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
It’s as much of an age-old question as anything of the internet age is, but I think about it every few years. Slapping up a web page full of personal thoughts in 1999 didn’t carry the same weight that it does in 2024; employers, even...
There’s been plenty of words written already explaining why calling Trump, J. D. Vance, and the rest of the MAGA branch of the Republican Party—which is to say, the Republican Party—weirdos seems so effective. These conservatives have...
Two years ago, I moved back to Florida for family reasons; a year in, I mused on the changes, both good and bad, that the move brought. Now two years in, the most obvious life change is, (probably) unfortunately, employment. The...
In which I fall down a rabbit hole with a purported “AI novel writer,” and wonder what the result tells us about generative AI’s future. I spent nearly six years as a technical writer at an AI company, and it was one of the best jobs...
There’s a maxim I see a lot among tech reviewers, which goes something like this: Buy a product for what it does now, not for what you hope it will do later. The product may never get a major new update at all, and it certainly might not...
About a year ago, I moved away from the San Francisco Bay Area, back to Tampa Bay, Florida, where I’d lived for (mostly) all my previous life. Florida is not the same place it was when I left. The metros feel more urban, more alive, than...
Those of you not plugged into the Mastodon community may not be aware of the predominant reaction to Instagram Threads. This started when it was merely rumored, reaching a crescendo with reports that Meta had been talking to a few of the...
So I’ve been seeing arguments for why, no, you should really stay on Twitter, because of the problems with anything vying to replace it. Most circle around what tech people might dub failure modes in terms of both engineering and policy....
I. I wasn’t born in California. I wasn’t born in Florida, either, even though it was, until 2002, the only place I ever remembered living, the place I would say I was from. I was born in Dallas, but only lived there maybe six months. I...
When TextMate burst onto the scene in the mid-2000s, it didn’t take aim at Emacs and Vim as much as BBEdit, a Mac-only editor around more than a decade at that point. TextMate offered radically easy ways to create sophisticated new...
Update, April 2024: While this was all true when I wrote it in mid-2021, Nova has continued progressing, and I’ve actually ended up using it a lot more for web development than I expected to, chiefly because of its integrated...
So, what is it? Music mixed in Dolby Atmos. So, like, surround sound? Yes, with an asterisk we’ll come back to. Most surround systems use multiple channels: the original Dolby Surround used four (left, right, center, and rear), then...
So what’s the deal? Apple Music can now stream files as “lossless,” up to 24-bit resolution and a 48 KHz sampling rate (which is better than CD quality), or “hi-res lossless,” up to 24-bit resolution and a 192 KHz sampling rate. Does...
Basecamp is both the name of a small tech company and their primary product, a web-based project management tool that includes forum-like message boards and a Slack-like chat component. It’s pretty good. (So I’ve heard.) In some ways,...
At the end of 2010, John Gruber of Daring Fireball wrote in a Macworld column, The central conceit of the iPad is that it’s a portable computer that does less—and because it does less, what it does do, it does better, more simply, and...