Tessory

There's a spot on the bike trail behind our house where the path drops and then swoops back up, and you can see both the short slope and the long climb right in front of you. My younger son gets nervous at the top because the gravel there is slippery, so if he stops to walk up he slides. But if he kept his momentum down the hill, it would carry him three-quarters of the way up the next section...

Growing up, part of my family was into racing, which meant I got direct, specific feedback on how I drove. There were so many trips where my grandma would talk through exactly how I used the accelerator, how much I braked into a corner, how I came out of the exit. It wasn't harsh, it was honest and precise: here's what you did, here's what it cost you, here's what to try instead. I...

There's a gardening process called hardening off. When you've grown seedlings inside and want to move them outside, you don't just put them out and leave them there. You bring them out for an hour, then back in. The next day, a couple of hours. Then half a day, until they can stay outside on their own. In this house right now, the mantra is attitude and effort. One kid is learning to k...

We went for a hike over the weekend and my youngest was not into it. He was done before we left the house. Then the grassland changed to forest, streams appeared, the temperature dropped, the air got damp, and the birds started sounding different. He forgot to complain because things got interesting: a small waterfall, caves built into the rock where people had had fires. He stopped counting how l...

My fridge died a couple weeks ago, in the morning, right as we were getting ready for school. A power surge took out several appliances across the neighborhood. It still had lights, but the control panel was blank except for a row of eights, and neither compressor was kicking on. I spent about 90 minutes with Gemini working through it methodically before landing on the control board being fried, a...

Someone asks you at the soccer field, or school pickup, or a community barbecue, so what do you do? And the answer feels complicated, because you don't want your work to be your entire identity, but it's where you spend most of your time, it's how you pay your mortgage, it's what's turning over in your head at 11pm when you meant to be asleep. For entrepreneurs, your business i...

My five-year-old wanted more iPad time, so I told him if he wanted that, he needed to help move the house forward first. I'd asked him to wipe down his bathroom counters. He wanted to scrub the toilets instead. I wasn't going to say no to that. I got the cleanser in, he got the scrub brush, and I went on to other projects while he worked. When he came to get me, I asked if it was all the w...

It's spring break here, which meant a week spent mostly offline, playing games, going swimming. But a few things at work and at home got me thinking about something that comes before what we do with our time: what we let in. The information that fills the gaps between everything else usually isn't something we specifically chose, we just let it fill, and then the algorithm decides what we...

We had a leaking faucet in our en suite bathroom, and the water was making its way down into the cold room where we keep our freezers and canned goods. The pull thing that switches the water to the shower has a small circular ring inside it, and ours had stretched into an oval, so the seal wasn't sealing anymore and the back pressure was pushing water into the wall and down through the floor....

It’s been a week of "Maintenance Tax." From glitchy game servers to rejected bank deposits and a complete "tech black hole," the messy reality of keeping a household running has taken center stage. When you’re spending all your energy re-syncing your past, how do you find the agency to build your future? In this episode, we explore the finish line mirage - that moment when you’...

Our dryer vent hadn't been sitting snug against the base, which meant more lint getting through than it should. Looking down the spring flaps, I found a large accumulation of debris I couldn't reach with the tools I had in such a narrow opening. I started unscrewing the screws that looked different from the rest, pulled things apart a little, and saw more debris than expected, along with a...

We'd entered a new stage with our youngest where responsible screen use wasn't quite working, so I went into the iPad settings and set up app limits, a hard one-hour cap, plus downtime blocking screens between certain hours. I felt accomplished. Then in the middle of the night he got up, grabbed the iPad, and still played three games. I'd missed the button that ties a passcode to the s...

When I set up my new phone, I skipped notifications on most apps and left email off entirely. About a week in, I realized I hadn't heard from my siblings, who I usually reach through Signal. I'd simply forgotten to log back in. Syncing meant opening my old phone, and I was flooded, email, Reddit, news, all of it arriving at once. I'd thought I didn't have many notifications turned...

My long-term goal for our wall-mounted display was a full digital family dashboard: calendars, per-person tasks, smart home controls, a button to shut off the house lights entirely. I'd started a Linux server over the summer with Home Assistant on it, made some early choices that weren't the right ones, and learned I needed to reinstall the whole thing. So the dashboard I thought I was fin...

We have a bi-level split entryway with a small landing, a tiny closet, and stairs going up to the kitchen or down to the basement, and it's become the natural collection spot for every backpack the moment everyone gets home. I took a picture and asked ChatGPT for ideas on making it look tidy, and as a follow-up mentioned wanting a monitor-sized touchscreen on that wall for a family calendar an...

My son came home from school convinced he was invited to a friend's birthday party the next day, but he'd never gotten a physical invite, and I wasn't sure whether he actually was. I asked ChatGPT to help frame a text to the other mom, something that could confirm the invite without making anything awkward if the guest list had changed. It gave me three versions, and I picked one and a...

The name Tesseros came from way too much introspection and research into names. It was inspired by a mosaic, all the pieces you already have, plus the ones you might still want to gain, and a single piece of a mosaic is called a tesserae, which is where Tesseros comes from. Tessory, this podcast, is the spinoff of that parent company, the forge, the action, the story of actually bringing those pie...