For a long time, I’ve been bothered by the fact that certain HTML emails — ones I’m interested in — won’t display accurately in Microsoft Outlook, my standard email/calendar/contacts desktop client. This problem doesn’t occur on my Apple mobile device, which renders everything perfectly. In particular, the emails sent from…

The other day, I was doing Quordle, the version of Wordle that involves solving four grids at once. Who knew there were that many five-letter words in the English language? And speaking of English, there are a lot of words that the New York Times (owner of Wordle) and Merriam-Webster…

I’ve been following the tech industry so long that I’ve seen everything at least twice. For that reason, I’m rarely impressed by various corporate announcements of breakthroughs and such. But this one caught my eye. Qualcomm is arguably the king of connectivity, having deep intellectual property portfolios in all the…

Transistors on a single die are not all uniform, and blocks can be optimized for particular tasks. For a central processor (CPU), performance is often tied to the number of compute registers: more is better. But these days, given process node advancements, even single dies have enough transistors on them…

It said: “Snakes do not have arms, and therefore do not have the ability to miss them. Snakes have evolved to have a highly specialized body plan that allows them to move effectively on the ground, in water, and in trees, and they have adapted to this body plan over…

When Damar Hamlin collapsed on a football field from a frightening but fascinating medical event called “commotio cordis” (disrupted heart), the name alone sent me off to read about it in Wikipedia. I was fascinated to learn that the “window of vulnerability” is tiny, occurring during only 1–3% of the…

When is it enough? — I was sitting in our local cantina the other day with my good friend Hector and a couple of beers, when he decided to unburden himself. …

Last week, Intel hosted the perhaps-confusingly named InnovatiON conference in San Jose. InnovatiON could be seen as the restart of Intel Developer Forum (known to everyone in tech as IDF). IDF had been slowly dying for a few years; the last one was in 2017, and Covid made sure it…

Sometimes a kaleidoscopic fireball comes in a plain package — It’s been many years. So many that I don’t really have clear memories of much. What I have are snapshots, mental stills that I took with my brain, not consciously, of course, but in the moment, as particular images were burned into my head. The first image I can dredge…