There’s a drawer in my test lab that I’ve started calling the graveyard. Inside it: eleven pairs of wireless earbuds, every one of them dead for the same reason. Not crushed drivers, not frayed cables — dead batteries. Lithium cells that swelled, faded, or simply gave up after two or three years of daily charging …
At 1:47 on a Tuesday morning, my phone buzzed: the Ring Nebula was ready. Forty minutes of exposure, stacked one ten-second frame at a time by a telescope sitting on my patio — alone, untended, under a sky with maybe eleven visible stars and the orange smear of a streetlight two houses down. I padded …
For the better part of two years, my workday ended the same way: on my hands and knees under the desk, swapping one USB-C cable between my work laptop and my personal desktop, fishing the keyboard dongle out of the back of the monitor, and mashing the input button until the right machine showed up. …
I did something embarrassing last week: I priced a 2TB NVMe drive I’ve been recommending for two years and briefly assumed the retailer had been hacked. The kit that sat at $99 through most of 2023 now carries a sticker north of $350. My first instinct was to wait it out. Then a member of …
When Google euthanized the Coral USB Accelerator last year, I wrote about the workarounds my cameras fell back on — and I was honest about the ceiling. A Raspberry Pi with a Hailo stick can watch two, maybe three streams before it starts dropping frames like a bad phone call. My house runs six cameras, …
I have spent twenty-five years staring at glowing rectangles, and for most of that time I assumed the glow was the price of admission. Then a review unit showed up this summer that sits on my desk like a sheet of paper — no backlight, no PWM flicker, no blue light barrage. It’s an e-ink …
For six weeks, a glowing rectangle on my desk has been showing me the weather, the time in three time zones, a rotating gallery of pixel-art cats, and — during one ill-advised afternoon — a live Bitcoin ticker I still haven’t fully emotionally recovered from. It started as a skeptic’s assignment. My team keeps a …
Every house has one: the drawer where dead batteries go to be forgotten. Mine had forty-one cells in it when I finally dumped the whole mess onto the kitchen table last month — a graveyard of alkalines in every size, most of them leaking, all of them money I’d already burned. My assistant counted them …
The last thing my eyes saw every night used to be a phone screen, and they were filing complaints. I wrote about fixing that screen fatigue back in August, and the single change that stuck wasn’t an app timer or a pair of amber-tinted glasses — it was moving my evening reading onto a device …
A reader email landed in my inbox last month that I’ve received, in one form or another, maybe forty times this year: “I want to buy my first drone. Which one won’t end up in a tree?” I’ve been testing consumer drones since they were carnival gimmicks with four screaming motors and a battery life …