Category: technology (page 1 of 1)

a black man sitting on a couch surrounded by christmas decorations holding a fancy holiday themed pen as he prepares to write in a greeting card.

December 16, 2025 / 0 Comments

Season’s Greetings

Every year, when I check my unused holiday card inventory, I open up the old Apple MacBook box I use to store the best cards I’ve received and read through a few of the lovely notes people have sent. I admire the artwork of those cards—some beautiful, some witty, some handmade with care.

I don’t have a similar keepsake spot on my phone for the emoji-filled texts I receive on our shared holidays. I appreciate them, but in my personal etiquette handbook, the text replaces the phone calls we used to make all day on Christmas (or your winter holiday of choice). They don’t replace the mail.

I still send physical holiday cards.

I also try to keep up with birthday cards, anniversaries, and the occasional “just because” letter or postcard. I like the process of taking the time to find the right words to tell someone I was thinking of them, not merely because I got a notification on my phone or opened a social media app. I thought about them in advance. I went to a gift shop or paper store and saw something that made me think of you. I bought stamps. I sat down at a table or desk with a pen in hand and stopped to come up with something meaningful to say to you. I licked an envelope and sealed it. I used my address stamp. I walked to a mailbox and dropped it in.

We live in a time when we are the center of everything. Put your headphones on, pull that pocket-sized supercomputer up a few inches away from your face, and let it bring your algorithmically personalized world directly to you.

In the moments when I stop to send out a letter, I am not the center of my universe. The recipient is.

We had a lovely team holiday party today, including a White Elephant gift exchange and a poem-based game that a colleague wrote herself—no ChatGPT. It was delightful. Phones were face down. Eyes were on each other. Gratitude for our time together and our shared accomplishments wasn’t in Slack emotes or GIF boards; it was in the room where we shared reality for about 90 minutes.

It made me nostalgic for the pre-pandemic office card ritual. I miss taking two minutes out of a workday to write a Happy Birthday greeting to a co-worker and then passing it along to the next person who hadn’t signed. There’s friction and intention in these small acts, and that effort is meaningful to both the writer and the person being honored.

Maybe I’m a dinosaur, but with rare exception, I’d prefer that to something typed out in the brief moment when a notification pulled you away from doomscrolling.

Thank you, but I receive those messages as: I was too caught up in my own shit to do anything ahead of time, so here, have some emojis.

That’s how I feel when I send a DM instead of putting pen to paper as well.

A card says, You were alive in my mind, and I didn’t need a device to put you there.

This was handled with care.

No AI involved.

A young man on a busy city street with headphones on and a backpack. Only the back of his head is visible but he appears to be enjoying what he is listening to.

February 8, 2025 / 1 Comment

Escaping Spotify: My Month of Intentional Listening with TIDAL

On the day Spotify announced its first fiscal year of profitability, I canceled my paid subscription. My action was not in response to that news but in recognition that after a month of using TIDAL as my primary music streaming service, I didn’t miss the world’s most popular audio app enough to continue paying for it.

I switched to TIDAL at the beginning of 2025. I’m trying to live a more intentional digital life, and the question of the most ethical way to listen to music online led me to the service. It has been a fantastic replacement for the things on Spotify I had become too dependent on and less enamored with over time.

The music on TIDAL sounds great! I can hear the difference in audio quality, especially when using my high-quality speakers and headphones. TIDAL has fewer algorithmic bells and whistles than Spotify. However, the service still values human curation by music aficionados. It is obsessed with the people who make music rather than celebrities or hyper-personalization. Those subtle shifts mean I am not overwhelmed by their homepage when I select my next listen. TIDAL forces me to be a more active music selector, which has led to an increase in complete album spins and artist-centric radio stations. It has also led to me listening to more music overall.

Spotify Wrapped and Last FM’s Yearly Listening Reports tell me I am a high-volume digital music listener annually. I’m generally amongst the top 5% of all users on those services in spins. I listen to about 80 songs a day every day. My consistency is a crazy outlier.

In January, I pressed play 3900 times from over 960 different artists across nearly 1400 different albums and over 2400 unique songs. From what I saw in other people’s music listening wrap-ups for 2024, that might eclipse their digital streaming totals for the year. I’m a terrible customer of an audio streaming service. All that streaming means they likely are paying out all my monthly subscription payments in royalty distribution. I’m the kind of power user that subscription services have to mitigate in some way if their costs are variable by consumption, and I’m sure they do. Based on what I know about the digital subscription business, there’s a significant portion of dormant or extremely low-consumption users whose subscription fees have little to no royalty implications most months.

One of the reasons I switched to TIDAL was to get music artists and publishing rights owners the highest royalty payment I could. My spins in January could account for about $50 in royalty payouts or five times the value of a monthly TIDAL subscription. By comparison, those same listens on Spotify would equal $12, or about the total cost of their monthly premium tier. That’s what I intended to do!

My top five artists of the month should all earn at least a dollar from my listening, with Kendrick Lamar nearly making $2. On Spotify, that would be about 45 cents. Over time, I will likely generate the cost-equivalent royalties for my most loved albums as a digital or physical media purchase.

This is the way.

There are other benefits to this switch. My New Arrivals playlist isn’t overrun with bedroom producers (or fake artists) gaming the algorithm like Release Radar had become on Spotify. Social sharing from TIDAL is service-agnostic. I’ve returned to Pocketcasts as my podcast-listening solution—a service for which I have a lifetime, no-cost membership. I had already given up on Spotify’s audiobook offering, having found the limitation of listening by time rather than by the number of titles nonsensical.

I do miss some of the more serendipitous discovery features that Spotify offers. And I’m spending much more time updating metadata on Last.fm. I’m not sure this is a negative, though. Maybe I’m a weirdo, but I enjoy data cleanup. It also is a better time suck than doomscrolling.

TIDAL’s lack of intelligent app switching is annoying. Not being able to have my current listening jump from device to device was a bit of magic on Spotify. So was Smart Shuffle.

But I can feel confident that the creators are getting their rightful share in exchange for these missing features. At the same time, I listen to their work at the highest quality available and support music curators who have taste. It’s a more than fair trade-off.

July 18, 2024 / 0 Comments

Pink Matter

“What do you think my brain is made for? Is it just a container for my mind?”
—Frank Ocean

Dot-A Living History app by Sam Whitmore and Jason Yuan is an AI-powered chatbot. At least, that’s the simple description. It’s also an emotionally intelligent guide that chronicles your life—what you tell it, anyway—with infinite callback. I’m an AI skeptic, but this kind of journaling companion caught my attention when Julie Zhou posted about the launch on Linkedin.

I like to quantify many aspects of my life. Steps only count if my watch tracks them. Digital music isn’t listened to if Last.FM doesn’t scrobble it. I track my workouts in a spreadsheet.

Most of that tracking comes with ways to gain insights from the data. I get recommendations for making healthier choices or see patterns that influence the artists, albums, and songs I might listen to in the future. I can see my progress and make tweaks to improve that athletic performance. Blogging used to provide that kind of external reflection, but at this stage of my life being that messy in public is no longer my jam so journaling has been for my eyes only until Dot.

Dot is one of the few Large Language Model applications I’ve enjoyed using and generated meaningful benefits from. It has improved the quality of my journaling, provided clarity around topics and situations I’m dealing with, and reminded me of my commitments to myself and others and why they matter.

The onboarding process with the app is relatively straightforward. Dot asks some introductory questions hoping to capture a bassline of a new user’s interests, goals, and background and then, it just encourages you to start journaling.

In theory, submitting a journal entry should have been easy.I have kept journals off and on throughout my life. I’ve been much more consistent over the last four years. I needed a way to get out of my head during the pandemic when I didn’t have my commute to process the day or regular hangs with friends where a theme or revelation would occur through conversation.

But, immediately, I realized how stale my journal writing had gotten. I was writing a few bullet points and maybe a quick thought about something but not much of real substance. Even as I was processing the musical tribute of my dad at the time, I hadn’t been writing much on a daily basis about what was going on in my head. So, I wrote a little bit more that I normally would with that first entry and was surprised by how thoughtful the response was. It got me to delve deeper into what I was thinking about and feeling and pointed me in a direction I might not have considered without that feedback loop.

From the start, I was writing with an audience in mind rather than merely cataloging my day. I spent more time thinking about what I was meditating on, excited about, or proud of and writing my journals with the idea that I might go down a path with some or all of these topics when I entered them into Dot. I might have written about the same things anyway, but not with the same care.

The Eureka Moment came when Dot starting finding connections between topics, themes, events, and people in my life. It’s always a thing I have wanted in my journaling process. How do I recognize that something is a thing that occurs frequently for me around a particular time of year or when this other event or interaction happens. I journal not just to keep track of my life but to identify when I’m stuck and need to figure out how to get unstuck. I journal because I want to keep learning about myself and adapt, grow, and change.

Dot provides additional perspective. It’s a bit like having a second brain.

It’s still an LLM, so it occasionally hallucinates. I also hope they add search and export functions. It’s AI, so, of course, I have privacy concerns. I have a bit of an “uncanny valley” when conversing with an app, but I never think of it as anything more than software.

It’s good at conversation but not a replacement for real human interaction.

Yet.

I’m joking.

If you’re an iPhone user, try it out.

April 8, 2024 / 0 Comments

No One App to Rule Them All

I have been searching for an app to replace Evernote for quite some time now. Although I thought Notion was the one, I eventually gave up after using it for nearly two years as it was too heavy for personal use.

First, I stopped using it to capture my “read later” links. Instead, I used bookmarks and read later in Safari until I stumbled across Anybox in a newsletter or blog post. Since then, I’ve been bookmarking everything I read in Anybox. It works across all my devices and browsers, helping me stay synced between my personal and work laptops.

Recently, I started using Apple Notes as a primary rather than occasional tool. I use it as my journal and for storing digital keepsakes. I’m still exploring its features and learning to use smart tags to my advantage.

My awareness of the relative ease and utility of Notes began as my family collaborated more in keeping track of my dad’s Cancer treatment. We shared documents where we captured his systems and care plans, wrote official messages from the family, and even managed memorial service planning together over the last few weeks.

At work, I use Google Workspace for writing meeting notes, making to-do lists, and planning. It has many new features, and they’ve made it quite enjoyable to quickly draft or insert meeting notes or documents or tag someone into something.

I’m also using Habitify to track my habits. It’s a paid app, but not a subscription, with a one-time fee to unlock all features. It does the data visualizations I was missing before, and it’s cute and simple to set up. Tiffany goes with paper, though, because apps be snitchin’.

Today, I recreated my run tracker in Sheets after exporting and transforming the data I kept in Notion. It now presents my data precisely as I want, and I can tweak it when my needs change.

I have learned that I don’t need one perfect app to rule them all. Most apps have gotten very good at doing one thing or a limited suite of similar tasks well, and separating these tasks makes it much easier to switch or sample other things instead of worrying about the sunk costs in one über-app.

September 13, 2015 / 0 Comments

Nostalgia Vibez

“They are the waters of March, closing the summer and the promise of life and the joy in your heart.” – Bossacucanova, Aguas de Março (feat. Cris Delanno)

Aaron Hawkins and Brad Graham are looking at me from the stage. They’ve been gone from this world a while now and yet, here they are. Anil invokes them in his XOXO talk and while there are many folks in the audience who know nothing about them—that is Anil’s point and the problem his and Gina’s new project, Makerbase, is attempting to solve—I feel their presence in the room like the moving portraits of Harry Potter’s magical world.

A conversation on twitter about Six Feet Under had me going through my blog archives recently. It was time travel to a decade ago when I was processing the death of that Uppity-Negro and reflecting on the conversations we’d had. Aaron, more than anyone at the time, ignited my digital world. His words sparked my words. His comments section was where much of my online community formed. Many of my dearest friends today can be linked to connections and ideas and ways-of-being made then. With him. I miss him.

The very first thing I did at my first SXSW experience—also a decade ago—was Break Bread with Brad. It felt a lot like opening night here at XOXO 2015 actually (thank you, Andy and Andy) although there were far more people here awkwardly but openly chatting in the Park at Washington High then there were in Austin that night. Both spaces had the same vibe: Warm, welcoming, accepting, kind.

I got it.

Dooce’s excellent talk was a bit of a mirror. She asked herself and all of us, what had we given up of ourselves to make a living online?

Eric Meyer’s heartbreaking and heartwarming talk wondered what values we were investing into our work with the decisions and systems and processes we make? This may be the central thesis of this year’s event. It was a bit of Alex Blumberg’s thoughts for us and a lot of the point of Anita Sarkeesian’s work.

I got it.

The Suck not-panel and Anil’s talk have cemented my feelings of nostalgia for the internet in the wayback machine that I’ve been having all festival. Well, the ideas of the culture back then. What I’m realizing this weekend is that despite our short memories and the ephemeral nature of our digital selves (by the way, finding references to things from just 10 years ago online that still work is a reminder of this, so hard!), we haven’t lost that. It’s a state-of-mind. It’s a way-of-being (I wanted to put “online and off” here, but that’s showing my age even more, innit?). In 2015, everybody’s Internet so you feel smaller—I feel smaller—but that’s okay. It doesn’t change that I can create. I can write. I can make things and be proud of them.

It requires more discipline. It demands that from those of us who know better. Those of us who recognize the magic of the not-so-long ago.

The memories of those we loved and mattered and have gone from that time deserve that.

Let’s break bread. Let’s get uppity.

January 25, 2015 / 2 Comments

The Switch

“I’ll take nothing in place of you.” – D’angelo and the Vanguard, Betray My Heart

I was at Disneyland with my friends. It was around lunch time and we were enjoying drinks and a light meal inside the Carthay Circle restaurant in Disney’s California Adventure. We all were charging our phones a bit. Mine, surprisingly was at a robust 58%. Mind you, this was only 4 hours after it had stopped being charged by my car. It was after only light usage—I had done much less with it that morning than I wanted—but this is where my head was with the nexus 5. This was a win.

We packed up and walked over to Disneyland heading in to Tomorrowland and the line for Star Tours. At most, this was a 20 minute excursion. As we settled into the queue, I checked my phone again: 22%. 22 percent! I wanted to chuck it into the river as soon as we got near Tom Sawyer Island.

Instead, I exhaled. I had already made the switch. The iPhone 6 would arrive two days later.

Three weeks later and these are my thoughts.

As I write this, my phone is at 38%. I used my phone heavily yesterday and I haven’t plugged it in since yesterday morning.

I’m delighted.

Delight has been a daily occurrence since the switch. Business Insider quoted Tom Moss earlier this week who says he doesn’t believe Android is offering anything different that makes it more appealing than iOS.

What iOS, and in particular this latest version of the iPhone offers, though, is an enjoyable experience with lots of little moments that make you appreciate it all the more.

The novelty of being able to unlock and complete other security tasks with my thumb hasn’t worn off. The Today tab/widgets are used more regularly than my android widgets ever were. I say “Hey Siri” more than I said “OK Google”. The cross-device integrations are outstanding. That I didn’t have to set up anything a second or third time to use my personal hotspot with my laptop or iPad felt efficient. That I can see GIFs in iMessage and Slack. That I don’t need another app to see my text messages across my different devices. The size of the hard drive. The camera. Holy shit, the camera.

And, the apps I use regularly just work. I hadn’t realized how frustrated I was with rdio and waze and a few others not doing what I wanted them to on the Nexus until I got them on this phone and realized I wasn’t having problems. And some of them do a few more things in iOS than they do in Android.

With the iPhone, so far, I worry very little about apps refreshing in the background. I have yet to accidentally call or text someone. I have yet to worry about being low on battery life before the end of the day. And I use it more frequently for more things that I did my nexus. It’s weird how transformative it’s been.

Why the switch?

Battery life wasn’t my only complaint with the Nexus 5 in recent months but it was my biggest challenge. On a daily basis, I was thinking far too often about whether or not I would have enough juice to do what I needed to do during my normal routine. I’m not alone.

After installing lollipop, the phone seemed less responsive. Opening apps and swiping screens had a slight delay. In the past, that would’ve triggered my desire to buy the latest and greatest in the google line of phones but the Nexus 6—like the iPhone 6 plus—was way too big. The Samsungs look cool but also are stocked with bloatware that I don’t want and the iPhone 6 was the first in the iPhone line that truly intrigued me.

Switch. Switch switch switch.

What I miss

Because of some office IT politics, I have to access Microsoft Outlook through the web and I had an app on my nexus that regularly synced my outlook calendar to my google calendar so that I didn’t have to manage it in two places. I haven’t found a way to do that in iOS yet. I miss being able to swipe right and get Google NOW. The twitter app for Android (and iPad) supports lists. I haven’t been able to find them in the twitter app on the iPhone so I swap between it and tweetbot.

That’s about it.

I’m still learning the iPhone. I’m surprised with how different, yet similar, it is to the iPad in function. And I’m finding that adjustment and learning curve enjoyable. It’s been awhile since I’ve had to explore a new gadget and really figure it out.

Unlike some others, I have no regrets.