It’s not what you can do with computers, it’s what you can undo — Of all the things you can make with computers, it is perhaps the things you can un-make that I like best. Delete. Backspace. Close without saving. Edit — Undo. These functions allow you to wipe the slate clean. To backtrack and remove mistakes as if they never happened. …

And many of us are trying to quit them — What do you do when you’re bored? For years the answer was probably unique to you: you pursued your own hobby or your own uniquely bad habit. But chances are, in 2021, there is a fairly standard answer to this question: you open an app on your computer or phone…

The European Commission is about to force vendors to standardize connectors. But will Apple add USB-C to the iPhone? — When people ask me what my hobby is, I tend to say something CV-appropriate like reading books or watching films. But to be honest, I’m starting to wonder if my main interest isn’t cables and adapters. I don’t know how this started, but I wander around the cable section in…

Innovator or laggard? Do you hold back because you have refined tastes or because you are late to see the potential? — There’s a part of me that thinks one day I’ll have to get an Apple Watch. I don’t want one. I don’t need one. I don’t even use a regular watch, so it wouldn’t make any sense to strap several hundred dollars of tech to my wrist and commit myself…

The judgments we cast on work — Find something you love, they say, and you’ll never work a day in your life. But I wonder how practical this advice is. For a start, there aren’t many jobs as full-time caramel yogurt eaters. And after a while, even my favorite yogurts would lose their appeal. Then there’s the…

Who owns spaces on our planet (and beyond) and what does owning them mean? — The plumber tells me that Elon Musk plans to surround the planet with so many satellites that NASA won’t be able to launch any more rockets. And then he’ll go live on Mars. “Musk will control Earth from space,” he concludes. We’re crouched under my floorboards as he tells me…

My clock isn’t smart, but it works even if US-East-1 is down — I call him a clocker. Which makes sense because he’s a clock. Maybe “Tocker” would have been better, but he looks like a Clocker. And anyway, the name has stuck now. Clocker is a mahogany Winchester chiming mantel clock. The chimes go off every quarter of an hour, like a…

Hard computing problems have become either trivially easy or so impossibly difficult it’s not even worth trying anymore. — The Moderna team that first created the COVID-19 vaccine designed it in two days. It was a weekend project in January. On Friday evening we had no vaccine, just a series of TGIF memes and an upcoming weekend to look forward to. On Monday morning we had the vaccine. …

In the beginning, the web was a free bonanza. Now every site tries to sign you up for a monthly subscription. — There was a time when it seemed like everything was free on the internet. Free email. Free hosting. Free software. Free cloud storage. Free photo storage. Every social media site was free as was every search engine and every news site. The software that powered the servers running the web…