Around this time last year, I was contacted by a recruiter from Facebook wanting me to apply for a technical writing position there. We talked for a little bit, I got the job information; it sounded pretty interesting, and the folks I know here in Silicon Valley who work for FB generally love it. They take care of...

Did you hear Tumblr’s getting rid of all the adult sites? Yes, the news is going around. Man, if only Apple wasn’t so prudish! Come again? This is all because Apple pulled the Tumblr app in mid-November after they found child porn on the site. Apple did pull the app because of that, yes, but there’s no evidence...

So I bought a new iPad yesterday. After a lot of waffling, I made some seemingly counter-intuitive choices: The 12.9″ model (up from my original 9.7″) Only 64G of storage WiFi only, not cellular The rationale for the first one is simple enough. I’ve been using my iPad more than my laptop, and moving to the bigger...

Hey, did you know I used to be a blogger? Okay, it’s not quite fair to say that I’m no longer a blogger; I’ve made about a half-dozen posts this year. But that’s way down from the original Tumblr-hosted Coyote Tracks: in the earlier parts of this decade I was at least managing a few posts a month, and occasionally...

I started thinking about this yesterday, and originally was going to say crazy, as in irrationally expensive. William Schuth expresses this well: My strategy had been to buy the mid-tier spec of the best iPhone offered. My iPhone 6S Plus cost me $849 at launch; the mid-tier XS Max is $1,249. That’s a whole Apple...

Right now I’m sitting in front of a 27″ iMac. It’s the best computer I’ve ever owned, with a 5K display, high color gamut, 24 gigs of RAM and 512 gigs of SSD storage. It’s beautiful and minimalist, just like every iMac they’ve released since they switched to aluminum in 2007. It’s also the least modifiable desktop...

Deep stories and ugly truths in American politics When I went to high school in Florida, I was in one of the last years that had to take a class called “Americanism vs. Communism.” I had the dumb luck to get a teacher named Bob Marsh, an iconoclastic sixty-something motorcyclist and science fiction fan who told the...

“Don’t write a text editor; you’re reinventing fire.” — Ben Straub As I’ve mentioned here before, I’ve been a TextMate user for the last few years, albeit increasingly reluctantly. TM has always been a mix of sheer brilliance and stone cold stupid, and while the former outweighs the latter, when the latter pops up...