Two Envelopes, One Bad Night
A late night watching the Oscars envelope mixup live, and some thoughts on how redundancy in a process can still fail when it's built to catch the wrong kind of mistake.
Personal
Personal
The Pebble On My Wrist Just Became a Fossil
Pebble is folding into Fitbit and my Kickstarter-backed watch is now a dead-end gadget. Some thoughts on backing the wrong horse, twice.
Still Cant Find an NES Classic
Three stores, zero NES Classics, and a parking-lot scroll through $180 eBay listings. A dispatch from the world's dumbest holiday shopping hunt.
Still Hunting for an NES Classic
A month into the NES Classic shortage and I still don't have one, just a lot of dead-end Best Buy trips and eBay listings pushing $250 for a $60 box.
My Cyber Monday Was Refreshing a Best Buy Page at 3am
A Cyber Monday post-mortem about failing to buy an NES Classic Edition, writing a dumb little stock-checker script, and losing to bots and scalpers anyway.
Backing Up Six Seconds at a Time
A Sunday afternoon spent manually saving old Vines before the app winds down, and some grumbling about how badly Twitter handled the whole thing.
Digging Up a Yahoo Account I Forgot I Had
Yahoo's confirmation that 500 million accounts were breached sent me digging through a Yahoo Mail account I forgot I still had since 2003.
My Phone Charger Paranoia (Thanks, Samsung)
A Labor Day weekend spent oddly paranoid about my phone charger, thanks to Samsung's Note 7 recall, plus a smaller aside about the SpaceX pad explosion that took out a satellite meant for internet access in Africa.
Fourteen Days, Eighteen Planets, Zero Other Players
Two weeks and forty hours into No Man's Sky, on the grind, the lonely planets, and why the hype around meeting other players fell apart almost immediately.
Fighting My Own Start Menu
I finally installed the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, lost half my pinned tiles, and spent the rest of the night half-watching Rio instead of fixing it.
Walking Circles Around the Block for Pokemon Go
A night spent walking loops around my own block chasing Pokemon Go, dodging crashed servers, and side-eyeing that Google account permissions prompt.
Nobody I Know Is Upgrading Their Phone Anymore
Apple posted its first revenue decline in 13 years this week and everyone's writing the same doom-and-gloom piece about it. Here's why my three-year-old iPhone 5s isn't going anywhere.