About

It’s impossible for a writer to describe their professional experience without them feeling like a faded Southern belle in a Tennessee Williams play. (“…And at my MacHack Conference keynote in 2001, I had so many gentle-nerd callers! Why, the hotel manager of the Holiday Inn Fairlane even had to borrow chairs from the ballroom next door!”)

But here I go. Most recent stuff first, with multiple overlaps throughout:

• Podcasts! Co-host of MacBreak Weekly for the This Week In Tech network (over 1000 episodes!), co-host of the weekly Google news podcast Material for Relay (over 500 episodes!), and guest spots on loads more
• Six or seven years as the regular tech news contributor for Boston Public Radio (on GBH…Boston NPR)
• Twenty or so years as tech columnist for The Chicago Sun-Times
• Monthly tech contributor to The CBS Early Show (network) for about a year
• Back-page magazine columnist for Macworld and MacUser (for…jeez…something like twenty years, was it?)
• Author of about a dozen books, including a dictionary for Random House and another one that was the #1 book on all of Amazon. Only for like a microsecond, and it was back when Amazon was big but not yet untouchable by the laws of humankind or the hands of the minor gods. But still!

And I’ve been keynoting and speaking and conducting onstage interviews at conferences sort of forever, on (counting…) four continents.

I try to run the cleanest house possible. I haven’t added anything that tracks, fingerprints, follows, identifies, hassles, or cookie-fies the site’s visitors—or anything else that would make them feel like a bunch of dopes for trusting me.

If you sign up for a membership, I’ll know who you are. But I’ll only use your email for business directly related to your relationship with me as a subscriber/member. I won’t share it with anybody else. Your payments are processed by Stripe. I have zero access to any of the information you provide to Stripe (including your credit card info, of course).

This site runs on Ghost, and is hosted by Ghost.io. I chose it in part because it’s a privacy-forward platform that doesn’t use tracking cookies and hosts the site on secure, GDPR-compliant servers. Ghost provides me with data about the traffic to my site, but its scope is limited to “help me learn about what my overall readership likes.” You can read more about it here: https://ghost.org/help/native-analytics/

My site’s traffic runs through Cloudflare. Cloudflare keeps my site up and safe, and protects it from various kinds of malicious bots that I don’t want to have to deal with (again). Cloudflare can see your IP address and basic info about your browser. However, I never see that data, and Cloudflare uses it only for security and performance purposes. They don’t sell it to anybody. You can read Cloudflare’s privacy policies here: https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/

The site uses Amazon Affiliates links (rarely, and only on products that are not in any way tech-related, such as digital music). Here’s some informative and accurate boilerplate:

"When you click on an Amazon affiliate link on this site, a 'cookie' is placed on your browser for 24 hours to track the referral for commission purposes. This process is automated and does not provide this site with any of your personal identification, financial information, or specific purchase history. Amazon may use the data from these clicks to personalize your experience on their own platform."

I earn Amazon store credits from qualifying purchases made through those Amazon Associates links. Each and every one of those links is clearly labeled.

Ghost’s editor makes it easy for me to embed content from external services, like YouTube. Some of these embeds (like YouTube) allow the service to drop a cookie as soon as the page is loaded. The basic idea is that the service wants to collect the same data they would have gotten from you if you accessed the service’s content on their own site or app. At some point in the future, I might work out a way to get around that. At this moment, however, I’m very, very tired.

I do not use any kind of AI to help me create any kind of written content, in any way, shape or form.

I regard every step of the writing process as essential and irreplaceable. Even if LLMs were to become so adept that they can produce longform text that's better than mediocre—and I'm not convinced that they ever will—I think my experiences, my point of view, and random misfirings of my synapses are valuable.

Plus, although I'd never admit this while I'm actually doing it: writing is way too much fun to leave it to a bot.

Therefore, this ban is comprehensive. It includes, but isn’t limited to:

• Brainstorming ideas for new posts
• Outlines for new posts
• Generating first drafts (GOD no)
• Rewrites

I do use AI for help with parts of the writing process that I consider to be non-creative. These include:

• A basic proofreading prompt that scans my final draft for typos, grammatical errors, run-on sentences, and other purely technical issues. The prompt presents me with a table of the issues it found. Then I implement or reject its suggestions one by one, by hand. The chatbot never touches the document.
• Broad types of research. I don’t get my facts from Gemini. When I need to learn about something new, it helps me find reputable resources for the information I need.
• Managing and navigating the information in reference materials. Even here, I don’t trust Gemini to give me correct facts. I use it (for example) to identify the sections in a super-long PDF that I should read first and study closely, based on what I’m trying to learn from it.

I generally don’t use AI to create any images or videos on this site. I’d rather not have an image at all if the only way to get it is through generative AI. When an exception to this pops up, it'll be clearly labeled as generative AI.

Finally, chatbots (almost entirely Gemini) helped me build the JavaScript code that runs this site and the CSS style sheets that make it look nice.

The readers are the only people I'm trying to please here. The means by which I try to please them is by writing good stuff, regularly. It is my hope that this will set into motion a mysterious chain of events that ultimately leads to many of them supporting the site through memberships.

That, honestly, is all I got by way of a path to profitability. There's no sentence in my business plan that starts with "If I manage to build a large enough audience, then I can exploit that fact by…"

You will all be relieved and pleased to know that I am choosing the moral high ground. I plan to exploit you directly. That is, via your willing (and I hope to earn the adjective "eager") participation.

I'm going to list some rules by which I choose to operate. Despite the jocular title of this section, I'm not suggesting that anybody in my line of work who doesn't follow these same guidelines is some kind of con artist. I respect a lot of fellow tech commentators who don't. I just choose to run my shop this way.

I don’t accept money, goods, or services in exchange for writing a post about a thing. If I choose to write about something, it’s only because I find it interesting—often for reasons that are incomprehensible even to me.

When hardware, software, or services are loaned for the purpose of commentary or review, I note that in the post (specifying whether it was offered to me or solicited by me), so you’re aware that I didn’t just go out and buy it. These transactions occur with the explicit understanding that the provider will have absolutely no influence over, or advance knowledge of, the contents of what I write. Nor are they assured that I’ll even write about it at all. Sometimes I think “This looks interesting” and then after spending a week with it I conclude “No, it isn’t.”

Hardware of non-trivial value (let's call it “greater than the price of a grilled chicken club sandwich” or thereabouts) remains the property of the maker and is returned after the review is complete.

Software and services provided to me gratis for purpose of review must be properly paid for if I continue to use them after the review is complete.

I don’t use affiliate links on this site, with a single and specific exception. If I’m mentioning a movie or a piece of music or a groundhog hand puppet—something 100% divorced from my authority, expertise, and integrity as a tech journalist—sure, I’ll put an Amazon Associates shopping link in there. It’s nice to get a surprise ten or twenty bucks in Amazon store credits at the end of the month (when I meet the minimum threshold). I tend to spend it on goofy stuff, such as, yeah: a groundhog hand puppet (Amazon affiliate link).

All Amazon affiliate links are explicitly and clearly labeled. Like that one.

Most importantly: Amazon links to anything tech-related, even tangentially, get a plain, non-affiliate link. For example:

• “Hey, this little folding stool (Amazon affiliate link) is really handy to have around the kitchen” gets an Amazon affiliate link.
• “Hey, this little folding stool raises my laptop to perfect ‘standing desk’ height and I can stow it away in the gap between my desk and my filing cabinet when I'm not using it” does not get an Amazon affiliate link.

I suppose I could have just said “I know that ethics are important; I promise that my heart is in the right place,” instead of making that huge, self-aggrandizing stump speech.

Absolutely yes! I have always been upfront about this. I’m willing to sell out myself and my readers for any sum of money so great that I’d never need to work another day in my entire life. Anything under that dollar figure, and it really seems like it’s a lot less hassle to just stay on the side of the angels.

But good lord, if I'm offered a $10,000,000 payday for positive coverage of something that I know to be half-baked and pointless (but safe for use), I'm taking the money. If I didn't, my immigrant ancestors—who once scratched out a living herding goats—would visit me in my sleep and have some very ugly words for me.

This site runs on the Ghost content management system, and is hosted by Ghost.io.

Site design is by me.

Its theme/template is based on Ghost’s stock “Casper” theme. I forked it into “Ihnatko-Ghost” through a heroic quantity of custom CSS and JavaScript co-written (to say the least) by Google Gemini.

Headline text is Domine. Body text is Source Serif 4.