Category: Technology

• Live Text, Reader View, No-Signup Tools

  Three techie things I’m loving. 1. Live Text Live Text, available in iOS 15 and beyond, feels not far off from magical. The ability to copy text from photos or through the camera app has completely transformed my book notetaking process as a print-book partisan but digital notetaker. I can just point the camera at […]

  September 27, 2022

  Technology

• Three principles for a pleasant inbox

  I open 100% of the (non-spam) emails I get, and enjoy doing so. Here’s how, and why. 1. One inbox to rule them all Pretty much as soon as Gmail debuted the Promotions and Social tabs I turned them off, leaving me with a single inbox that almost always has close to zero emails. I […]

  June 6, 2022

  Technology

• My home screen

  The funny thing is this looks similar to the last time I shared my home screen, despite having gone through a few different iterations since then. But I landed back at the black wallpaper and (even more) minimalist layout for a few reasons: My recent job change allowed me to delete several apps I didn’t […]

  May 19, 2022

  Technology

• Please (don’t) clap

  Robin Sloan: Twitter’s only conclusion can be abandonment: an overdue MySpace-ification. I am totally confident about this prediction, but that’s an easy confidence, because in the long run, we’re all MySpace-ified. The only question, then, is how many more possibilities will go unexplored? How much more time will be wasted? Wishful descriptions of Twitter as […]

  April 27, 2022

  Technology

• The Rockefeller theory of time travel

  Morgan Housel: Charlie Munger was born in 1924. The richest man in the world that year was John D. Rockefeller, whose net worth equaled about 3% of GDP, which would be something like $700 billion in today’s world. Seven hundred billion dollars. OK. But make a short list of things that did not exist in […]

  March 15, 2022

  Science, Technology

• Tools of the moment

  It’s been a minute since the last time I took stock of my notetaking/productivity apps, so here’s where I stand currently: I still use paper. The reporter’s notebook I got last Christmas is good for my occasional work-based bullet journaling. Feedly has been my RSS reader of choice for years now. To further declutter my […]

  October 22, 2021

  Technology

• On Paper Trails and Typewriting Females

  I just finished reading Cameron Blevins’ new book Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West, which I learned a lot from (see my full notes and quotes from the book below). One thing that popped out to me was the role of women in the Post Office’s workforce. Women made […]

  June 23, 2021

  America, Books, History, Review, Technology, Typewriters

• Are You Paying Attention? On ‘The Social Dilemma’ and ‘My Octopus Teacher’

  I don’t have to go looking for synchronicity because it always finds me. This time it was on Netflix. The other day I watched Netflix’s new docu-drama The Social Dilemma (trailer) based on the recommendation from a friend and a lively text thread about its implications. The film’s thesis is that social networks are engineered […]

  October 8, 2020

  Film, Life, Nature, Review, Technology

• Camcorders and the quotidian

  Two things my wife and I are really glad to have are a camcorder and a digital SLR camera. We got both of them several years ago, the camera as a wedding gift and the camcorder from my mother-in-law. Mostly we wanted them to be able to document family get-togethers, trips, and our nieces growing […]

  July 8, 2019

  Life, Technology

• My favorite notetaking apps

  C.J. Chilvers wrote about the pros and cons of popular notetaking tools. Out of the four he features—Apple Notes, Evernote, Ulysses, and Bear—I have used two previously, and none currently. So, having already examined my favored podcasts and newsletters, here’s a look at the tools I do use and why I use them. Paper The […]

  February 14, 2019

  Design, Technology, Writing