I bought a Pinebook Pro in 2020 to be the laptop I use at home—the one that lives on the coffee table and gets picked up to read something, ssh somewhere, or write a few lines of code. Six years later it is still that laptop, which is more longevity than I expected for $200!

I moved my desktop computer out of the living room and back to my desk at home. Previously, we’d mainly used it to play games, but Steam Remote Play (and WiFi) has become good enough to stream to the TV in the living room. So I’m using it as a desktop again. Since I’ve mainly used low-power devices at home (Pinebook Pro, it’s been amazing to have a machine that’s so responsive. The i7-12700K is … a lot more powerful than the RK3399 in the PBP, and 96GB doesn’t hurt either.

We don’t have cable, but there is a surprising amount of free television floating through the air over New York. Over-the-air broadcast still carries the networks, and if you can get an antenna somewhere with a view, you can watch them in better quality than most streaming services manage. The problem is that an antenna and a television are rarely in the same part of an apartment.

I first saw an e-ink Android phone on my coworker’s Boox. At the time I had been listening to Old School with Shilo Brooks, which discusses great books and why you should read them. I wanted to read more. The phone in my pocket, however, was optimized for a different activity: little jolts of instant gratification arriving faster than I could decide whether I wanted them.

When my wife and I were expecting our first daughter, we soon had a small collection of names we liked—and a surprisingly hard time finding more like them. The trouble was the word like. What was it, exactly, that we liked about a name? Its sound? Its spelling? Its age? Its associations?