This 13-minute video from Wes Bos analyzes this today-almost-mythical McMaster-Carr website and figures out why it’s so fast. It’s perhaps more technical than what I usually link to, but shows what can happen if someone really cares about performance. What’s interesting to me is that the author posits that it’s...

When home computers were new, there was this enduring myth of “killer poke.” POKE was a pretty low-level BASIC command that allowed you to write any number to any place in the memory, as there was no memory protection. From that developed a set of myths of the right magical pairs of numbers that could be input and...

A nice short analysis of window resizing in macOS Tahoe by Nobert Heger: Since upgrading to macOS Tahoe, I’ve noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window are failing. This never happened to me before in almost 40 years of using computers. So why all of a sudden? I understand this might be the casualty of...

A 6-minute video from JHR about the 1980s British game Jet Set Willy, a big prize for its completion, the bug that made it unplayable, the copy protection, the hackers, and the mess of it all.#bugs #games #history #youtube

I still sometimes think of the miracle that is Undo Send in Gmail. Michael Leggett announcing it in 2009: This feature can’t pull back an email that’s already gone; it just holds your message for five seconds so you have a chance to hit the panic button. And don’t worry – if you close Gmail or your browser crashes...

This appeared when trying to delete (even when trying to Delete Immediately, skipping the trash altogether): Same thing right after, when trying to tag some existing items, for which I don’t imagine any new space should be necessary: Also, why are these dialogs so different? I feel like not so long ago there were...

I have been wondering the other day why aren’t there more mouse pointer museums and here’s one – Amiga Pointer Archive! (Amiga was a 16-bit home computer especially popular in Europe.) Doesn’t work so well on mobile, but it’s fun on desktop. I recommend zooming the page to 200%. #history #iconography #interface...

★★★★☆ (as a TV show) ★★★☆☆ (for the purposes of this blog) 2024 / 4 episodes ~50 minutes each During my year at Code For America, I saw many glimpses of truly bad technology – slow courtroom computers, infuriating interfaces, obsolete specs, and the inevitable layer of remote access GUIs atop it all that made...

An extremely bad click-through experience in Vimeo: a whole lot of redundant text, and a double captcha (luckily you only have to click on one). Put the little captcha box in the middle of the screen and that’s it. Nothing else feels necessary. A great example of an insecure interface. #complexity #interface design...

I have never before heard of this story of an absolutely botched deployment of a new accounting system at the British post office, and “the widest miscarriage of justice in UK history.” More on Wikipedia: Between 2000 and 2015, 736 subpostmasters were prosecuted by the UK Post Office, with many falsely convicted and...

You might not encounter them often in polished fonts unless you’re knee-deep into typography, but: fonts have bugs, too. Paul van der Laan on Mastodon: Did anyone ever notice that Avenir LT has some serious errors in the descender lengths of p and q in certain weights? Florian Hardwig adds: It’s one of the things...

The first iPhone famously introduced the soft keyboard, which could change its shape depending on the need. Sometimes it would mean becoming a keypad (for numeric entries), and sometimes something subtler, like introducing a “.com” key to the bottom row, or adding a new column of keys and making the keys a bit more...