The Loneliness of a Room of One’s Own
The part of A Room of One’s Own that everybody knows isn’t buried. It’s there on the first page—“a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”—and there again on the last, with more caveats but more ambition: If we get our money and our room, and […]
The Cassandra of ’The Machine’
One day, Mrs. Pengelley came to London seeking the assistance of Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective with the mustache, whose “little grey cells” assist him in solving mysteries. With a troubled look, she tells him that she fears she is being slowly poisoned. The doctor doesn’t see anything much the matter, she says. He […]
Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
There is a distinct, visceral kind of pain in watching an otherwise brilliant engineer hold down the Backspace key for six continuous seconds to fix a typo at the beginning of a line. We’ve all been there. We learn ls, cd, and grep, and then we sort of… stop. The terminal becomes a place we live in-but we […]
Technology: The (nearly) perfect USB cable tester does exist
As probably everyone reading this blog, I have a lot of USB cables. I want to sort and categorize them. What the cable can and cannot do is an important factor. But how do I really find out what a cable supports? As I found out during this quest, your cable may successfully lie to […]
Running Tesla Model 3’s computer on my desk using parts from crashed cars
Tesla runs a bug bounty program that invites researchers to find security vulnerabilities in their vehicles. To participate, I needed the actual hardware, so I started looking for Tesla Model 3 parts on eBay. My goal was to get a Tesla car computer and touchscreen running on my desk, booting the car’s operating system. The […]
Nonfiction Publishing, Under Threat, Is More Important
When Politics & Prose hosted a “wake” last month for The Washington Post’s Book World, the rite of mourning was familiar. The closure of the section and the laying off of the paper’s books editors and critics were just the latest in a series of unkind cuts to serious books in this century. They follow […]
The EU still wants to scan your private messages and photos
🚨 The Conservatives (EPP) are attempting to force a new vote on Thursday (26th), seeking to reverse Parliament’s NO on indiscriminate scanning. This is a direct attack on democracy and blatant disregard for your right to privacy. No means no. Take action now!
Personal Encyclopedias
Last year, I visited my grandmother’s house for the first time after the pandemic and came across a cupboard full of loose old photos. I counted 1,351 of them spanning all the way from my grandparents in their early 20s, my mom as a baby, to me in middle school, just around the time when […]
Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you ”verify” the bug remains unfixed
Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you “verify” the bug remains unfixed Previous: App Store developers: suggest your small ideas for improvement Articles index Jeff Johnson (My apps, PayPal.Me, Mastodon) March 25 2026 Why do I file bug reports with Apple Feedback Assistant? I plead insanity. Or perhaps addiction. I seesaw between phases of abstinence […]
Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy
Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy – The GitHub Blog From April 24 onward, interaction data—specifically inputs, outputs, code snippets, and associated context—from Copilot Free, Pro, and Pro+ users will be used to train and improve our AI models unless they opt out. March 25, 2026 | 3 minutes Today, we’re announcing an […]