Reading Time: 3 min In all of my talk over the years about owning your website with WordPress and owning your notes with Obsidian, I’m well-aware that I had a big hole in that philosophy when it came to my email. It was all in Gmail, where I have zero actual ownership of my account. The problem is that […]
Technology
Stay focused or stay available?
Reading Time: 2 min I’ve noticed that when I meet someone for coffee or lunch, they behave in one of two ways: I also see some of this from the other side: It’s a matter of deciding what’s important. I certainly hate to not respond to people while I’m in the middle of a meeting, but it’s almost always […]
Gmail turns 20
Reading Time: 2 min I mentioned a few days ago that I’m not super happy with Google lately, but a few days before that I shared how I just can’t shake Gmail. The math says I shouldn’t use it, but that’s much easier said than done. It was exactly 20 years ago today, April 1, 2004, that Google introduced […]
The four ways Google is failing
Reading Time: 2 min The list of ways where Google is falling short continues to grow, and none of them have to do with AI. Well, maybe some do, but none that I’m talking about today. As I recently shared, Google’s approach over the last few years is very clearly aimed at shareholders instead of users, and it’s going […]
The challenge of owning your data
Reading Time: 2 min For many years, I’ve been a big proponent of people keeping control of their digital assets. There are three main buckets for this: All of that stuff is great, and I fully believe in it, but it’s much easier said than done. I thought about this the other day when I went to leave a […]
Swipe right on Android to see why Google is heading the wrong way
Reading Time: 3 min Google is no longer the darling that it once was. While it’s still clearly a huge, powerful and (generally) helpful company, it’s trending the wrong way. Business Insider compares Google to lumbering giants like IBM, and last year I shared how Google’s treatment of RSS ended up being horrible for the health of the internet […]
Pig butchering for cryptocurrency
Reading Time: 2 min It’s a weird-sounding name, but you’ve likely seen it happen. You get a weird text from an unknown number, with something fairly innocent like “how are you doing?“, and it slowly evolves into a full conversation. The text is from a scammer, and over the course of a few days they try to build a […]
2: What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life?
Reading Time: 2 min Today we’re going to dig into the second question (here are all of the questions) from Tim Ferriss’ book “Tribe of Mentors”, which is: What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months (or in recent memory)? My readers love specifics like brand and model, where you […]
The new jargon that comes with AI
Reading Time: 1 min Perhaps more than any other area, changing technology generally brings with it a slew of new acronyms and terms. We have things like HTML, DNS, SEO, HTTP, PHP and dozens of others that are used nearly every day in tech-related fields. The explosion of AI is bringing a new set of words and acronyms for […]
Social media is the only place that kids can go
Reading Time: 2 min Congress is currently working on a bill called the “Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)”, which sounds good in title, but really isn’t. Danah Boyd has an excellent article explaining what the purpose is and why this is likely to backfire in a big way. In an article where Techdirt was summarizing the state of KOSA, […]