Posts by Allen Cheung
The Smart Home Sweet Spot
A couple years back, I was checking out the initial hardware products from a nascent startup called Wyze. Compared to other smart home manufacturers, Wyze’s unique business model is to sell reasonably sturdy hardware at close-to-manufacturing costs, and invest…
User Experience as a Tool
Is there a moral dimension in designing user experiences? I came across this article by a software creative consultant, someone who has seen their discipline of user interface and experience design stand up as a force for good in the…
The Asymmetry of Creation
It takes me, on average, about an hour to write a minute’s worth of blog prose. That is, as most posts here take only 3–4 minutes to read, they correspondingly take about 3–4 hours to write and…
Productivity in an Age of Working From Home
How is your work counted? I mean, literally? In the United States anyway, full-time work[1] has been traditionally split between exempt and non-exempt employment. The exemption here is referring to overtime pay; that is, whether an employee is eligible…
Review: Uncanny Valley
I first figured that Uncanny Valley , from its back-of-the-book description, is just another tech industry exposé. As a 20-year resident of this area, I'm not exactly its intended audience, and so the shock value of reading about our…
The Theater in Home Theater
I can count, on one hand, the number of times that we've ventured to an actual movie theater post-kids. The disinterest is actually a confluence of a number of factors: trouble finding a few hours of uninterrupted, child-free…
