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
I’ve long liked Federico Viticci’s MacStories, although I’ve drifted away from it as it’s gotten more focused on AI lately. (Note: this is what writers call “foreshadowing”.) I’ve been listening to the Connected podcast he co-hosts since...
In July 2022, I wrote “Thoughts on Leaving California” about my move back to Florida after twenty years in the Golden State; I followed it a year later with “A Year Back in Florida”, which ended with “I’ll check back in after another...
There’s been buzz recently about how a nascent web and mobile astronomy app, Dark Hours, got wildly incorrectly rejected from Apple’s App Store. Then maybe it turned out that the rejection wasn’t so wild because Apple may well have been...
I’ve written before about being between two communities with very different attitudes toward our current generative AI moment: Artists, writers, and other (non-tech) creators mostly loathe it with every fiber of their being, to the point...
Back in the olden days, there was an Insert key on Mac keyboards. (There still is on PC keyboards, although in many programs it doesn’t actually do anything anymore.) If you were editing text, you had two different modes, overwrite and...
In November of last year, I wrote about what I did and didn’t want to do in Emacs. It’s great for anything that involves text editing/processing, good for certain kinds of management tasks (it’s a great Git client, and even has...
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...