With wildfire smoke causing so much unhealthful air, I found myself wanting my own air quality monitors. I wanted an outdoors one both to better understand what’s happening in our immediate area and to help contribute insight to others. I wanted an indoors one to better understand what the air quality was like in our…
When I retired from search journalism in June, I had no idea what I would be doing next. I just knew I was ready for a break and something different from what I had been doing for so long. That something different has arrived: I’m joining Google as of Monday. My title is still being…
Finally, you can buy the Star Wars films in digital format — digital streaming, that is. Technically, we’ve had Star Wars in digital format via DVD and Blu-ray for ages. But if you wanted to stream Star Wars digitally from the cloud, you couldn’t until today. There seems to be no lack of providers offering…
Growing up as a Cold War kid in the 1970s, I was fascinated by Berlin. I’d read of the airlift, the city being divided then the construction of the Berlin Wall. I always wanted to visit the city. Little did I realize in the year that I did, the wall would actually come down. In…
When I was a kid, I used to spend hours playing in a little dirt patch in our backyard. I’d build cities with roads for my toy cars, rivers for boats, you name it. My kids do the same thing today. They just do it digitally, through Minecraft. My children have been Minecraft fanatics since…
Quick — how much does it cost to subscribe to the New York Times? The answer is that to figure out what’s the best option for you likely involves firing up a spreadsheet, given the lack of transparency in how the New York Times prices things. The New York Times is hardly the only publisher…
Yesterday, today and tomorrow, what are known as “king tides” are occurring. These are exceptionally high tide caused by how both the sun and the moon pull on the water. In my city of Newport Beach, they’ve pushed the harbor to extremes. Today, we had flooding in a few places. It would have been far worse…
Orange County has a number of tollroads run by Transportation Corridor Agencies. We have little “FasTrak” transponders in our cars, stuck to our windshields, and we pay a toll on the infrequent occasions we use one of these. But with LA County getting its first tollroad, it suddenly made much more sense to abandon my…