Well over a decade’s worth of posts, photos, likes, groups, and comments. That’s my Facebook data, which, as of today, I have even more options for collecting and transferring to other platforms.

I imagine myself downloading it all, piling it onto a rickety wooden cart, hitching it to my trusty donkey IO, and then pulling it across the digital terrain to Google Docs. Once there, I dump it all in, and then, taking one rueful look back at the massive, disorganized pile, I slam the shed doors on it and walk away.

Facebook’s acceleration of data transfer tools and options…

I’m addicted to likes. The daily approbations from friends, family, and strangers that dot my social media like so much pepper in my fettuccini nourish me in conscious and subconscious ways. When my numbers are high, I smile to myself, content that I’ve connected with the world in some meaningful way. When the likes are low or nonexistent, I grow anxious and wonder where my audience has gone.

This relationship is probably unhealthy, but I’m not sure I’d want it any other way.

Across all of my social media — Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook — I have what might…

Apple will hold this year’s highly anticipated spring product event on April 20, 1 p.m. ET, entirely online. As anticipated as spring blooms themselves, this year’s event promises to be one of Apple’s richest in terms of product strategy and device number.

Among the categories on the table are:

• Laptops
• Desktops
• Tablets
• Custom Silicon
• Tracking Tiles
• Content

The surest bet is tablets. Most people expect Apple to update its iPad Pro line, which last saw a major update in March 2020 that added trackpad support, LiDAR, and the peppy A12Z Bionic CPU.

That silicon is now a few paces out…

Roku just released a bunch of products and, I promise, I’m going to get to them but what I really want to talk about is remotes.

Our relationships with our television and streaming boxes are defined not so much by the interfaces, content, or even the big screens but by the remote controls. Our eyes see, but it’s our hands that touch these small pieces of plastic, metal, glass, and rubberized buttons. That tactile relationship isn’t fleeting. Raise your hand if you binge with the remote in or near your hand (how else can you go back 30 seconds to…

Pigs with implants (not as fun or tasty as Pigs in Blankets) was probably, in hindsight, the wrong way, last summer, to introduce the public to real-world brain implant technology applications.

The pigs were uncooperative, and Neuralink founder and real-world Tony Stark Elon Musk struggled to explain the real-world applications of a brain implant in a way that didn’t freak people out.

I’ve been pwned. You’ve been pwned. We’ve all been pwned. Somewhere, somehow, some digital bit of our persona has appeared in one of countless data breaches that happen across the internet with alarming regularity.

The most recent breach—an exploitation of what may be an old and now closed Facebook vulnerability—means that records from more than 500 million users are free-floating out in the wild.

I tend to be blasé about such hacks. These companies are bad at protecting our data, and to be fair, we’ve also freely shared insane amounts of our personal information on public and only semiprivate platforms…

With a market cap of over $2T, Apple is a country-sized company and, unsurprisingly, its impact is felt around the world. What the company develops and sells matters to billions of people, as does what the company’s leadership believes in, invests in, and actively fights against.

Companies like Apple, however, can be secretive and private. Access to leaders like Apple CEO Tim Cook is, rightfully, treated like a precious commodity. New York Times columnists, podcaster, and iconoclast Kara Swisher netted a rare and extended one-on-one with Cook and revealed much about the current state of Apple’s core philosophies. …

It’s not even on my current desktop. After more than a decade of using what is inarguably the world’s most popular web browser, Google’s Chrome doesn’t even have a spot on my taskbar. I switched to Microsoft Edge and I’m not looking back.

What started as a flirtation with Microsoft’s Edge browser and its meme-inducing name has turned into a rock-solid relationship, one that solidified when Microsoft swapped its proprietary engine for Chromium.

The truth is, I’d been looking for years to get out of what I considered a demanding browser relationship. Google’s Chrome is smart, compliant with virtually every…