Coyote Tracks
Coyote Tracks
Watts Martin
I’m a science fiction/fantasy author and a technical writer. A few years ago I was known for being a technical blogger on Tumblr; now I blog right here. I left Twitter a while ago, but you can find me posting on Mastodon and Bluesky now. My pronouns are he/they.
Latest Posts
If you’ve been on the Internet in the last fifteen years and change, you’ve probably heard of Soylent, whether you wanted to or not. Nutrition drinks as a category have been around forever, pitched in various forms to dieters or...
Not so long ago, I considered myself basically a capitalist, and—echoing folks like Ralph Nader and Elizabeth Warren—would have said our problems are with corporate capitalism. Maybe so, but whether or not corporatism is the capitalism...
I shared a LinkedIn post with that title last week. I’m going to share what I wrote there, but I’m going to ask a second question after that, which I may or may not share with the LinkedIn crowd later. If you’re thinking “but I thought...
John Gruber linked to a piece by Sam Henri Gold entitled “This Is Not the Computer for You”, which both is and isn’t an article about the MacBook Neo. It’s a reflection on how kids get started with computers, and how when he was a kid,...
While I don’t think Apple Podcasts itself has a “trim silence” feature, it’s popular in a bunch of podcast players. Overcast probably kicked it off with its “Smart Speed” function, but it’s in Pocket Casts, Castro, and I’m sure a bunch...
For someone who’s neither all-in on AI nor a passionate anti-AI crusader, I think about it a lot. From 2018 through 2023, I worked for Viv Labs, a startup from the folks who built Apple’s Siri; they had been bought by Samsung in order to...
It’s a match made in…frankly, I’m not sure where. But I’ve been experimenting with using org-journal as a replacement for Day One, and while it’s pretty good, there are two things that I immediately missed: The way Day One records my...
Whenever I make a big purchase—a TV, a new computer, a car, an A/V receiver—I inevitably enter a long period of internal debate, arguments and counter-arguments, pros and cons. It doesn’t matter whether I’ve set money aside for this, how...
If you poke around the Emacs community, you’ll quickly find some—all right, loads of—users who want to do everything in Emacs. Not just writing, not just programming, not just publishing their blog. No. They want to read and write their...
Matt Novak, writing at Gizmodo on October 22: President Donald Trump is currently demolishing the East Wing of the White House in one of the more shocking acts of his second term. Trump plans to build an enormous $250 million ballroom in...
Back in the dark ages (the 1990s), I was an inveterate operating system switcher. At various points, I ran DR-DOS with DESQView/X (what Windows 3.1 should have been), FreeBSD, several distributions of Linux, Windows 2000, QNX Photon, and...
Every so often, there’s a surge of “here’s why no one can do serious writing in Markdown” articles. They don’t come on any obvious schedule, or with any obvious trigger; usually, somebody complains about something Markdown can’t do that...
“It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity” isn’t as much an aphorism as a punchline, as people point out—often with an unwarranted hint of smugness, as if nobody else had made this observation before—that 95° F is too damn hot no matter how...
So, you might know that I’m a text editor junkie. At a job in the 1990s, I used a great Windows-only editor called HomeSite for web development. When I moved to the Mac in 2001, I wrote to Allaire, the developers, and asked if there was...
The common wisdom seems to be that Apple is critically behind in AI, but that makes some 'AI triumphalist' assumptions that bear examining.