The Curious Engineer

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Craig Mod

craigmod.com

The homepage of author and photographer Craig Mod — long walks across Japan, pizza toast, books, photography, literature, and more.

Essays / personalTravelGeneral

’00’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
122 from 7 May 1998 to 21 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (35 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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https://craigmod.com/index.xml

2026 31

  1. [RODEN] Digger Is Good, Notebooks, Please Be Weirder
  2. [RIDGELINE] A Notebook Fit for a Walk
  3. [RIDGELINE] Walking and Not Walking a Castle in Italy
  4. [RIDGELINE] Walking Norway's Gudbrandsdalsleden Pilgrimage
  5. [RIDGELINE] Walking with Annie
  6. [RODEN] Writing in 2026, Walking Europe
  7. [RIDGELINE] A Few London Strolls
  8. [RIDGELINE] Walking The Length of Manhattan
  9. [RODEN] Blood Robots For You and You and You
  10. [ESSAYS] A Swarm of Blood Robots
  11. [RODEN] Oooohhh Summer, How Much Risk Is a Useful Amount of Risk?
  12. [RIDGELINE] Kazunori Hamana in Apartamento
  13. [RODEN] Go Knicks, A Better Goodreads, 'Cheap' Killer Films
  14. [RIDGELINE] Walking New York POPS
  15. [RIDGELINE] Speedwalking the Met
  16. [RIDGELINE] Walking the Brooklyn Bridge
  17. [RIDGELINE] The Inland Sea is Complicated
  18. [RODEN] NYC, Asheville TBOT Event
  19. [RODEN] New Japan, NYC, Soderbergh Bonanza, Too Much Movement
  20. [ESSAYS] MacBook Neo and How the iPad Could Be
  21. [RIDGELINE] Walk and Talk — The Portuguese Coastal Camino
  22. [RIDGELINE] A Return to Nagasaki
  23. [RODEN] Meditation, Language, and LLMs
  24. [ESSAYS] Software Bonkers
  25. [RIDGELINE] The Shops Atop the Canal in Toyohashi
  26. [RIDGELINE] Start With a Walk
  27. [RODEN] Memberships Year Seven, Nuclear Bombs, Solar Power
  28. [ESSAYS] The Seventh Year of Running my Membership Program
  29. [RIDGELINE] Eras
  30. [RIDGELINE] My 2026 New York Times Pick — Nagasaki
  31. [RIDGELINE] Happy New Year With a Side of Fries

2025 7

  1. [RODEN] Tokyo TBOT Event, Selling a House, 2026 in Brooklyn?
  2. [RIDGELINE] The Walk and Talk, Nagano Kiso-ji
  3. [RIDGELINE] No Phones in The Ten-don Shop
  4. [RODEN] Blank Spaces, Radicalized Offlineness, Curious Protagonists
  5. [RIDGELINE] Full Days and the Long Walk
  6. [RIDGELINE] Between Two Mountains — A New Pop-up Newsletter
  7. [RIDGELINE] UNIQLO LifeWear Magazine — Classic Kissa

2022 1

  1. The New York Times

2021 1

  1. Long, Boring Walks So boring! Such wonderful!

2019 1

  1. April 2019 SMS Publishing Minimum viable networked publishing

2014 1

  1. August 2014 Iceberg Tweeting The ever growing world beneath the tweet

2013 1

  1. November 2012 Unbindings and Edges Consider the magazine

2012 1

  1. April 2012 A pointable we [3/3] The power of URLs and publishing

2010 1

  1. April 2010 Books on the iPad Collected media quotes from April 2010

1998 1

  1. January 2011 The Long Road Back to 2000 On building a simpler page for A List Apart

Undated 76

  1. Aeon Magazine
  2. The New Yorker
  3. Kidd
  4. The Message
  5. The Morning News
  6. February 2025 My 'Rules' for Running My Membership Program Six years of running SPECIAL PROJECTS. Here are my "rules" that guide the program.
  7. February 2024 Five Years of Memberships I've been running the SPECIAL PROJECTS membership program for five years; here's what I know.
  8. February 2023 Running a Membership Program: Four Years In Everything I've learned in the first four years of running SPECIAL PROJECTS
  9. December 2022 Drumming Returning to drumming after a fourteen-year break
  10. September 2022 Electric Bike, Stupid Love of My Life Reflections on eighteen months of electric bike ownership
  11. January 2022 Memberships Work What I learned during the third year of running my SPECIAL PROJECTS membership program
  12. August 2021 Photos and Words and Teju Cole's Golden Apple of the Sun Containers matter; what makes Teju Cole's latest book so great
  13. July 2021 Pop-Up Newsletters are the Greatest Newsletters Timeboxed, seasonal, pop-up — a newsletter with a limit is a fantastic tool for not losing your mind
  14. April 2021 The Healing Power of Code For some of us—isolates, happy in the dark—code is therapy, an escape and a path to hope in a troubled world.
  15. March 2021 Looking Closely is Everything How the pandemic taught me to look closely at the world, and how I hope to carry that forward out the other side
  16. January 2021 Running a Successful Membership / Subscription Program What I learned from the second year of running my SPECIAL PROJECTS membership program
  17. October 2020 Let's Walk Across Japan, Together Join me as I walk 500 km along the Tōkaidō in November, 2020
  18. June 2020 Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump Our software feels less refined as our hardware achieves platonic ideals
  19. January 2020 Running a Paid Membership Program What I learned from the first year of running my SPECIAL PROJECTS membership program
  20. January 2020 On Being a Good Newsletterer Notes and tips on how not to be a newsletter ding dong
  21. November 2019 Stab a Book, the Book Won't Die On the resilience of books in the face of apps, attention monsters, and an ad-driven online economy
  22. August 2019 Referenced Works 2019: Walks, Books, Habits, Publishing Tools Referenced articles, books, art, locations and related reading for talks in 2019
  23. July 2019 Fast Software, the Best Software On the benefits of speedy software, and how it affects user perception of engineering quality and overall usability
  24. May 2019 Walking Across Japan, Disconnected and Bored How I modified my digital tools to reconnect with time on a six-week, 620-mile trip on foot across the country.
  25. February 2019 Oh God, It's Raining Newsletters Email: The oldest networked publishing platform
  26. November 2018 Referenced Works: Books, Meditation, and Mountain Paths Referenced articles, books, art, locations and related reading for recent talks
  27. November 2018 Books, Walks, and the Edge of the World On Margins ep. 006: A walk in the woods
  28. November 2018 Getting the iPad to Pro The new iPad Pro is a computer from the future, with software from yesterday
  29. April 2018 If kottke.org were a book Jason Kottke has been distilling his brain into kottke.org for twenty years; what would that look like printed out?
  30. February 2018 Offscreen Magazine Interview Notes on writing, publishing, startups, life, and disconnection
  31. February 2018 Tools and Creative Permission On the feedback loops between our work and the objects around us
  32. October 2017 Kevin Kelly and the Golden Age of World Travel On Margins ep. 003: "Asia Grace" — Photographing Asia in the 1970s
  33. September 2017 Focus / Hida 2017 Fellowships Two fellowship openings for a fall 2017 retreat
  34. July 2017 To Make a Book, Walk on a Book Designing Koya Bound and other books by placing them on the floor
  35. April 2017 A Life in Cameras Seventeen years of light tight boxes
  36. January 2017 How I Got My Attention Back Technology is commanding our attention in infinite, insurmountable loops. A country trip off-grid helped me escape.
  37. February 2016 The Leica Q A six month field test — by Craig Mod
  38. January 2016 Myanmar’s Farmers and their Smartphones A dispatch from an Internet revolution in progress
  39. November 2015 Paju Book City A city of books on the border of North Korea
  40. July 2015 Upon this Wrist A week with Apple Watch
  41. February 2015 Notes on the Other Can you eat sushi? Can you use chopsticks?
  42. November 2014 A Need to Walk How and why we walk and how to walk better
  43. September 2014 Hello, Again Feet on the ground, satellites, and the indie web
  44. August 2014 Let’s Talk About Margins We're making a book. The margins are important. Do you know how important?
  45. July 2014 On Permission Your phone is off, Dylan is on. Let's get to work.
  46. July 2014 Let’s Fly How to survive air travel
  47. June 2014 Far Beyond Snowfall Op-Docs and video and the future of the Times
  48. June 2014 Ebooks for All Building digital libraries in Ghana with Worldreader
  49. June 2014 Coming Home: NYT Now Putting the news back on our home screens
  50. May 2014 Brando’s Room Traveling space, if not time, to say hello to Capote and Brando
  51. April 2014 Staring Down Colliders Visiting CERN and the LCHb proton collider
  52. December 2013 The First Façon Façon blend, cloth drip
  53. October 2013 Pull Back Everything benefits from a little consideration
  54. April 2013 Wind Up Kidd Chronicle To Murakami and Kidd and Ware
  55. March 2013 Hitotoki: Narrative Mapping the World Notes on tiered publishing, writing from the hip, and real-time storytelling
  56. December 2012 Subcompact round up and The Daily Circling back on the tiny Japanese car
  57. November 2012 An Invitation — Roden Explorers Join me on an adventure in mailing listing
  58. October 2012 How Magazine will be Changed Forever On the edges of print
  59. October 2012 Walking and the quantified self How the quantified self affects our relationship with the world
  60. October 2012 パリとデータマインド、ホログラム化するぼくら 体力レヴェルから睡眠パターンにいたるまで、あらゆるものを記録するパーソナルトラッキングデヴァイスは、自分を知りたいという欲望を満たしてくれる。
  61. September 2012 Publishing Startups and the Great Fuzziness Startups are strange little things
  62. September 2012 Our New Shrines We have four million fans. We'd like to talk to you.
  63. May 2012 Ahab! A feeble attempt to help those foolish enough to make a Kindle book by hand
  64. April 2012 A pointable we [2/3] The power of URLs and publishing
  65. April 2012 A pointable we [1/3] The power of URLs and publishing
  66. August 2011 The Culture of Technology Silicon Valley versus New York City
  67. June 2011 Twitter Archives and the Sendai Quake The value of simple systems in moments of crisis
  68. March 2011 The Nourishing Wake Returning from Tokyo after the quake
  69. January 2011 A Simpler Page Reading digitally more simply
  70. November 2010 The Collaborative Book The effect of realtime and time on the writing process
  71. Textures Along a Quarantine Path Things seen on a little walk
  72. Walk vs. Hike
  73. Ben Pobjoy's Tips for Long Walks Ultra-walker Ben tells us how he does it
  74. The Craft of 'Kissa by Kissa' A short documentary on the production of Kissa by Kissa
  75. Pizza Toast Tales: Alps Alps diner, and 52 weeks of Ridgeline
  76. Do You Want to Run a Kissa? A beautiful kissa in Yushima, Tokyo is looking for a new owner