I’m curious if you know of this pattern that existed for as long as I remember. On a Mac, you can hold an ⌥ key (Option) whenever any menu is open, and often see more powerful, advanced, or faster variants of existing commands, helpful for a power user. Here’s Audio Hijack and Forklift: This is not limited to just...

After two more serious posts in this series, I wanted to stop somewhere a bit more lighthearted and inconsequential. “Here’a a fun thing you can try,” begins this 13-minute video from Retro Game Mechanics Explained: The premise of the parlor trick the video describes is a bit convoluted: Get your Nintendo...

You know how much I love simple and clean release notes, and I just stumbled upon these supercasual video release notes by designer Rafael Conde, and they made me smile. The video is just 45 seconds, and the following short thread is filled with a few other fun details of Conde’s app Hand Mirror. Particularly this...

It seems sometimes that browsing the web these days is just constant closing of pop-ups and banners, and ignoring those that cannot be closed: old school modals and in-page ads, Substack-style “subscribe to my newsletter”on-scroll pop-ups, cookie banners and popovers, (relatively new) VERIFY YOU ARE HUMAN, HUMAN_...

I don’t think anyone particularly enjoys typesetting in monospace. Regular text is okay – at least as okay as it can be: Right aligning is also fine, as long as you don’t mind counting spaces, but centering already gets tricky, as you don’t have a half space to make things truly even: And full justification is where...

I often link to John Gruber’s Daring Fireball posts with a nod, but this time around I want to offer an opposing point of view. About a month ago, Gruber linked to a Markdown editor written by Sean Malseed in 2026 for the early 1980s Macs, and commented: I absolutely love that this exists. I don’t like the actual...

I mentioned Atari’s Pong recently, a game often considered to be the first videogame ever. It wasn’t, and as a matter of fact, it was a clone of one of the games from the first home console Magnavox Odyssey, released earlier in 1972: This is a 34-minute video by FrameRater walking through the console and all of its...

A Mastodon post by computer scientist David Chisnall has a very Unsung opener: I have used vim since around 2000. I have written five books, a PhD thesis, a few dozen papers and over 150 articles with it. At this point, my higher brain functions are not engaged at all when I use a bunch of common vim commands, they...

It is a testament to how much things have changed in competitive NES Tetris – a game released the same month the Berlin Wall fell – that this hour-long documentary by Summoning Salt that talks about the 2018 Tetris Championship covers the previous revolution in a play technique: I don’t watch a lot of sports, but I...

One of the small things I added to Medium in early 2016 was a change to the favicon: It came from an observation about the writing process. When writing on Medium, you are likely to have a bunch of Medium tabs open with other posts, yours or otherwise, for reference… but you usually only have one tab you’re writing...

A perfect example of breaking the “let me click” slash “the current action has the most momentum” principles we just talked about, in macOS Settings. When you try to add a new keyboard layout, the layouts you already have added are completely disabled, not just from addition, but even from selection: On a surface...

A thoughtful moment in the Arrange Displays pop-up in macOS’s Settings when you choose to designate a screen to be a primary screen: It not only shows a nice preview of where your menu is going to land, but also changes the shape of the menu proxy you’re holding, to help you connect the two. (The whole interaction...