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,...

Here’s a 2002 story from a younger internet, by programmer Trey Harris (link to the original and if you don’t like the classic Usenet formatting – my browser’s reader mode can’t even prettify it! – here’s a nicer-looking format): “We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.” “What’s the problem?” I...

A delightful 24-minute video from ToffeeBun about sampling in videogame music and how it changed over the years: The video helped me understand the difference between tunes purely synthesized from soundchips, those sequenced with samples (e.g. MIDI or sound trackers), and those that are completely “streamed” (e.g....

I love looking at origins of obvious things, because of two things: They help me get unstuck. If you go far enough, you will find out that even the most ossified conventions that are older than you haven’t always been this way. They put me in the mood of “what of the things that feel normal today that deserve to...

I have mixed feelings about Raycast announcing their move from the native interface to one powered by web tech (this is the same thing that made Photoshop’s dialogs so bad), but their blog post announcing the change has at least a useful list of some details that separate good native apps from bad web ones. I think...

Chrome’s find option, like every search coming from a good home, does something clever with accented characters – it normalizes them: No matter whether you search with a proper accented character, or with its basic Latin equivalent, all the same stuff matches: The “ø” letter is treated the same as “o” both in the...

I witnessed this Siemens locomotive depart yesterday and for a second I thought I was losing my mind. Then, I smiled so hard: Turns out, the startup melody was intentional in this particular model. The power converters have to adapt the current from the overhead line to convert it to the three-phase motors of the...

Turns out that the breathing light survives, sort of, not really, in an Apple product today: The AirPods Pro case does this when charging – right at the start, or when you tap it later. But it disappears after a while, the pace is now 28 breaths a minute (over twice as fast as the original iteration), and the light...