them.
That is exactly what I have been doing with the Mac mini sitting in the back room of the Lithgeek shop.
The Mac Mini Setup — Remote, Quiet, and Surprisingly Powerful
I have been running this Mac mini for a few months now and I have to say it has genuinely impressed me. It is not the latest model, but it has more than enough power to handle everything the shop needs day to day — and then some. Customer records, invoicing, repair tracking, class scheduling — it handles all of it without breaking a sweat. And when the day winds down, there is still enough grunt left over for video editing, which is saying something.
Here is the part that makes people do a double take: I am writing this from the training room, but the Mac mini is physically in another room entirely.
Because I spend most of my working day in the training room — it is quiet, it has a massive screen, and it gives me the space I need to think — it made sense to set the machine up back there permanently. The training room also has an Apple TV, which means I can share the Mac’s screen directly to the big display when I am running a class. That setup alone has changed how I deliver training.
The challenge was what to do during the day when I need to keep an eye on the front of the shop but still get work done. I cannot always duck into the back, and moving the machine constantly is not practical. The solution is a piece of software called NoMachine.
NoMachine lets me see and control the Mac mini’s screen, access its files, and work as if I am sitting right in front of it — all from anywhere else in the building. Because the Mac is on our internal network rather than going out over the internet, there is zero lag. It feels completely native. If you run a small business and have ever wished you could be in two places at once, this kind of remote desktop setup is worth looking at seriously.
A Word on AI — And Why I Use It Differently
There is no shortage of opinions about artificial intelligence right now, and I have my own. What I will say is this: used well, it is a genuinely powerful tool. Used poorly, it is a shortcut to mediocre content and wasted time. I try very hard to be in the first camp.
I do not use AI to churn out generic videos or cookie-cutter blog posts. I use it to spot patterns I might miss, to act as a personal assistant that actually keeps up with me, and to handle the parts of my workflow where my ADHD and dyslexia create the most friction.
LittleBird — The One That Sees Everything
LittleBird is the AI tool that gets the most interesting reactions when I describe it. It runs quietly in the background and monitors everything happening on my screen. Emails, invoices, browser tabs, open documents — it sees all of it. And then it reminds me about things I would otherwise forget entirely.
That invoice I scrolled past three days ago? LittleBird caught it and flagged it. The follow-up email I meant to send? Same thing. For someone managing a small business with ADHD, having a system that watches what you are actually doing — rather than waiting for you to manually log a task — is a genuine game changer. Yes, it is a little unsettling at first. But the productivity gains are real.
Claude — Better Than I Expected
I have only been using Claude for a few weeks, but it has already become my preferred AI tool, pulling ahead of ChatGPT for the way I work. I use it primarily to augment my own writing — not replace it. With ADHD and dyslexia in the mix, there is only so much that a spell checker can catch. Claude helps me take rough, honest writing and shape it into something polished without stripping out my voice in the process.
I also use it for the programming side of things. The shop runs several internal tools, and rather than learning HTML from scratch, I would much rather focus my energy on Python and Bash — the languages that actually serve the work I do. Claude bridges that gap neatly, helping me build and troubleshoot without having to become a web developer on top of everything else.
The bottom line: the right tools, used the right way, make a small operation run like something much bigger. That is true of the Mac mini in the back room, the remote desktop connection keeping me at the front counter, and the AI tools quietly filling in the gaps my brain likes to leave open.