The year is 1981. Your IBM PC is equipped with a tragic speaker that sounds awful for anything except occasional beeps. (Those beeps sound awful, too.) You can’t afford a sound card and besides, sound cards for your PC have not been invented yet. You can’t even afford a floppy drive, so you’re one of the rare people...

This blog is about craft, but sometimes the answer to craft is not skill or taste or awareness or effort, but it’s creating conditions for craft to flourish. Workday looks like Workday, and your banking app looks like your banking app, not because there aren’t enough designers and engineers around that know how to...

One of the most mysterious keys on the PC keyboard has always been Scroll Lock, joining Caps Lock and Num Lock to create the instantly recognizable LED triumvirate: Scroll Lock was reportedly specifically added for spreadsheets, and it solved a very specific problem: before mice and trackpads, and before fast...

I realized recently that I conflated two similar user-interface comedy skits. This one is from Sean Wing from 2023: And this older one is from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, from 2009: Speaking of Tim and Eric, this one was also funny and ostensibly on topic for this blog! (And re: previous post – I had to...

From May last year, a 21-minute video by Linus Boman about font piracy, specifically during the era of personal computing and early internet: The nuances of what separates font piracy from non-pirated revivals or general inspiration are too much even for me, but I liked how the video moved on from the obvious and...

Those terms confused me back in the day, and occasionally they still do, so I thought it might be nice to write it all out. This is how I understand them: deterministic: whenever you do something, it gives you identical results as any previous or next time you do it idempotent: if you do something twice, or thrice,...

As a former ISP employee I occasionally like dipping my toes into some networking stuff, and this 25-minute video from The Serial Port is a good retelling of the day in 2014 when one of internet’s important routing tables crossed a threshold of 512K, which caused all sorts of trouble: What I appreciate about The...

I read Erika Hall’s Just Enough Research. I’m not going review the entire book as it feels a bit off-topic for this blog, but the chapter about surveys had me nodding my head so much I’d love to excerpt a few things: The questions can be asked in person or over the phone, or distributed on paper or collected online....

Mac allows you to assign keyboard shorcuts to menu items, but the interface is clunky – you have to select the app even if you just came from it, and then type in the menu item name by hand without any assistance: Other tools, like Keyboard Maestro, do something similar. You either have to type it again, or you can...

Before computer graphics, movies relied on matte paintings to extend or flesh out the background. This is perhaps my favourite matte painting, from the end credits of Die Hard 2: Turns out, videogames do something similar, except the result is called a skybox, since it has to encompass the player from all sides....

Beagle Bros was a 1980s software company making apps for Apple II that is still remembered fondly for their personality. The company had a hobbyist slant, selling various small tools and collections with fun names like Beagle Bag (in the “Indoor Sports” collection) and DOS Boss and Utility City – similar perhaps to...

A thoughtful essay by Nick Heer as a sidebar to the annual Apple/Six Colors report card, in which he proposes this simple framework: In short, the way I think about software quality is the amount of meaningful problems. […] There are problems in Finder — resizing columns, renaming or deleting files synced with a...