An 8-minute video by Bread on Penguins about some fun uses of terminal: I am pretty sure this is nothing new for heavy command-line gurus (and heavy Raycast users, and so on), but I found it delightful to see someone so excited about creative uses of the terminal, and it made me realize how much time I do waste...

I liked this little microinteraction by Mario Guzmán explored on Masto – it felt like a clever idea to help you locate a tiny widget on what might be a huge screen or two: But it also made me think. I still strongly associate macOS shake with “wrong password,” meaning “you’re doing something wrong” – something the...

I spotted this interesting thing at work today, and was curious about that phrase at the end: Turns out, it is basically a unique human-readable encoding of a 32-bit digit, I’d guess particularly for ease of voice/​phone support communication. (Otherwise I imagine copy/​paste would work well?) Asana has been doing...

Complementing my previous post, a lot of great thoughts in this post about invisible work from Hardik Pandya: When the project succeeded, her work had dissolved into the project’s infrastructure. The doc was just “the doc.” The tracker was just “the tracker.” The alignment was just how things were. People forgot it...

I learned from Diana Berlin’s always excellent newsletter Diagonal that Stewart Brand has a new book out, and it’s about maintenance, and it’s published by Stripe Press. From the introduction: This book, I’m pretty sure, is the first to look at maintenance in general. It asks: What can be learned if you think about...

This is incredible – a story of a museum exhibit that replicated an experience of being a tech support person for a videogame company some time in the early 1990s: You knew hint lines existed, right? 1-900 numbers, long-distance charges, hoping whoever answers actually knows what they’re talking about. They had...

In 2009, there was a strange one-off build of Chromium with a guy’s face in place of the close box: If I remember the story correctly, this was neither a bug, nor an Easter egg, but instead a joke’y punishment for not delivering the correct asset on time.#google #humor

Many people already linked to Terry Godier’s thoughtful essay about email and RSS and the dangers of skeuomorphism by default: Email is where the metaphor made its jump from atoms to bits. “Inbox” was borrowed legitimacy. It sounded like that wooden tray, so it inherited its psychology. But the wooden tray had a...

I’m slightly suspicious of this story (and the video inside) that Unix commands were made so short (cp instead of copy, mv instead of move, ls instead of list, and so on) because the console keyboard had really unpleasant keys. I imagine it must be a confluence of many things, not just this one. Shorter means faster...

I thought about it on Masto in January (the responses are interesting if you want to read), but recently Robin Sloan eludicated it a lot better: What makes the AI chatbots and agents feel light and clean, here and now in 2026? Is it an innate architectural resistance to advertising, to attention hacks, to...

I have zero nostalgia for Mario, and yet I was surprised how much I enjoyed this 30-minute video by Sheddux: It serves as a bit of design history and even critique of early Mario games, and then in the middle it turns into an analysis of the Mario port on Game & Watch – an obsolete technology even in the 1980s, and...

This menu in Chrome feels like a surface running away from its creators: I think cerebrally I understand the subtle difference between Show and Always Show, but is that difference worth it? Because at some point the repetitiveness and heaviness of that top section is casting a huge shadow over the rest of the menu....