Technology moves fast, and new devices come out all the time, so getting a new laptop often involves digging through a wealth of reviews for everything on the shelf. But some guidelines for laptop shopping never go out of date.

I’ve been working in Information Technology for twenty years, and much of my job is recommending purchases and assisting people who are using laptops and desktops. These are the rules I go by, based on all the real-world feedback I’ve received from people who are using computers for their daily work.

1. The more you’re going to use it, the more…

“Are you willing, tonight, to condemn white supremacists, and militia groups, and to say that they need to stand down, and not add to the violence that we’ve seen in these cities, as we saw in Kenosha, and as we’ve seen in Portland?”
“Sure, I’m willing to do that.”
“Then do it.”

“White supremacy, and any other ideology that believes one race of human beings is better than another, or that one race is corrupted or inherently lesser, is an abomination before God, an abomination before the United States of America, and an insult to everything this great nation has…

At some point during your career, you’ll almost certainly listen to a demoralized coworker complain about their job. They’ll lament the extra effort they put in, the lack of recognition from the higher-ups, and how pointless and inefficient the policies are. When this happens, I hope you respond by validating their feelings, and being empathetic and supportive. And then I hope you give them one single piece of advice:

Stop caring about your job.

Which isn’t to say “stop caring about your work.” You should care about the work that you do. You should take pride in doing good work…

Gerrymandering is simultaneously one of the most maligned and most abused tactics in US government. It allows parties to secure power. It often suppresses minority influence. It frustrates voters who see their towns sliced up with surgical precision, diluting their vote and forcing their preferred candidate into an uphill battle. Everyone hates it. So why can’t we seem to fix it?

The problem is that any set of rules can be manipulated, and the people who win or lose by those rules have plenty of incentive to bend them to their benefit. As much as we may hate gerrymandering, we…

An excerpt from “The Interglactic Guide to Planetary Religions,”:

In most respects, the religions of Sol-3 are altogether typical. Most are deity-based, and among them we see common archetypes, such as sky gods, divine prophets, and elemental spirits. But the planet deserves special attention for one particular religion which, in addition to being highly unusual, is also by far the planet’s most successful. I’m speaking, of course, about the great mouse god, Mickey.

The dominance of the mouse religion on Sol-3 is truly incredible. The centralized church commands a vast wealth. It has large religious sites across the planet, where…

In 1999, the movie Office Space immortalized one of the most common frustrations in all of consumer technology with one simple line: “Why does it say there is a paper jam when there is no paper jam?” It’s a moment that resonates because we’ve all been there; the printer reports a paper jam, you check it and find no paper jam, and then it reports a paper jam again. It’s baffling and annoying. But in my years working in IT, I’ve found that this issue usually has a simple cause, and an easy solution that takes seconds to perform.

Now…

Building on the failures of Google Talk, Google Huddle, Google Spaces, Google Hangouts, Hangouts Meet, Hangouts Chat, Google Allo, Google Duo, Android Messages, Google Wave, and the chat-thingy that only works inside of Google Docs, the search giant announced today that they are simplifying their messaging strategy by creating a unique chat service for each person in life.

“We’re excited by the complete lack of progress we’ve made by creating our existing bizarre, weirdly-unfocused collection of services that kinda do the same thing, but not really, over the last few years,” the company said in a post on its official…

The wild success of the Nintendo Switch seems like it came out of nowhere. Its predecessor, the Wii U, was a clear stumble, suggesting that Nintendo was on a decline, and that the success of the Nintendo Wii had been a fluke. The Wii U looked to be the last gasp of a company that had lost touch with the modern audience — a desperate attempt to throw gas on the fire with another controller gimmick.

When the Switch was announced, it seemed like another Wii U-style flop waiting to happen. Once again Nintendo was releasing a console with motion…