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 […]
Technology
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, […]
A minute on the internet in 2023
Reading Time: 2 min Every year, the folks at Domo create a graphic that showcases how much is created and consumed across the internet in any given minute. You can view the 2023 data on their site here, or scroll down to view it: The numbers are always staggering to see. In just one minute, people send 241M emails, […]
A paper planner on a digital notepad
Reading Time: 2 min For the last few years, I’ve kept a rough schedule on my digital notepad (first the reMarkable, later the Kindle Scribe), and the tools keep getting better every year. Planning tools aren’t native on either device, so I’ve been purchasing templates from “ePaperTemplates” on Etsy. They make some great templates at a fair price and […]
How can I pay for that?
Reading Time: 2 min I’ve always been a believer in supporting the apps that I use the most. So many small, useful apps go out of business every year, so I try my best to support them and I encourage you to do the same. Snipd For example, the popular “Airr” app on iPhone was forced to shut down […]
Adversarial Interoperability
Reading Time: 2 min So much of what technology does for us is only possible thanks to the concept of “adversarial interoperability”. It’s a weird concept with a simple premise: It’s a system that is wide open enough that other organizations and individuals can use it without permission (via “The Song of Significance“). The EFF explains it further: For […]
Can your notes be read on a 60-year-old computer?
Reading Time: 2 min At our technology and tools continue to improve, we’re increasingly losing our ability to own what we create. Not from a legal standpoint, necessarily, but a technical one. If Squarespace doesn’t agree with your platform, they can delete your site. If you ever posted on Myspace back in the day, that content is long gone. […]
Design is how it works
Reading Time: < 1 min Good design can be hard to notice. Not because it’s so beautiful or creative, but because of how well it makes things work. A well-designed product is ideally beautiful and creative, but the true design comes from the function of it. In an article in the New York Times 20 years ago, just after the […]