I read Mike Monteiro’s book of pre-pandemic essays called The collected angers. The book has less to do with the subject of this blog, but I grabbed a few quotes that resonated with me and seemed relevant. In order not to make it too reductive, I’m also linking to the original essays for those who want to follow up:...

A nice counterpart to my post from a few days ago – a 5-minute video by philive of more kill screens from various classic arcade games, with simple explanations. #bugs #games #history #youtube

I liked the angry website Bugs Apple Loves because it’s hitting on something that got me worried in recent months: Apple has been bad at bugs for a while now, but we might be overfocusing on giving them crap solely for some of the most visible – even visual – Tahoe stuff. This is a condensed list at the time of...

If you plug in a CD drive (he said with a straight face in the lord’s year 2026), and then eject too soon, the system offers this dialog, which allows you to say: Eject whenever you’re done with whatever you have to do. But more modern media, like SSD drives, don’t show that window. The best case scenario is that...

One of the most potent themes in Stanisław Lem’s writing was the fallacy of first contact. Lem argued that we are just not ready for an actual meeting with something truly alien. That the most open-minded of us are close-minded on a cosmic scale. That sci-fi made us think that aliens will look like human with...

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...