Five weeks ago I wrote an article about firing Alexa from my house and replacing her with a voice assistant that never phones home. I stand by every word of it. Which is why it’s deeply annoying that Amazon announced something this morning that made me open a new browser tab and start building an …
There’s a house three doors down from mine that glows on random Tuesdays in March. Not holiday lights — the owners took those down sometime during the second Obama administration and never bothered again. This is different: a low, warm wash along the roofline that comes on at dusk every single evening, like the house …
On November 1, the clocks fall back, and by the following week the sun is clocking out at 4:45 in the afternoon. If you work at a desk — and especially if you work at a desk at home — that means your brain starts its “evening” chemistry while you’re still answering emails. I’ve been …
There’s a silver box that has lived on a shelf in my office since 2017. It has outlasted four phones, three laptops, two smart speakers that arrived with great fanfare and died quiet subscription deaths, and roughly every gadget trend this industry has cycled through since. It’s a Yamaha R-S202 stereo receiver — the $150 …
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 …
The forecast on my phone said zero percent chance of rain. Eight minutes later, a gutter two feet over my head dumped a month’s worth of water across the patio table, my notes, and a very unimpressed laptop bag. That was the afternoon I finally went looking for where my weather actually comes from. The …
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 …
For fifteen years, my family ran on a paper calendar bolted to the kitchen wall. It cost four dollars at the office supply store, it survived three kids and two house-shuffling moves, and it finally died the way all paper calendars die: not with a bang, but with a smudge. Somewhere between a orthodontist appointment …