If you’ve been on the Internet in the last fifteen years and change, you’ve probably heard of Soylent, whether you wanted to or not. Nutrition drinks as a category have been around forever, pitched in various forms to dieters or weightlifters or people who just frequently find themselves rushing in the morning....

Not so long ago, I considered myself basically a capitalist, and—echoing folks like Ralph Nader and Elizabeth Warren—would have said our problems are with corporate capitalism. Maybe so, but whether or not corporatism is the capitalism that Adam Smith envisioned, it’s the capitalism we have. Inasmuch as the notion...

I shared a LinkedIn post with that title last week. I’m going to share what I wrote there, but I’m going to ask a second question after that, which I may or may not share with the LinkedIn crowd later. If you’re thinking “but I thought you were an AI skeptic!”, hold on. Okay? Okay, here’s the post: First and...

John Gruber linked to a piece by Sam Henri Gold entitled “This Is Not the Computer for You”, which both is and isn’t an article about the MacBook Neo. It’s a reflection on how kids get started with computers, and how when he was a kid, “every limitation was just the edge of something I hadn’t figured out yet.” It’s...

While I don’t think Apple Podcasts itself has a “trim silence” feature, it’s popular in a bunch of podcast players. Overcast probably kicked it off with its “Smart Speed” function, but it’s in Pocket Casts, Castro, and I’m sure a bunch of other ones. The idea is that the player “listens” for silences in the podcast...

For someone who’s neither all-in on AI nor a passionate anti-AI crusader, I think about it a lot. From 2018 through 2023, I worked for Viv Labs, a startup from the folks who built Apple’s Siri; they had been bought by Samsung in order to fix Bixby, their much-maligned assistant. (The punchline here is that, to a...

It’s a match made in…frankly, I’m not sure where. But I’ve been experimenting with using org-journal as a replacement for Day One, and while it’s pretty good, there are two things that I immediately missed: The way Day One records my location and the weather for every entry. Being able to quickly insert photos that...

Whenever I make a big purchase—a TV, a new computer, a car, an A/V receiver—I inevitably enter a long period of internal debate, arguments and counter-arguments, pros and cons. It doesn’t matter whether I’ve set money aside for this, how sure I am that yes, I do need/want/carnally desire the thing in question....

If you poke around the Emacs community, you’ll quickly find some—all right, loads of—users who want to do everything in Emacs. Not just writing, not just programming, not just publishing their blog. No. They want to read and write their email in Emacs. Read their RSS in Emacs. View their PDFs in Emacs. Manage their...

Matt Novak, writing at Gizmodo on October 22: President Donald Trump is currently demolishing the East Wing of the White House in one of the more shocking acts of his second term. Trump plans to build an enormous $250 million ballroom in its place, a structure that will dwarf the existing White House. But who’s...

Back in the dark ages (the 1990s), I was an inveterate operating system switcher. At various points, I ran DR-DOS with DESQView/X (what Windows 3.1 should have been), FreeBSD, several distributions of Linux, Windows 2000, QNX Photon, and BeOS. With the exception of QNX, I didn’t just run them, I used them. Used...

Every so often, there’s a surge of “here’s why no one can do serious writing in Markdown” articles. They don’t come on any obvious schedule, or with any obvious trigger; usually, somebody complains about something Markdown can’t do that {reStructured Text, AsciiDoc, Org Mode, DocBook, DITA, LaTeX, Pollen, Typst, a...