is a blog about design, technology and culture written by Khoi Vinh, and has been more or less continuously published since December 2000 in New York City. Khoi is currently Principal Designer at Adobe. Previously, Khoi was co-founder and CEO of Mixel (acquired in 2013), Design Director of The New York Times Online, and co-founder of the design studio Behavior, LLC. He is the author of “How They Got There: Interviews with Digital Designers About Their Careers”and “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design,” and was named one of Fast Company’s “fifty most influential designers in America.” Khoi lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
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I had more or less given up on the idea that I was ever going to find a 
If you’re a fan of Kelly Clarkson, Justin Timberlake and/or Coldplay, and you want to download their songs to your Windows computer, then you have my sympathies. Without signing on to one of the competing 
The premium prices that Apple Computer charges for its hardware are hard enough to justify when it comes time to lay down the big cash for a new desktop or laptop, but it gets doubly hard to swallow when shopping around for commodity peripherals. Granted, wireless networking — Wi-Fi, if you prefer — can’t yet be said to be so ubiquitous that it can be classified as a commodity, but while shopping around for 802.11g wireless base stations, it seems hardly very far off. For literally days, I’ve been trying to decide between buying one of the more sensibly priced offerings, like the 
My cold’s worse today than it was 
My 
In just a few days of having a trial membership to 
My iPod has instilled in me a disturbing insatiability for more music, more often. Where once I was satisfied with a new CD or two each month, I now find myself on an endless trawl for MP3s to add to my hard disk. It’s a sickness; I have more music now than I could possibly have time to enjoy — my iTunes library alone is 8.5 GB, and I have stacks of 
I have a soft spot for utility software — especially for the Macintosh — because the authors, engineers and publishers who work in this niche almost always seem to be real fans of the computing experience. The very nature of utility software — those little add-ons and enhancements that subtly or significantly alter the behavior of the operating system — is one of tweaking, of altering the way of things in a particular, sometimes obscure way so that the universe seems just a tad bit more in order… and it’s usually the most devoted computer geeks who will tweak.