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See What’s On Your Hard Drive and Other Stuff I Wrote This Week
Over at WIRED I wrote a quick guide to visualizing what’s taking up room on your hard drive. I hope this empowers people to track down the large files that are filling up their device instead of just buying a bigger hard hard drive. Computer parts are about to get a lot more expensive in the United States of America…
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Practice Is The Point
Writing isn’t just my job—it’s how I think. When I’m not sure what I feel about something I start typing. I put down ideas, contemplate whether I agree with what I just wrote, and in this process figure out how I feel. A lot of my blog posts start as me playing around with ideas.…
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Stay private while browsing and other stuff I wrote this week
Last week I explained how to tell if Jeffery Goldberg, Editor of the The Atlantic, is is your group chat, which is obviously among he most important privacy articles I’ve ever written. But it wasn’t the only privacy piece I wrote: I also I talked to a number of privacy and security experts to write a…
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Extrinsic motivation is ruining everything
It’s one of those patterns you can’t stop noticing once you think about it.
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The lost art of cleaning out your feeds and other stuff I wrote this week
I regularly go through everyone I’m following on social media and remove accounts I’m not enjoying or learning from anymore. I’ve been doing this for a long time, as a way to take control over what I’m paying attention to. I talked about this lost art of cleaning out your feed for PopSci. Here’s a couple other things…
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How to Tell If Jeffery Goldberg, Editor of The Atlantic, Is In Your Signal Group Chat
Only you can protect your privacy from Jeffery Goldberg, Editor of The Atlantic
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Playing modern games on an ancient TV and other stuff I wrote
I recently wrote about why new tech only feels good for a short time over at PopSci. It’s a little bit outside my wheelhouse—it’s about tech, yes, but also about human psychology means a new TV or computer will never make you happy in the long term. There may be a spike in happiness after a wedding, a…
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Is constantly insulting your core customer base a good marketing strategy?
Imagine a Budweiser Super Bowl ad where the Clydesdales can talk and they spend the entire two minute ad discussing how much they despise country music, pickup trucks, and Christianity. The tagline: “Budweiser: we hate everything you hold dear”. What do you think that ad would do to Budweiser’s market share? This is basically the…
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Blurring out distractions and other stuff I wrote this week
This week, over at Lifehacker, I tried a simple Mac application that blurs all but the currently open window. I find it sincerely useful when I’m trying to write and it made me think about how much I like finding little productivity tools that make focusing just that much easier. Do you have any favorite apps like…
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Read local news instead of doomscrolling
How does one exist online, right now, without being a constant mess of anxiety? It’s what I’ve been working on lately. I’ve told you about rejecting anxiety bait and not getting your news from social media, and both of those can make a big difference. But there’s something even simpler that I think can help:…