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I never did a ton of comparison shopping on food items because I always presumed that in an efficient market food prices would generally land within a couple dollars of each other. You could save some money, but even over a year you were not going to move the needle a ton. Rising prices at Wegmans made me rethink this and I now am eating my shoe.

• Why Ruby has Symbols was a helpful explanation of this often used but sometimes mysterious Ruby feature.
• Bill McKibbon did a great job of outlining what has to happen to win the fight against climate change in the New Yorker. We’re going to need a lot of electricians.
• Justin Gillis and Tyler Norris explain why interconnect approvals are blocking large solar projects.
• WIRED explains Flipper Zero which is a fun device for reading and reproducing wireless signals from a variety of things you might own.
• If your new years resolution is to improve the brain, you should know that Dr. Kawashima of Nintendo’s Big Brain Academy series turned down his royalties. The science behind brain games remains unsettled, but for the current sale price you can at least have fun with it if you own a Nintendo.
• 123 DevTools tips for working with the DevTools in your browser.
• Scientists analyzed ancient Roman concrete to figure out how it self-heals.

In 2015 I traveled with Lon Seidman to explore CES and record dispatches from the floor. He’s been visiting nearly every year since, and his dispatches remain one of the closest things to being there. He likes to find smaller companies and items missed by mainstream outfits like The Verge and CNET, so it’s worth a watch if you want to see things that are cool but not part of the marketing hype machines that fuel the larger outfits. He has a playlist of his dispatches on YouTube.

I am a big fan of Apple’s AirTags for keeping track of items like luggage and my backpack or keys. However I find it odd as a glasses user that almost no companies sell a glasses case with an AirTag holder. The single one I found is on Etsy and it is expensive but makes a great gift idea.

In December the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (my previous employer) released a study on the impact of food delivery apps like DoorDash. Using publicly available data they showed how rapid growth of food deliveries is destroying our environment and clogging our streets with traffic.