I linked to Strudel before, but this 6-minute video is even better – it shows a musician named Switch Angel constructing a trance track from scratch: This is of course competence porn, made even better by the dry Polish lektor-like delivery. But it’s also a puzzle. I watched this so many times. There are so many...

I’d guess a lot of people know that the original 1980 Pac-Man ends accidentally with an iconic, glitchy, and impassable “kill screen.” Many people will also nod with recognition at hearing the kill screen is level 256, a number that immediately gives some ideas on what might have happened. But this fun 11-minute...

I was reminded of and rewatched this 43-minute 2016 talk by David Jonathan Ross with great interest: Ross designed Input, a coding font superfamily which was very inspiring to me in the day, and taught me that coding fonts could be a place of surprising creativity and innovation. First of all, Input has four width...

On Mastodon, Hendrik Weimer posted 5 most boosted Fediverse posts of 2025. The numbers look kind of low, but the author explains the methodology below. At any rate, two of the 5 posts have to do with our trust in software. Number 1 from Max Leibman: No, I do not want to install your app. No, I do not want that app...

Found listening to this 2-hour episode of The Talk Show podcast with Daniel Jalkut very enjoyable, and more thoughtful than just “bitching about Tahoe.” One particular thing that stood out to me was a discussion of shame and embarrassment and pride that all come with shipping software. And looking to Apple itself...

Fun little story by Bruce Horn on folklore.org about the original Mac and how modes are sometimes good: We went to quite a few stores in the week or so after the introduction, and found that, without exception, every Mac’s floppy disk had a garbage name! They were all named something like ”;lkakl;rt;klgjh”, as if...

★★★★☆ 2008 / 58 minutes The house is a masterpiece. It is perched on a hill overlooking Bordeaux. It’s made of glass and concrete and seemingly nothing else. It has pipes cleverly hidden to the side, a cantilevered roof that seems to defy the laws of physics, and a beautiful center elevator platform for a...

I have recently stumbled upon two websites that try to do something interesting and inspiring when it comes to showing scale. John Wallace’s Tangible Media Connection’s initial appearance might not feel very well-crafted, but jump to any page (for example this one) and it’s astonishing how great the photos of the...

I have been thinking about this a lot since the pandemic, and Rob Napier on Mastodon summarized this really well: I spent a lot of time in the 90s working on Y2K. It wasn’t a huge panic. It was just a slice out of everything else we spent auditing code. It wasn’t “spend 80 hours a week fixing this.” It was just...

The state of menus on Google’s search result page: all inconsistent, most ugly, ignoring UI mechanics learned decades ago (for example understanding the importance of diagonal movement or supporting mousedown-drag-mouseup in addition to just clicking), with easily triggered buggy states, bad animations, and even...

I am still figuring out what this blog is, and I hope I’m not going to make this part too awkward, but I’d love once in a while to point to someone whose work I admire or find inspiring. I just spent an hour or so simply scrolling through David Aerne’s Bluesky feed, and I felt it was just so much fun for me. David...

A good 22-minute video from XDA about the debacle that was Windows Vista and the corrective measure that followed, Windows 7: It taught me many things and it clarified that things were more complicated than they seemed. Windows Vista (widely seen as failure) perhaps wasn’t so bad, and 7 (quoted by many as the best...