I’m strangely conflicted about sharing this post about taste from Roger Wong: Sensitivity is how finely you perceive—noticing friction, asking why a screen exists, catching the moment something feels wrong. Standards are your internal reference system for what “good” actually looks like. Both can be trained. The...

A wildly fascinating 12-minute video from the always-hilarious YouTube channel Map Men about the reason for a surprising black spot that could be seen on Google Earth until 2012. Reading the Wikipedia entry after watching the video adds extra color to the mystery, turning it more squarely into a “software quality”...

I was surprised at this little thing that appeared in my Chrome Canary this morning. It is rare to see an interface clean up after itself this way. This flew by quickly and wasn’t communicated very well, but I believe this changed my new tab page from this… …to this: Now, I said “surprised” and not “delighted” not...

When I was in Hong Kong a few months ago, I noticed that a lot of intercoms have this particular animation of a cat sleeping and chasing a fly, on a loop: It was actually kind of fun to see it all over Hong Kong on LCDs of varying quality. Turns out this was Neko! A “screenmate” application from the late 1980s that...

Daniel Kennett in A Lament For Aperture, The App We’ll Never Get Over Losing (also note an alt title in the URL): Start spending time in the online photography sphere and you’ll start to notice a small but undeniable undercurrent of lament of its loss to this day. Find an article about Adobe hiking their...

I saw this screenshot the other day (link): I never particularly liked those “cute” app updates that were all the rage some… 10 years ago? Or app updates that are too generic. I always felt the updates should be informative, and I occasionally like seeing what’s actually being fixed, and sometimes learning from it....

Savage from heliographe.studio on Threads (via Daring Fireball): #apple #humor #iconography #mac os

Even though this blog is about software, I might occasionally post some inspiration from real life. I saw this today outside of an RTA transit station in Cleveland. I have not seen it light up, but I imagine it would blink when the train is near the station, which would mean: hurry up if you want to catch the next...

Speaking of hardware: Always loved this 1998 Australian story (magazine scan or an easier-to-read transcription) of a very particular computer virus that did not require any software to spread “like a Sydney bush fire”: Now it all became clear. One of the female sockets must have deformed when I first reconnected...

I mentioned speedrunning before in the context of mastery, but there is the other side of speedrunning that’s equally interesting: that utilizing bugs (or, glitches) to get the fastest possible time. This 17-minute video by Msushi covers “one of the most loved and broken glitches in Portal 2” and the strange...

A fascinating deep dive look at one of the most well-known bugs in computing history, the 1993 Pentium FDIV bug. Ken Shiriff actually grabbed a microscope to analyze the processor and mapped out exactly what happened on the hardware level, and the details of Intel’s (surprising) fix. Also, an interesting detail of...

I added a table of contents UI to the most elaborate essays on my site, and then wrote about some of the design details and choices I made there. Let me know if this is an interesting case study! I tried to do something new here with tons of mini videos. At the bottom, I will also be collecting other implementations...