Jake Russo

Student, writer and podcaster

  • Socialization and Customer Service

    This is an excerpt from something I wrote for a sociology class. I liked it and thought I might publish it here.

    Interacting with customers at work has been a major socializing force for me. I got my first job around the time I turned 16 and worked consistently until moving to college. Starbucks was the most demanding of those jobs. Our store was constantly understaffed, and I thought it would be cool to work overtime (“No, I’m not busy at 4:30am; sure, I’ll come in!”). I would sometimes talk to upwards of 40 people per hour in the drive through. This constant loop of communication, where I would have approximately the same conversation with dozens of people in a row, gave me good feedback on what worked and how I could get the best responses. My greeting, after trying (A/B testing?) many variations, eventually solidified to, “Good morning, welcome to our Starbucks; what can I get for ya?”. I still use techniques1 I learned during my time there, even in everyday situations.

    One time, while working as a host at a sushi restaurant on a particularly busy night, a customer who had been waiting to be seated for a few minutes came to the counter, where I was taking an order, and asked if I was going to leave him waiting there much longer. I am not an angry person, but I, in the moment, could imagine a reality in which I told the gentleman exactly where he might take his business if he was so displeased with our service. It took me a second—maybe there was a loading symbol over my head—but I smiled, thanked him for his patience, and said we’d be with him as soon as we could given the volume of patrons. He seemed a little taken aback and walked sheepishly back to his party.

    Something my partner noticed is that I apologize very often for things that aren’t my fault (e.g., “I forgot my water in the kitchen.”). I joked with her about another possible cause of this behavior, but I think the real one is socialization from my time in customer service. The way my coworkers, or at least the ones who seemed effective to me, would field customer complaints was to apologize immediately and (seemingly) sincerely and offer a solution (“Oh, I’m sorry you left it there; let me go get it for you.”). Interestingly, doing this at work rarely felt insincere to me, and it never does in my personal life. I think imitating that has affected my emotional response as well as my verbal one.


    1This is intentionally vague because it includes a wide range of things, from “being patient and understanding” to “getting the FedEx clerk to make a minor exception for me while picking up a package.” Maybe it warrants further explanation in a later post.

  • Winter 2025 Update

    This list is non-exhaustive, and the order is only a little particular.

    • Over the summer, worked as a barista at Starbucks and host at a local sushi restaurant, sometimes 55 hours/week!
    • Moved to college and lucked into some wonderful roommates (who were interested in me partly because of reading this blog!)1
    • Took the photo on the homepage of this site
    • Reconnected with a former (no longer former!) best friend
    • Made my first in-person Apple Store purchase
    • Played Beat Saber for the first time
    • Gave a presentation on credit
    • Got a crash course in dealing with car insurance
    • Read The Other Significant Others, about friendship, and liked it a lot
    • Gave a presentation on the importance of close friends
    • Finally transitioned my writing to this blog
    • Became a steadfast believer in “not wasting any time” on the dishes and throwing them ~straight into the dishwasher, partly thanks to Technology Connections
    • Sent dozens of postcards and letters to a handful of people
    • Found out shaving doesn’t have to be painful (got a Braun S9 Sport from Costco after years of using a safety razor)2
    • Visited several specialty coffee shops
    • Got a projector (XGIMI MoGo 2 Pro) on clearance from Sam’s Club, mostly to watch Impractical Jokers on the wall3
    • Completed an online training that allows me access to my university’s podcast studio
    • Started listening to music more often
    • Went to the post office more often than I care to admit
    • Found out it’s possible to lose track of time and talk for hours, only realizing this once the sun starts to come up; who knew!
    • Started thinking of this quote from Experimental History and decided I might know what it means
      • And yes, love is all of those things. But it’s not only those things. […] That’s why, at a happy wedding, the couple looks like they know a secret that no one else knows, a secret that no one else can know.

    1Which has led me to write off all my spending on the services to run it as 100% worth it

    2I’ve started writing a post about this; it might eventually see the light of day.

    3The thing is actually fantastic and might warrant a mini review.


    I compiled this list by memory and scrolling through my photo library. I will start keeping a rolling list, adding things as they happen, which should make for a more interesting post next season.

  • Why You Should Make Close Friends

    I gave a speech on the value of close friendship to my Technical Presentations class. This was supposed to be a persuasive presentation. It went okay, and the topic is one I think about often. I figured I’d share the video here in case anyone else might find it interesting.

    Notes

    • The speech was produced a few hours before delivery.
    • My movements aren’t very polished.
    • I’ve cut out a personal anecdote (around 1:51).
    • The speech is partly inspired by Neel Nanda’s Intentionally Making Close Friends but, I think, original enough.
      • “Non-standard action” (3:55) is a direct lift.
    • The list of questions (4:08) is mis-cited as being adapted from a New York Times article. More accurately, it is adapted from Neel Nanda’s adaptation of that article.
    • The part at the beginning, about having “no place left to turn” was inspired by a prop in a TWiT set that lives, from time to time, rent-free in my head.
    • I was a little light on information about mental health benefits of close friendships, probably because I figured it was almost intuitive. The presentation could’ve used figures on neurotransmitters.
    • The ending isn’t strong and could’ve been more inspirational—maybe something about how even strangers prefer deep conversation to small talk, or an anecdote about one of my unlikely friendships.
    • I might update this list as I continue to notice things about the presentation.

    Standing invitation to send me a message with your thoughts!

    Transcript

    Have you ever felt sad, lonely, like you have no place left to turn?

    Well, all of us have, and ironically, we’re not alone.

    According to the American Psychological Association, one in ten Americans feels lonely every day, and that number rises to one in three each week.

    So I’m going to make the case to you for making, for why you should make close friends.

    I’m going to propose this as a solution to loneliness.

    And, as kind of a roadmap here, I’m going to go over the definition of close friendship, establish that this sort of friendship is uncommon, go over the benefits of such friendship, and finally, how you can make those friends.

    So how do we define close friendship?

    My favorite definition comes from a blogger who’s written a lot on the subject of friendship.

    His name is Neel Nanda, and this comes from one of his 2021 posts.

    A close friendship is safe, it’s comfortable, it is emotionally close and vulnerable, which I think is one of the number one points there, built on mutual trust.

    And close friendship is uncommon.

    Now, while about one in 12.5 Americans have no close friends, a plurality, so they have five or more.

    So it sounds like we’re in pretty good shape.

    Unfortunately, of the things people report discussing with their close friends, their mental health ranks last, with 31% of females discussing this, and only 15% of men.

    Now, this comes from the Pew Research Center, a survey they did.

    So what are some of the benefits of close friendship?

    Well, one of them, of course, is support during crisis.

    Now, what else do you get from close friendships?

    Is it just like paying an insurance premium?

    You maintain friendships just in case you need them in time of crisis, but it’s just a pain in other ways?

    No.

    In fact, there’s a lot of meaning in the day to day of having close friends.

    I would argue that witnesses give your life meaning, sharing your life with other people, becoming intimately familiar with other people’s lives, and they with yours, is one of the most gratifying and interesting and joyful experiences I’ve had.

    Now, it also improves your mental and physical health.

    The mental health bit is a little more obvious, but the physical health aspects we’ll get to in just a minute, it makes you happier, and it gives you a sense of security.

    Knowing that there are people who are just radically accepting of you gives you a sense of belonging that I think is just unmatched.

    Now, on the topic of physical health, this comes from a PLOS Medicine Metaanalytic Review, a bunch of different studies, 2010.

    People with no friends, poor quality friendships, are twice as likely to die prematurely, a risk factor even greater than the effects of smoking 20 cigarettes per day.

    Now, close friendships also build empathy.

    According to studies of brain activity, the closer two friends become, the more similar their brainwaves become to the same stimulus.

    That means this blue circle expands as you get to know someone better.

    Now, all of this is great, but how do you make close friends?

    Well, I have a few tips for you, be vulnerable.

    It’s hard, and it’s not a standard action, but it is incredibly rewarding.

    Ask deep questions, nice weather, what are your insecurities?

    Now, this comes from a New York Times article called The 36 Questions That Lead to Love, it was published in 2015, and it was meant to give you kind of more of a guideline for romantic relationships, but as psychologist Marissa Franco, PhD, argues, there are fantastic benefits to incorporating some of the intimacy building activities that are traditionally present in romantic relationships into platonic ones as well.

    Now, we’ve talked about being vulnerable, asking questions, what else?

    Listen actively.

    You want to learn more about people, and you want them to realize that you’re paying attention.

    This is very important.

    And don’t be afraid to be weird.

    Chances are, you seem less weird than you expect.

    Now, I hope I’ve inspired you, all of you here, to go out and make a friend.

    This transcription was generated using Aiko on iOS, which is a GUI for OpenAI Whisper.

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  • Transitioning to WordPress!

    WordPress was the CMS I’d use when spinning up cPanel websites on a $30/year Namecheap shared hosting plan in the fifth grade. That is to say I’m somewhat familiar with it.

    For the past few years, this site has run on Hugo, which I covered in a previous post. In fact, I had a second site, running on the “notes.” subdomain, also using Hugo but on a different hosting service. That site was easier to update and ended up being where all of my writing went. That website has merged1 with my “main” one, and all of its content lives here now.

    This WordPress instance is running on EasyWP WPEngine because it’s fast and cheap reliable. They seem to have a strange hobby in suspending it for abuse, but hopefully that stops be fantastic so far.2 The theme is an ever-so-slightly modified version of the basic Twenty-Twenty Five one.

    I have ideas for things to write about, but I’ve learned my lesson about making promises in that department. I’m mostly looking forward to finishing this post so that I can point the domain to this site.


    1My second site is still up at the time of writing, but it’ll disappear soon, and all of its content is already here!

    2EasyWP didn’t work with a custom domain, at least the way I was trying to configure it. Well, it sort of did in that some of the content showed up on the custom domain, but all the site’s references were to pages on the EasyWP subdomain. This is probably just a setting in WordPress, but WPEngine had a Cyber Monday sale and cashback.

  • Hello again!

    Hi! I have been writing a lot for school lately, which made me remember that I actually enjoy doing this sometimes. When it’s marginally enjoyable to write about things about which I have no interest, it must be truly enjoyable to write about things that do interest me. That’s the theory anyway.

    Both this website and my main one are out of date, and I would like to get around to merging them into one. I finally stopped paying $7/month to host a one-episode (two-, if you count the “trailer” one) podcast. I found out that it broke for some reason, so I was quite literally paying for nothing for some period of time. I guess it doesn’t make that much of a difference, since, while it was working, I was paying for practically nothing. Anyway, the podcast is on Acast now, and it took practically no time to transfer.

    I’m still young, and I have no idea how change works. I’m going to college soon and am in my last few months of high school. It’s incredibly boring, and I do a horrible job staying motivated and getting work done. I’m looking forward to being interested in school once college comes around. We’ll see if that (school being interesting—I think the antecedent might’ve been unclear) prospect just keeps receding into the horizon…

    I know that my life will change a lot and that this part is almost over, but I don’t know it yet. I guess I’ll have to realize it sooner or later.

    I was recording some voiceovers (for personal use, nothing particularly interesting) the other day using my podcasting setup, and it reminded me that I like talking and listening to myself talk while editing that audio. I might get around to recording another episode of something.

    Publishing things online is always fun, even though ~no one reads this. I’ll probably think of more random things to type.

  • Cool Things I’ve Read This Week – Week 37, 2023

    • The Razors-and-Blades Myth(s) by Randal C. Picker :: SSRN
      • This one was recommended by Byrne in TheDiff.
      • An interesting “well, actually” story about the origin of the “razors and blades” model
        • Gillette didn’t sell razors at a loss and make up for it with the blades!
        • They actually charged a premium for both their razors and their blades, both during and after the life of their first patents.
        • They invented cheaper, disposable razor blades
      • I shave with a safety razor now, both because I find it easier and because the blades are cheap enough that I don’t have re-use them, and its blades are the thinner ones that Gillette pioneered.
      • Interesting parallels to razor-and-blades lock-in with HP printers — Gillette warned customers against using genuine blades in third-party razors; HP warns about the inverse.
      • The paper probably could’ve been much shorter; 30 pages seemed a little excessive.
    • Charter-Disney Winners and Losers – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
      • Disney caved to Spectrum!
      • A look at the future of video entertainment
      • Ben’s prediction about re-bundling might be coming true.
      • “The Arc of Video — Winner: Consumers” seems like a stereotypical economist’s faith in the system, but it’s true nonetheless.
    • Office of Public Affairs | Justice Department Sues Google for Monopolizing Digital Advertising Technologies | United States Department of Justice
      • Straight from the horse’s mouth, as they say
    • U.S. v. Google: What to Know About the Biggest Antitrust Trial in 20 Years – WSJ
      • I’m biased towards thinking antitrust lawsuits against tech companies are frivolous and annoying.
        • I like many of the big tech companies — many consumers do? — and government hearings have been total jokes.
      • I’ve heard Sherman Antitrust doesn’t work well for tech companies who control demand, not supply.
        • Consumers are free to choose competitors; they don’t because the dominant player is just better.
          • But maybe the dominant players wielded their superior product to effect unfair market conditions where competitors couldn’t compete effectively.
      • Google’s adtech business seems a little shady, and I don’t know enough about it.
      • I’ll keep following this case!
    • A Beginners Guide to Generalized Second-Price Auctions
      • I became really annoyed because I forgot what a second-price auction was when reading about the Google case. This reminded me.
    • The Lindy Effect
      • The effect makes sense intuitively (though might not be applicable in some of the ways in which it seems to be intuitively), and I had been thinking about it sometime during the week or two before I happened upon this link in The Browser.
      • I didn’t understand much of this paper.
        • Most of the math — outside the sliver I remembered from AP Statistics — lost me completely.
        • I circled some things to google.
      • It was fun to read though.
    • How not to be fooled by viral charts – by Noah Smith (noahpinion.blog)
      • I appreciated “not to” as opposed to “to not”.
      • An interesting tour of some stupidly misleading charts, loose heuristics on identifying such charts (though he notes that more concrete rules are difficult to define), gives advice on finding real data (e.g., FRED)
      • Lots of pictures
    • The Trouble with the View from Above | Cato Unbound (cato-unbound.org)
      • I’m impressed with The Browser‘s ability to include things in their newsletters that I’ve thought about lately.
      • The discussion of how governments understand things narrowly and quantifiably, then forcing that view into reality was really cool.
      • I found the writing to be excellent and very engaging.
      • I finally purchased the book!
    • Apple’s iPhone Event; Innovation and Iteration; Pricing, Inflation, and Services – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
      • We’ve reached peak iPhone, at least for the time being.
        • “Boring” Apple keynotes are only boring because the products are so good.
        • Innovation compounds
      • This was probably going to be the year the iPhone switched to USB-C, regardless of the EU’s stupid regulations.
      • The skit about environmental friendliness was really dumb and unfunny.
        • Climate change, to the extent we can or will alleviate it, will be alleviated through technology and innovation.
    • Prologue–Chapter 2 of Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
    • Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson review – arrested development | Biography books | The Guardian
      • I read this the day after receiving and starting the book, just to hear it called an “dull, insight-free doorstop”.
      • “Isaacson comes from the ‘his eyes lit up’ school of cliched writing, the rest of his prose workmanlike bordering on AI.”
        • LOL
          • It could probably be shorter and better written, but I’m hardly 3% through, so what do I know.
          • Maybe clever prose is difficult in a non-fiction piece of this length and scope?

    I may have read some other things this week and forgotten about them. I’m working on being better at including things in this list, but sometimes I fold up the printout, put it in my backpack, and neglect to look through my bag for several days after.

  • Drawing and Commitment

    I drew a few things a couple months ago.

    What types of things?

    I drew two people: a man and a woman, based on a coloring page and the first ‘beginner drawing’ technique I found1 on YouTube.

    I drew a mushroom and some spheres.

    It was actually quite nice: I like to multitask, to feel like I’m completely engaged. I’ve struggled with this, though, because there’s a hard limit (at least for most of us) at one stream2 of language. I’ve tried to surf the internet while listening to a podcast or an audiobook, or even do homework or write while receiving another stream — it doesn’t work! I switch back and forth and have no idea what’s going on with either language stream; it decreases productivity and confuses me.

    Drawing, though, does not stress my ability to process only one stream of language; it uses a different part of the brain!

    Maybe it’s total placebo, but I felt like I was using a region of my brain that I usually hadn’t. And it was satisfying, also, to feel completely engaged while drawing and listening to a podcast.

    So what happened? Why did I stop3 in June? Maybe, by now, I could’ve managed some passable sketching ability.

    This is a flaw of mine, one of which this blog might be evidence: commitment. And not to people; I can stay highly committed to friends, relationships, other things that involve people. For example, I couldn’t stay committed to the gym to save my life, but I can stay committed to a personal trainer; I quit drawing after a week max, but maybe I would stay committed to in-person4 art lessons.

    I don’t know exactly why. There are even activities to which I am, when you zoom out, quite committed: walking, for example. But even with walking, I go through cycles of walking four miles per day to four days per month.

    Maybe it’s a time management thing, and maybe I should structure my time better.

    This post doesn’t have much of a moral, but I imagine this plight is nowhere near unique to me. No one trick will work for everyone, and probably not even in isolation for many people; productivity gurus are con artists, and Atomic Habits is dull.5


    1which consists of copying a coloring page upside-down so that you don’t think as much about the object you’re supposed to be drawing as you do about the lines, etc. I didn’t find this particularly convincing, but I did it anyway.

    2I heard it phrased this way somewhere and now can’t find where.

    3I just remembered I’ve managed to make this into an activity for which my progress is graded in school… because I need more busywork, apparently.

    4I’ve been warned against these.

    5I read it, thought it was dumb, and felt validated when a favorite podcast of mine, If Books Could Kill, came out with an episode on it.

  • Cool Things I’ve Read This Week – Week 36, 2023

    I didn’t read as much this week: I do most of my article reading during school via print-outs1 I bring from home2. It works out because it’s nowhere near as obvious as a book but still gives me back some of the time that’s being absolutely destroyed by whichever class I’m required to attend. Also, we had Monday off for Labor Day, and I have been super tired.

    • Instacart is the Best and Worst Grocery Business Imaginable (thediff.co)
      • I’ve been passively curious about Instacart and was excited when I saw the email from TheDiff.
        • I’ve never used it, but I think it’s cool to understand a little more about the business.
      • Byrne’s writing — at least for me — is tough to read the first time you pick it up. I’ve been reading him since early this year, though, and I’m finally able to be confident in my ability to follow his thoughts. He posts consistently, and those posts are consistently super interesting.
        • Sidenote to the sidenote — I once pasted an article of his into a writing help tool, and it said the sentences were likely too complex for a general audience.
          • This helped my ego. 😉
    • Hey tech folks: Vivek Ramaswamy is not the one (noahpinion.blog)
      • I already was not a fan of Ramaswamey because most of what I’ve heard him say is a little crazy, and I’m not a fan of right-wing ideas generally, but this was a good takedown of just a few of his incoherent ideas.
      • His speech is also annoying; Chris Christie was right.
        • Also, it looks like YouTube is now tracking individual shares with a new “si” parameter. This must be pretty new because I’ve never seen it before, and I didn’t see much mention of it after some quick (admittedly imprecise) googling.
    • The Rise and Fall of ESPN’s Leverage – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
      • I’ve never watched sports, and have only tuned into ESPN a handful of times — most of which were five–seven years ago when I was testing connecting my TV directly to the coax outlet in the wall because my cable provider at the time didn’t encrypt the channels or require a set-top box — but I enjoyed this article and have found Ben’s continuing coverage of the collapse of ESPN on Sharp Tech and in his updates quite interesting.
      • The quotes from Those Guys Have All the Fun worked well.
    • The prologue to Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller
      • I finish very few of the books I start, which is something I’m working on. That said, I don’t know if I’ll finish this book — one difficulty is that I have too many books, both printed and digital, and I subscribe to Kindle Unlimited — but I enjoyed the discussion of life as being a fight against entropy, disorder.
      • The opening lines were captivating: > “Picture the person you love most […] eating cereal. […] Entropy will get them.”
    • Our climate change debates are out of date – by Noah Smith (noahpinion.blog)
      • My current biology teacher is more hopeless about climate change than I’d like, and this was a nice, interesting update to my (limited!) knowledge on climate change.
      • I didn’t know how cheap solar and wind were getting!
    • Amazon and Shopify, Shopify and Its Merchants, The Payments Question – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
      • The AWS model for Amazon distribution!
        • Ben has covered this on Sharp Tech.
        • One of the many differences between the two, though, is that AWS is not branded; Buy with Prime is.
      • This was a good update, but it left me curious about how exactly Amazon Pay is integrated with Shopify Checkout such that Shopify processes the payments.
        • Maybe this was a bit of a miscommunication because the press release seems to imply that Amazon Pay is/will be a payment option but not a required one for Buy with Prime.
      • I enjoyed the nuances about e.g., how Amazon might have wanted the deal with Shopify more than Shopify did.
    • Credit card debt collection (bitsaboutmoney.com)
      • I read this about a month ago when it came out, but it was featured in The Browser today, which, to me, was a validation both of the article — reading this very blog a few years ago sparked my (casual) interest in finance and economics! — and of The Browser, the editors of which consistently find excellent reads.

    1four pages per sheet, double sided, flipped on the long edge!

    2or, sometimes, when I’m desperate, print in the school library for $0.10/page


    I wrote many of the entries in this post at once, but the goal is to write my reactions soon after I read an article — which is something I often do anyway, just on the paper on which I’ve printed the piece.


    Week numbers! What’s the Current Week Number? (epochconverter.com)

  • Summer 2023 Update

    I’ve fallen victim to a corollary of Parkinson’s Law. Indeed, as work expands to fill the time it’s been allotted, use of that time becomes less efficient. This has described much of my summer: I have accomplished very few of the things I set aside for “when I have more time”. I, embarrassingly, feel as though I haven’t done much at all. While some of that might be due to quirks in memory, I certainly haven’t been terribly productive. In some sense, that’s okay. There’s a value in having almost more time than you know what to do with — and that’s not a luxury I’ll have for much longer.

    With just over a week to go before my break is over, I’m experiencing the inevitably familiar emotions of school: frustration, boredom, a shortness of time. It’s difficult for me to say outright that I dislike school, and it’s hardly a brave or original thing to say. There are definitely things I like and things I don’t — it’s mostly a waste of time, but that’s the price to pay for the benefits, which, in my judgement, are the handful of life-changing teachers and the opportunity to socialize. I’m planning a “Retrospective on High School” post1 at the end of the year, so I’ll keep it brief here.

    I’d say I have a couple goals for this school year: one being to finish diploma requirements (e.g., essay, CAS, other busywork), and another being to socialize more with friends new and old. People say to “take risks”, whatever that means. I guess it’s because general advice is so difficult to give that we end up with lines — ambiguities — like these. I think, though, it’d be fair to say I haven’t taken many.

    This summer, I

    • made friends and spent more time with those I already had.
      • Introvert vs extrovert sometimes seems like a false binary. But I suppose I’m clearly an introvert.
    • managed to get fired from a second job after two days of work.
      • It was, ostensibly, without cause, and the restaurant is exceptionally poorly managed, (e.g., they were well acquainted with the health department as well as the federal government, among others) so maybe it’s for the best.
    • pulled money out of thin air by cancelling a bunch of subscriptions I wasn’t using nearly enough, one of those being GeForce Now (which I’ve mentioned before).
      • Interestingly, my least used subscriptions were the most expensive — I cancelled multiple for $20/month each.
      • I downgraded my plan on the subscription service that hosts this site because I wasn’t using a single one of the features of the Premium plan.
    • recycled my Halo products. (This one is clearly out of place, but the products were the subject of my most recent post here.)
    • didn’t accomplish much of anything I set out to at the beginning.

    I often cite to myself summer breaks in between years of school as some of the more transformative times. It seems these breaks — at least for me — force a sort of introspection and living with oneself. It’s something that sometimes threatens to drive me crazy.

    Maybe, though, I’m misattributing changes that happen during the rest of the year, while school is in session, to the almost artificial breaks between them: if some internal change happened at at some point during the year, I might cite the break separating that year from the previous, rather than the year itself.

    Anyway, maybe I’ll finally attend a sportsball2 game this year.

    I find this might actually be useful because I find that I blank completely when people ask me what I did over the summer. Maybe I could pull out this webpage. 😉


    1We’ll see whether or not that actually happens.

    2I’m not sure how widespread this term is, so here’s the dictionary.


    This is quite incomplete, but it represents what I could remember when I wrote it.

    I’ve backdated this post by about a month and a half because that’s when I wrote most of it, and it’ll be more accurate as of then.

  • A Marginal Annoyance Improvement: Kensington VeriMark Desktop Fingerprint Key

    In January, I felt the sudden urge to buy a fingerprint sensor. I have a habit of locking my desktop each time I get up, and retyping my password ten times daily was getting annoying. More than that, though, leaving the computer unattended for more than ten minutes locks the password manager. That’s probably drop-down menu away from being fixed, but a fingerprint sensor seemed cool.

    Naturally, my purchase research began with an Amazon search for “fingerprint reader”. Among the seemingly random off-brands was one I recognized: Kensington. They make the Kensington lock (which I’ve found intriguing for years since I started noticing it and its logo on things)! In addition to reading fingerprints, it’s also a FIDO key, which is nice (more on that later).

    Reviews on Amazon were fine, but they were hard to find on YouTube, Reddit, or separate sites. Lazy Tech TV’s video overview was helpful, though, and we have the same microphone (including the finish)!

    The setup was plug-and-play on Windows 11. You, of course, have to navigate to Windows Hello in settings, and setup your fingerprint.

    I don’t need it — I could take the extra few seconds to type in my password (or PIN?) each time. But between not having to do that, and using Hello to bypass my password manager’s re-authentication, it makes using the computer significantly more enjoyable. The logo glows white when the computer prompts for a scan, and quickly flashes red for misreads or unmatched prints. Also, my desktop is set to sleep the display pretty rapidly when it’s locked, and just tapping on the fingerprint sensor to wake it up, bypassing the login screen, is satisfying.

    The sensor almost always works, and quickly — in contrast to my laptop, whose sensor is quite finicky. The only real problem I’ve experienced is having to un- and re-plug the sensor, but very rarely; this could be a machine- or configuration-specific problem.

    I stocked up on YubiKeys late last year (Cloudflare ran an excellent promotion), but a location-fixed one is nice to have. It works on most sites that accept FIDO keys (I had problems with sites that require a PIN when using the key), and requires — like all(?) FIDO2-compliant devices — you touch it when signing in (though it checks touch only, not fingerprint).

    Small quality of life improvements in everyday tedium are nice, and this is an example of just such an improvement.


    I haven’t been writing lately. I would use exam season as an excuse, but that hasn’t had much of an impact on my free time. I have some ideas! More soon… maybe. 🙂