Just because you can (sort of) do something doesn’t mean you should — The health of your heart is important, and Apple wants to help. According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control), cardiovascular disease, not cancer, is the leading cause of avoidable death among Americans. That’s around 800,000 people annually. And it’s not just older adults. Heart attacks are on the rise…

Stop adding new features before you ruin your app — “Feature creep” messes up a lot of good software. We’ve all seen it happen to our favorite apps. We get an early version, we thrill to it; it does exactly what we want. We’re in love. But then, over the years, the developers and product folks start cramming in more…

Phones have become boring slabs of glass. The Sidekick pointed another way. — Last weekend, I cleaned out one of my Messed Up Old Tech drawers, with help from my 14 year old son. We tossed out some ancient Mesopotamian Zip drives, a copy of Microsoft Office 2000, and a tangle of cords whose original functions are lost to the mists of…

If only there were a way for a trillion-dollar tech company to improve this experience — I have group chats with different groups of friends (brag!). There’s one with my two best friends; another with two friends I introduced to each other right before the pandemic, thereby unintentionally creating a triad bonded to each other through whatever happened in 2020 and everything after; one with my…

An ode to the senses — What, if anything, do you remember about 1999? Endless discussions about the Millennium bug and our computers not being able to work. Or the dot-com bubble? When I think of 1999, I think of music. Napster — the peer-to-peer file-sharing network — changed everything. Suddenly it wasn’t necessary to buy…

Stuck between the expensive toys we don’t want and companions they’re still not — I gently pulled the decaying Pleo down off a top shelf in my office. The once energetic robot toy hadn’t been touched in years. Its battery depleted and rubber skin frayed and split. Still a cute simulacrum of what might be best described as an almost Disney Camarasaurus, its face…

On the joys of writing scripts that do scut work — Last night I automated the tip of my index finger. I was getting super annoyed by an infinite-scrolling site. I generally hate those: I’m a journalist, and every so often I’m a) doing research that b) requires me to go back several weeks, months or years on c) an infinite-scrolling…

Why I’m still tweeting — How many things do you do consistently for 15 years? For me, it’s not a lot, and if you would’ve told me on March 19, 2007, that my first inconsequential tweet would be the beginning of 15 years of pithy Twitter missives, I know I would’ve laughed in your face.

I used a GAN to illustrate ‘Because I could not stop for Death’ — How would an AI illustrate a famous poem? In my Linkfest earlier this week, I wrote about the new crop of AI “generative” models, in which you provide a few words and see it translated it into an image. Often, these AIs create pictures that are fascinatingly alien. You get…