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A collection of 35 posts

What's new: a quick trip down memory lane

What's new: a quick trip down memory lane

I started working on MetaFilter in the Fall of 1998, but just before launching it I realized the new blog I built was for a community, not just me. So I built a little blog engine to power my personal domain starting in Summer of 1999. By early 2000, I

Move fast with broken things

Move fast with broken things

Today I got an instagram comment on a very old photo, so I popped over to see it was spam and deleted it. But then I noticed I linked to my cousin by name in the photo, and he died unexpectedly a few years ago, so I went to his

Weather on the Way is the roadtrip app I never knew I needed

Weather on the Way is the roadtrip app I never knew I needed

I take a lot of road trips, but I never knew Weather on the Way existed until this week and it's a simple concept. Put in an address for where you'd like to go and the app plots the route using Apple Maps then looks up

Old people hacks: tips for those of us over 40/50/etc

Old people hacks: tips for those of us over 40/50/etc

Time keeps marching on as we collectively age, so I thought it’d be helpful to drop a few tips I’ve learned after being on this planet for over 50 years, and using a computer for most of them. In no particular order, here they are: Get the largest

The one good HomeKit-capable wall switch you should get

tl;dr: The Lutron Claro (or Diva if you want dimming) Smart Switch is the best HomeKit compatible wall switch there is, period I've been playing with smart home devices since x10 came out in the 1990s. And every house I've had since 2005 has had

Apple should sell the iPad mini as a wireless CarPlay monitor

Piggy backing on my last post here, as I was trying to get my weird android tablet with a huge plastic bezel and odd mounts to look better in the Rivian, I thought about how much smoother and better my experience would be if it was a real iPad mini

A new "3rd way" for CarPlay

I am a fan of Apple's CarPlay. I think it can make driving safer while keeping you informed of new calls and texts, and entertained with podcasts and music, all without having to take your eyes off the road or ever feel the need to pick up your

Surprisingly good tech: The weBoost Drive Reach cell signal booster

A couple years ago, I started seeing ads for "cell phone booster" antennas for cars and trucks around the off-roading/4x4 world as a way to stay connected while out in the middle of nowhere, but I was deeply skeptical. How much better could your phone signal be

Moon shots

All the best photos from the Artemis I unmanned mission around the moon are in an album on Flickr here.

How to be a writer on a marketing team without sounding like a jerk

How to be a writer on a marketing team without sounding like a jerk

I spent close to seven years in a marketing department on a content team as I wrote blog posts, ebooks, tweets, podcast episodes, magazine pieces, and slide decks among other things. Based on all that experience, I wanted to share some lessons I learned from my time there, and this

Every Mastodon iOS app scratches an itch: a brief tour of various clients

Last week, I wrote a gentle intro to Mastodon for the Zapier* blog. I aimed it at regular people that hadn't yet delved into everything it takes to leave Twitter for the federated network, offering tips on how it works and how to get started using it. After

The best stocking stuffer is these little wire ties

I am pretty sure I first found out about these little reusable wire tie things from an interview at Cool Tools where someone mentioned how much they loved them. I bought a set solely based on the strength of recommendations made on that site. Once I got them, I started

Hardcore twitter

The best lesson I ever learned was interviewing for my first job after grad school at a place where I heard from former students employed there that they had problems with life/work balance so I asked about the expected hours of working and the CEO guy's face

AppleTV upgrade adventures

Since my house is all-in on Apple's HomeKit for controlling lights and cameras and devices, I got the latest and greatest new AppleTV so I could add support for Thread, a new home automation communication protocol. Upgrading to a newer AppleTVs is getting easier, but still has major

Shift is happening!

Marcin Wichary has been working on a book about the design of keyboards for over 5 years and I've followed him on Twitter for over a decade, enjoying each time he's given followers a glimpse of his work. I even got to interview him about the

Playing downloaded music on the go

Doppler is a good piece of software for a specific use case I encountered where nothing else worked. I was on a long road trip recently, and I'd already gone through hours and hours of old podcast episodes when I figured I'd head over to the

Tech economics

I’m not some kind of fancy economist but it’s weird to watch every major tech company lay off 10-20% of their workforce and even Apple, one of the most successful companies on earth, announce a hiring freeze when their company revenue graph looks like this. See the teeny

Stable Diffusion and AI generated art is absolutely wild in every way

After reading Andy Baio's latest post about AI-art generators and artist rights, I reached out and had him walk me through how to experience it myself. We followed the instructions in this video: How you go about it It was about an hour of tinkering before about another

Rewind

There's a new company that caught my eye today, called Rewind. It claims to watch and listen everything you do on your computer (frightening yes, but also potentially powerful), while using transcripts and OCR to capture all the text that flashes before your eyes so you can find

blinded by science

The Mini Maker Faire kind of blew my mind

I always wanted to attend the original Maker Faire in the Bay Area and the annual shows that followed, but they started soon after I moved to Oregon and they never overlapped with my travel down there. I recently noticed they were touring around Mini Maker Faires to different cities

On Lanyrd, investing, and selling

Lanyrd blew me away from the day it launched. It's a way to track speakers and attendees of upcoming conferences, but it's also a social web application. It was the first site/app I used that didn't require yet another login (it used the

Pulling off a surprise party in this day and age

Pulling off a surprise birthday party in this day and age isn't as easy as it seems, especially when the subject of a surprise (Andy Baio in this case) is totally plugged in with the technology world. Every movement and moment in our digital lives can leave a

3d Printing and the speed of progress

This is fascinating, someone has made a 3d printed insert for the Elevation Dock to hold a new lightning cable. In August, I received a few Elevation Docks after funding it earlier this year, and I loved using it each day as my phone finally had a nice bedside charger.

Ten months with a Nest

With the recent news of a new version of the smart thermostat Nest coming out, I figured I should finally write up what it has been like living with the first version of the product since last November, when mine arrived. Overall, it's been a great little tool,

World travel with the unlocked US Verizon iPhone 4S

I've had the Verizon iPhone 4S since it launched last Fall, and I've now taken trips to three countries to use it. I've spent extensive time in Belgium and New Zealand using local micro SIM cards to great effect, and due to a Verizon