I worried my panels would be ugly. Now I think they look awesome — That picture above? It’s the solar array on the roof of my house in Brooklyn. When I first had them installed four and a half years ago, I worried they’d look terrible. It’s partly because they’re jacked up high in the air like that. In Brooklyn — where the houses…

My messaging isn’t strange enough — My signature move with emoji is this combo: 🤘🤖 I use it whenever I want to signal approval, pleasure, or agreement with something. A “robot throwing up the horns” is my nerdy contribution to the world of emoji linguistics. I’m not a heavy user of emoji, though I do use…

The “bullshit” problem turns up in code, too — Lately I’ve been seeing people using ChatGPT to write code. One guy posted on Twitter about how he used it to make a simple version of Pong “in under 60 seconds”, while another had it write a Python script to rename files. I wanted to get in on the action…

New research suggests Zoom brought not just fatigue — but genuine connection — I’m an extrovert, so when COVID hit, I lunged for any form of social connection I could get. That meant: Zoom parties! Back in early 2020, Zoom was blowing up. Quite literally: Its sales were up 370% in the first few months of the pandemic. (In the first month of…

Cultural subjects mocked for being frivolous are often profound and useful — Last week, Nathan Heller published a long reported piece in the New Yorker that explored the dramatic decline in students studying the humanities at college. The reasons for the decline are manifold, but one big driver is the economy: College in the US is brutally expensive, so students (and their…

The Jungian symbol of supposedly “liberated” work — Back during the dot-com boom of the late 90s, if you visited one of the then-hot startups in San Francisco — or other major US cities like New York — there was an emerging workplace aesthetic. Ties were out; skater clothes were in. Cubicles were becoming passé — many dot-coms…

The “Ebbinghaus curve of forgetting” tells us to use it or lose it — When I was first teaching myself computer programming, I’d often set aside a big chunk of time on the weekend to work on tutorials. By the end of a couple of hours, I always felt like I’d made real progress. Alas, by the time the next weekend came around, a…

There’s no magic bullet. It’s mostly about sheer, dogged persistence — “How do you research a subject?” I got asked this last week, while being interviewed by some college students. We were chatting about energy and technology, but they were also interested to know: As a journalist, how do I set about researching a new area? If I’m starting fresh and…

Need to quickly edit pictures and design posters? These work great — Every so often I need to do a bit of lightweight photo editing and design. Sometimes it’s for journalism; I’ll do a blog post and want to create some text cards for it. Other times it’s for the bands I play in — I’ll be creating shareable cards for upcoming…