If you have not read the 1997 newspaper advice column or listened to the 1999 spoken word poem, you need to do that first. Enable Two-Factor Authentication Ladies and gentlemen of the internet of 2026: Enable two-factor authentication. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, two-factor authentication would be it. The…
Author: Collin
The Same People Who Got Rich Making You Sick Are Getting Rich Selling You the Fix
The board of directors of Planet Fitness governs the largest gym chain in the United States. Over nineteen million members. More than 2,500 locations. Ten dollars a month. The most accessible on-ramp to fitness in the country, built for exactly the kind of person who has never felt comfortable in a gym before. Here are…
The Tomb Was Empty, and So Was the Noise
“Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” — Philippians 4:8 Forty days ago, I gave up the news for Lent. I wrote about it at the time with the energy of someone building…
Living In The Safest Country You’ve Ever Been Afraid Of
In 1960, Rod Serling wrote an episode of The Twilight Zone called The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street. The setup is simple. A quiet, tree-lined American street. Then a shadow passes overhead and the power goes out. Cars won’t start. Radios go dead. A boy suggests it might be aliens. What follows is twenty…
Alone in the Midst of the Park
A wealthy town, annoyed by the condition of its neighbor’s side of a shared park, builds a fence down the middle to keep the riffraff out. The residents are furious. At a public meeting, one of them suggests building a second fence around the first fence. Another suggests burning it down. The wealthy town, meanwhile,…
Boycott Everything, All the Time
It feels like every other week there’s a new call to action flooding my social media feeds. Boycott this company. Don’t shop there on Saturday. Pull your money out of that bank. The targets change constantly, sometimes it’s a fast food chain, sometimes it’s a streaming service, sometimes it’s an entire retail category, but the…
Forty Days Without Headlines: Reclaiming My Mind for Lent and Breaking Free from the Outrage Machine
This Lent, I’m giving up something that might seem essential in our hyperconnected world: the news. Not social media entirely (though I’m cutting back), not books, not long-form journalism. Just the daily drip-feed of breaking news, hot takes, and algorithmic anxiety that has controlled my attention for far too long. Morrissey put it perfectly in…
The App Store Is Filling Up With Weekend Projects
I keep seeing the same pattern play out: someone has an idea on a Tuesday, “vibe codes” an app by Thursday, tweets a shiny demo on Friday… and by next month it’s basically digital driftwood. It feels especially loud right now in the MacOS and MacApps subreddits. Every other post is “I built an app…
Priced Out of the Page: Why Your Library Can’t Just Buy Digital Books
I borrow a lot of ebooks from my public library. It feels like magic: tap a button, a book appears, and two weeks later it politely vanishes. No late fees, no driving, no dusty shelves (complimentary, not an insult). But here’s the part I didn’t really understand until I went down the rabbit hole: libraries…
New WordPress Plugin Released: Paragraph Ads Inserter
I’ve just released a new WordPress plugin. It allows you to automatically insert ads between paragraphs in WordPress. It’s free to use and open source on my GitHub profile. For more information, click here.
Last.fm WordPress Plugin Updated
I pushed an update to my Last.fm 3×3 Album Art Image Grid for WordPress plugin that makes it a lot nicer to use day-to-day. The main change is that you no longer have to paste your Last.fm username and API key into the shortcode every time you want to show a grid. Instead, you can…