More unexpected Mario content: a 7-minute video speedrunning composite by FlibidyDibidy: This video combines my first 5,162 attempts to speedrun Super Mario Bros. I recorded 193 hours of attempts (and practice) on an original 1985 Nintendo Entertainment System, then I wrote a custom computer program to process those...

I like sharing, thinking about, and revisiting basic rules and principles because they really do ladder up to help you with more complex things down the road. I wrote before how a simple rule to give some breathing room to your length-limited edit fields can be upleveled to a more general “let me color outside the...

Software engineer Ajitem Sahasrabuddhe recently wrote a 6-post series called “Iron Core” about airline ticketing infrastructure. The entire series is probably too software engineer-y for us, but the third part has some interesting info about a particular 1960s user interface called “cryptic mode”: Cryptic mode was...

In light of a recent Googlebook announcement that uses a mouse wiggle gesture for AI (which to me doesn’t seem like a pleasant interaction), some of us were talking about how, on macOS, mouse wiggle helps you locate the cursor by making it bigger. I am maybe a sucker for videos and podcasts where people start...

A fascinating 9-minute video from PawelCodeStuff about randomness in the context of computing: It explains those weird moments where sometimes the computer asks you to wiggle your mouse – to generate unpredictable numbers – although the specifics of what exactly was random in my wiggling was a surprise to me. There...

The post about Photoshop’s new dialogs traveled through some of the internet’s pipes and alleyways. Michael Tsai has a nice roundup of reactions; let me pick a few things that caught my attention. 1. Nick Heer at Pixel Envy made a discovery that Photoshop’s new windows are… websites: Maybe it really is possible to...

The best thing the crypto industry coined might have been the expression “rug pull,” but I’m not happy about that. To me, it perfectly describes how it feels when an app or a website randomly changes your scroll position for no rhyme or reason. You’ve seen it so many times before: you start reading a webpage, but it...

Randomly found this 2014 Dribbble from Jamie Nicoll and it made me smile: For context, Save For Web was a popular export function in Photoshop at the peak of its use for web design, but assigned a rather unpleasant ⌘⌥⇧S shortcut. Using it often turned your hand into a… claw of sorts. There was a Tumblr cataloging...

A fascinating 25-minute video from Mark Brown at Game Maker’s Toolkit about how the team building Grand Theft Auto 3 conquered the technical limitations of PlayStation 2: How do you squeeze a city that occupies over 50 megabytes into the 32MB memory of the console? You simply do what The Truman Show did, and...

Since the early 2000s, Mac OS X had a few orientations of icons depending on whether they were applications, files, utilities and so on: In 2020, macOS Big Sur unified those styles and made them more iOS-like: A few years later, Jim Nielsen revisited the icon “Big Sur-ification”, and showed examples of apps that did...

In his latest video, Shelby from Tech Tangents unpacked, installed, and put to use a truly forgotten product: IBM 3119, one of the first consumer flatbed scanners. The setup was a small nightmare, needing a rare hardware card installed in a specific computer, an ultra-particular combination of two operating systems...

I have a confession to make. I prefer Apple TV’s 2015 remote: The remote was universally ridiculed for its “which way is up?” problem – too much vertical symmetry which didn’t give your hand enough cues to know whether you’re picking it up the right way or the wrong way. Apple tried a half-measure first; in 2017...