This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

The world's got plenty of cowboys, but it's short on dancers.

This is the award-winning Better Offline, and I'm your host, Ed Zittron.

Better Online. That's right, you're listening to this week's monologue.

And you may wonder why I'm saying award winning, but that's because we won the

goddamn Webby for best episode in the business category.

We're winners, all of us, you, me, every listener.

You all did this.

Thank you so much.

And before I get started any further,

as lots of you have been asking about it, we're finally selling better offline merchandise. We've got shirts, hoodies, onesies, glasses, tumblers and mugs, and until May 22nd, we're selling a limited edition hat. It's all really good stuff. The links are in the episode notes. Buy them now. Anyway, the monologue.

I've realized that over time I've skewed pretty negatively about tech, and as I've said before, it's because I'm a broken-hearted romantic. Tech has made me who I am, enabling me a man with a coordinational disability, dyspraxia, if you're curious, severe ADHD, and a good amount of social anxiety in the past, well, it allowed me to thrive. Without the internet and the associated platforms I've used, I would have never had a good life. And if that sounds dramatic, you should see my hand rang, or hear how awkward I was as a child, or see how I tie my shoelaces. Anyway, so today I want to talk about some of the things I love, why I love them and why you might love them too, because it's important for you to see that I'm pissed off because I know that tech can be cool.

It can be so much better. Now, while some of you might see this as shilling or fanboying, I think it's important

that anyone covering tech actually likes it, find something exciting about it and wants it to be

better beyond the bullshit horse trading or sports fandom style stuff.

And this episode will also run down my general daily carries.

I optimize for convenience and as little thought as possible because I'm a huge baby and I need

everything to be easy.

I do not have any financial relationships with any of these companies that have in some

cases given them a great deal of my own money.

Unless I specify otherwise, everything I've mentioned or linked to something I've bought with my own money, far in advance of recording this. So, at my desk, I use this insufferable keyboard, a split keyboard called the Moonlander ZSA, and it lets me type and feel like I'm plugged into the mainframe. You've got your two hands separate. It's good for the wrist because you're not moving them around. And I've got an Apple Magic trackpad, along with a giant 49-inch Samsung OLED. It's a G9 connected to this thing called a Scrono dock where I just slide my MacBook Pro 16 inch in. Your mileage may vary, but I really like it when I travel between New York and Vegas to just be able to slot the thing in and have the same setup. It works. It works really well. And like I said, I'm a huge baby, so if it didn't, I'd be complaining endlessly. Now, when I'm out and about, I really like what companies like Anchor have been doing with gallium nitride, GAN for short, and their charges and batteries. Gan lets you put way more power in the much smaller profile, meaning that you can now get charges that are dramatically smaller that can fast charge your iPhone or your iPad, or even your MacBook Pro. The reason I like Anchor stuff is because it works and it can take a beating, and their batteries tend to come with a cable built in, which I love because I hate having to have cables in my pocket. If you would cost me on the street, I probably have one of their fast-charging USB batteries in my pocket,

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