Writing

Nobody ever said making a living from writing was easy, but it doesn’t have to be rocket science either. I’m the lead editor of the Medium gadget blog Debugger where I regularly work with Partner Program writers to help them find a bigger audience and get paid for their writing. I first started working with Nick Wolny due in no small part to the adorable picture he sent me of his dog named Hefty.

It wasn’t just that Nick and I shared a love of dogs, although that helped. It was that at the very end of my Debugger launch…

In my former life as a tech podcaster, I used to switch phones, smartwatches, and tablets with my co-host for the entire month of January. He was an Android guy and I was all Apple all the time. This was always an entertaining experiment (to us anyway) and made for many good discussions that you can still watch on YouTube if you‘ve got some extra time on your hands.

For the most part, I loved my time with Android. I liked customizing my home screen (although Apple lets you do that now), sending Star Wars holograms with the first Pixel…

“When is the last time you actually thought about PDFs?” asks Rob Walker in his excellent look into the 30-year-old tool we often take for granted. “The PDF is a…

When Apple Fitness+ launched in mid-December, I immediately signed up for the free trial. I’d been looking forward to subscribing to the company’s $10 a month service that includes guided workouts and integration with Apple Watch. I knew that if I liked the service, it might finally convince me to sign up for Apple One, the bundle of services that didn’t quite do it for me without Apple Fitness+.

After using Apple Fitness+ four days a week for almost a month, I’ve already developed a love/hate relationship with the service that I will most definitely continue paying for after my…

In mid-February of 2020, I took a trip alone to the desert. It was the first and only vacation I’d taken by myself in my entire 47 years on this planet. I am the mother of three teenagers and an elderly dog. I’m also married to a man who loves solitude, and he thought that I would love it too, so he encouraged me to go away for a week. I don’t do well by myself, and I’m terrible at relaxing, but I managed. I took the week off work and social media and taught myself how to be alone…

Internet Happy Places

At the end of a year in which we could not explore much IRL, team OneZero is sharing our favorite places we found online.

It is generally frowned upon for a wife and a mother of three human children to say that, most days, her favorite thing in the world is her dog. And yet, my dog is pretty amazing. But I also love other people’s dogs, and this year I really didn’t get to pet enough of them. Naturally, my favorite place on the internet was anywhere where the dogs are.

In 2019, only one person on my team…

Story Spotlight

When I moved to Petaluma, California (former egg capital of the world), I thought I would get chickens. Instead, I got three children. And then I got a dog. Our neighbor had chickens. But they didn’t have a chicken coop or a fence. And one morning as my family was sitting down to breakfast we saw our dog, Gilbert, run past the glass doors, a cloud of white feathers in his wake. Our neighbor had one less chicken.

People are weird when they hear that our dog killed the neighbor’s chicken. But they shouldn’t be. “They are predators, after all,”…

Buying a gadget or an internet service for a loved one or even for yourself can be complicated. Does the gadget violate privacy? How soon will it end up in…