I often link to John Gruber’s Daring Fireball posts with a nod, but this time around I want to offer an opposing point of view. About a month ago, Gruber linked to a Markdown editor written by Sean Malseed in 2026 for the early 1980s Macs, and commented: I absolutely love that this exists. I don’t like the actual...

I mentioned Atari’s Pong recently, a game often considered to be the first videogame ever. It wasn’t, and as a matter of fact, it was a clone of one of the games from the first home console Magnavox Odyssey, released earlier in 1972: This is a 34-minute video by FrameRater walking through the console and all of its...

A Mastodon post by computer scientist David Chisnall has a very Unsung opener: I have used vim since around 2000. I have written five books, a PhD thesis, a few dozen papers and over 150 articles with it. At this point, my higher brain functions are not engaged at all when I use a bunch of common vim commands, they...

It is a testament to how much things have changed in competitive NES Tetris – a game released the same month the Berlin Wall fell – that this hour-long documentary by Summoning Salt that talks about the 2018 Tetris Championship covers the previous revolution in a play technique: I don’t watch a lot of sports, but I...

One of the small things I added to Medium in early 2016 was a change to the favicon: It came from an observation about the writing process. When writing on Medium, you are likely to have a bunch of Medium tabs open with other posts, yours or otherwise, for reference… but you usually only have one tab you’re writing...

A perfect example of breaking the “let me click” slash “the current action has the most momentum” principles we just talked about, in macOS Settings. When you try to add a new keyboard layout, the layouts you already have added are completely disabled, not just from addition, but even from selection: On a surface...

A thoughtful moment in the Arrange Displays pop-up in macOS’s Settings when you choose to designate a screen to be a primary screen: It not only shows a nice preview of where your menu is going to land, but also changes the shape of the menu proxy you’re holding, to help you connect the two. (The whole interaction...

If you haven’t played Kern Type yet, you’re in for a treat – released by Mark MacKay in 2011, it’s a delightful browser game that teaches you the art and the math of text kerning: If you have played it, you’re still in for a treat, as MacKay under the Method of Action label released a few similar games since: The...

Ilya Birman on his blog talks about interfaces that unnecessarily slow people down, in a series of two posts. In the first one, titled “Let me click,” Birman shows a few places that force the user to go through a roundabout series of clicks, instead of taking a direct route: In Aegea’s comment settings, there is a...

A fascinating 11-minute video by Modern Vintage Gamer about the PC videogame piracy in the 1990s: This is a “no honor among thieves” story about a few groups racing to pirate and release one of the most important videogames in history: 1996’s Quake. There is a lot of interesting vernacular here: leetspeak, nfo...

I believe every modern operating system allows you to set the key repeat rate and the delay before first repeat: By default, on a Mac, the initial delay is 500ms, and the key repeat rate 1000ms. You can adjust both: Initial delay goes from 250ms, to as long as 2s. Repeat rate goes from 2000ms (once every two...

In 2018, Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie teamed up to make a short PSA about the dangers of frame rate interpolation, a.k.a. the soap opera effect: It’s a strangely boring video from the men known for exciting filmmaking, but it captures a fascinating debate. TL; DR of their argument: Home TVs have an option to...