What's Next? - A Newsletter by Will Smith

What's Next? - A Newsletter by Will Smith

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Kindle DRM Deadline is Approaching!

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Sorry for the last-minute, sky-is-falling post today, but I just learned what Amazon was up to this weekend and wanted to get the word out before it’s too late.
If you’ve bought eBooks for the Amazon Kindle family of devices or apps, you should know that Amazon is disabling a key feature that makes it easy to strip the DRM from those books. On the 26th, they’re going to turn off manual…

Just Say No To (Most) Notifications

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You know the feeling, you’re getting a lot done and feeling really productive and then your phone makes that little beep-boop-buzz sound that says “Hey you! Pay attention to me!” So you stop what you were doing and pick up your phone to see what your favorite screen decided was so important that it had to interrupt you.

“We’re celebrating February 21st with 21% off at Wingstop if you order in the…

I'm Declaring Email Bankruptcy

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I’ve known that email is broken for a long time, but I was hoping, when I started researching this week’s newsletter, that I’d find some piece of software that would just fix my email problems—a magic bullet of an email client, setup to handle multiple email addresses seamlessly, while keeping me from missing important messages from my contacts, all without requiring a bunch of tedious daily maintenance. If AI is worth anything…

The Steam Deck Gets a Lot of Stuff Right

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I’m always looking for both big and small ways that you can recapture your computers. One of the main reasons I love the Steam Deck is that it cuts almost all of the BS out of running a gaming computer.

(For folks who don’t know, Steam is the largest online store for PC games. It’s owned by a private company, Valve Software. They occasionally make their own games, but they also take…

Unfucking Windows For Fun and Profit

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There was a time, not that long ago, when you’d buy a new computer and the first thing you did with it was fire something up to see how fast it was, instead of clicking “No thanks” on a bazillion offers for cloud storage and anti-virus and other subscriptions you probably don’t need.
Setting up a new PC (or Mac) these days really makes me miss the days when Windows was a…

Dark Patterns, Cognitive Load, and Your Computer

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I have to start today by apologizing. In last week’s newsletter, I dropped some inside baseball jargon without adequately explaining it. So today, I’m going to talk about dark patterns, cognitive load, and why these things matter in the modern context of phones and computers.

Cognitive load is an idea that came out of educational research in the 80s and it’s applied to a great deal of modern game and user interface…

Today's Computers Are Broken, Let's Figure Out What's Next

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I’m sitting here in January, looking at this year’s haul from CES and it’s the same parade of new products adorned with the same adjectives I’ve seen for the last 20 years—faster, bigger, smaller, thinner, lighter, shinier, smarter, better. The numbers always get better and the bars always get bigger, but nothing I’ve seen out of CES is going to solve the actual problem we’re all facing: time. 

The modern computer…