My Experience
I’m PCMag’s senior analyst covering smart home and wearable devices. I’ve been writing about tech professionally for nearly a decade and have been obsessing about it for much longer than that. Prior to joining PCMag, I made educational videos for an electronics store called Abt Electronics in Illinois, and before that I spent eight years covering the smart home market for CNET.
I foster many flavors of nerdom in my personal life. I’m an avid board gamer and video gamer. I love fantasy football, which I view as a combination of role-playing games and sports. Plus, I can talk to you about craft beer for hours and am on a personal quest to have a flight of beer at each microbrewery in my home city of Chicago.
My Areas of Expertise
Smart home technology: smart speakers, smart displays, robot vacuums, beer brewing robots, really any type of helper robot, and more
Wearables: fitness trackers, heart rate monitors, and smartwatches
Video games: action games, consoles, and RPGs
The Technology I Use
I tend to like mixing flavors from various companies. My personal computer is an Apple MacBook Pro. My phone is a Google Pixel 7a. My watch is a Samsung Galaxy. Yes, my watch is old, but I also enjoy seeing how far I can stretch tech into its twilight years. Before the 7a, I was using the Pixel 3a, and I still occasionally break out my original iPad mini.
I spend plenty of time in front of my entertainment center, which features a 55-inch LG OLED TV, a Yamaha soundbar, a Nintendo Switch, and a PS5. (I insisted on getting the PS5 with the disc slot when they were hard to come by and haven’t used the feature in more than a year.) I thought I’d have given into temptation and snagged an Xbox to play Starfield by now, but Baldur’s Gate 3 saved me money by distracting me long enough for the Starfield hype to blow past.
I have two cats and sneeze plenty, so I have a Shark Air Purifier to help me fight back against their dastardly, shedding ways.
I use my aforementioned Pixel 7a for Google Assistant, an iPhone 14 to talk to Siri, and an Amazon Echo Show 5 for Alexa, so I’m not in danger of falling out of touch with any of the big three digital assistants.
