I know I just mentioned the Google Search app, but I’m also in the process of disentangling myself from Google and Gmail after last week’s Google I/O revelations. On that note, this is an interesting, meandering essay by Ernie Smith at Tedium, reflecting on the enshittification of Google and the two-year anniversary...

Do you know those “Are you still here” screens? In some cases – like banking – they are ostensibly there to improve security. In public transit ticket or similar machines, on the other hand, they exist just so the machine can easily reset itself ahead of a future customer. Resetting to default state happens on your...

I absolutely love Jimmy Maher’s body of work. He’s been writing about older games and software in general since 2011; it’s always solid, always an enjoyable read, and always providing new perspectives even on stuff I thought I knew well. (Maher also goes by The Digital Antiquarian.) I linked to his work once before,...

The biggest smallest GUI design schism between Apple’s platforms and Windows isn’t the black vs. white cursor or where to put the menu bar. It’s the presentation of keyboard shortcuts. On a Mac, the shortcuts are iconographic. Command is ⌘. Option is ⌥. Shift is ⇧. Control is ⌃. Fn is 🌐. There are also icons for all...

Do you remember the video I once shared about making a song in Strudel? I recently stumbled upon this 20-minute YouTube video by iSongs of someone recreating Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” in GarageBand on their iPhone: Like the previous video, I believe this is so tight as it was previously rehearsed/​prepared, which...

I generally avoid think pieces about AI because a) a lot of them are boring, and b) they rarely match the pragmatic posture of this blog. But this essay on a new No One’s Happy blog was really interesting to read, and feels different in a few ways. First, it examines what happens as AI slop spreads in the context...

The Ringer journalist Brian Phillips asked on Bluesky: I’m working on a column about the tech annoyances that drive us crazy, and I want it to be as universal as possible, so tell me yours! E.g. scanning a QR code to read a menu, never receiving the one-time passcode they supposedly texted you, “verify you’re human”...

Actors are overwhelmingly diurnal, overtime is expensive, and film emulsion struggles with limited light, so since the dawn of time Hollywood has been using a technique called “day for night” – shooting during daylight, and then darkening and blue-tinting in post to pretend it was night time all along: It’s a method...

This 22-minute video by Karl Jobst describes a pretty wild discovery of a glitch called Crystal Storage Glitch, allowing to skip a certain level for much faster completion times in Mega Man X2: I won’t spoil the glitch because it’s a fascinating combination of a corner case, a race condition, and even a dose of dumb...

In Figma, when choosing a font, you can filter down a list of fonts from “all” to specific categories or e.g. only fonts present in the current file. But when you type into the search field, the search cuts across all fonts again, ignoring the applied filter. The search effectively lives outside the filter. In...

Andrew Gleeson designed Analog Mono, “fixing the crimes of VCR OSD Mono.” There used to be this classic pixel font that you’d see everywhere in the 1990s on hi-fi equipment: VCRs, TVs, camcorders, etc. One of its challenges was a low baseline which resulted in all the letters with descenders pulled up, for example:...

A nice, but unpolished onboarding callout directing people towards a more useful shortcut, in Google Docs. I’m holding arrow keys without ⇧ here first, then with ⇧: To improve it, I would add some sort of small celebratory “completed!” state, and auto-hide it afterwards; right now, it seems that it hides on a delay,...