Meet CYPHER_WATCH — the NFT wearable aspiring to be as weird and wonderful as the blockchain universe it lives in — Every so often, I order little things from random corners of the Internet, not because I need them right then and there, but because I have a certain feeling that, one day, I might build something with them. I don’t remember how I first came across Travis Lin’s DSTIKE. They…

How a few lines of code turned my Trump bot into a Musk bot — Four long years ago, I introduced a project to ridicule and exploit our ex-president’s irresponsible use of social media. [Trump] really likes to use Twitter. He uses it to express strong opinions about all sorts of things. Occasionally, those opinions are targeted at publicly traded companies. …

That time I put a Raspberry Pi inside an Apple iSight because nobody stopped me — It’s a pandemic outside, many of us are working from home, and I found myself buying a webcam for the first time since the last century. I was not the only one. The webcams out there today, they do the job. You just plug them in and get a pretty…

A short apology and a longer explanation — Look, I may have accidentally summoned some demons from the pixel art underworld. I don’t know what is happening to these little creatures, but it sure doesn’t look good. They appear to be melting and turning into other objects. I’m really quite sorry about all this, but it happened and…

Sometimes no user interface is the best user interface — There’s something special about the layout of a print-edition newspaper. A news website has infinite vertical scrolling space, but a printed front page is fixed to the same size every day. This constraint creates a very particular aesthetic and — if done well — a sense of typographic balance. I…

Why I created Accent, the smart picture frame with a pop of color and no cables — Screens live a double life. They serve us dense information in bright colors, only to transform back into black mirrors. We have gotten used to it, but it doesn’t have to be this way. As more and more connected devices arrive in our homes, it’s a good time to remember…

New prototypes from the living room lab — A while ago I made a smart mirror for my bathroom. Maybe you’ve seen it. It started with a particular image in my mind. I wanted to build a piece of technology for the home that feels new and futuristic, yet simple and clean. The mirror blends in seamlessly with…

And it’s open source so you can help make it better — Like many who call the United States their home, I have been worried and confused by the start to Donald Trump’s presidency. It’s hard to know how to react to the misdirected anger, the blatant racism, and the “alternative facts”, which are increasingly threatening our civil liberties and our planet…

When I couldn’t buy a smart mirror and made one instead — Sometime late last year I realized that I wanted my ordinary bathroom mirror to be more like the future we were promised in the movies. There doesn’t seem to be anyone selling the product I was looking for. The individual parts, however, were fairly easy to get. A number of…