Three weeks ago I lined up five e-readers on the kitchen table and told you to sit tight — a refresh wave was landing in October, and buying anything before it landed was a mistake. The wave made landfall on the first of the month. Amazon rebuilt the entire reading line from the display stack …
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, …
The water heater in my basement is seventeen years old, which means it has been living on borrowed time for at least two of them. Every technician who has looked at it says the same thing: “That thing could go tomorrow, or it could go in five years.” What none of them could tell me …
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 …
Somewhere around minute forty of yesterday’s Connect keynote, my notebook stopped being a list of announcements and became a scorecard. My team and I have been tracking the leaks on this one for months — we even put our predictions in print last week — so when Mark Zuckerberg finally took the stage in Menlo …
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 …
Every few years, the calendar hands you a gift. Halloween 2026 lands on a Saturday — the first time that’s happened since 2020 — which means the trick-or-treat window stretches later, the parties run past midnight, and every house on the block is competing for attention at full darkness. My street takes this holiday embarrassingly …
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 …