If you haven’t played Kern Type yet, you’re in for a treat – released by Mark MacKay in 2011, it’s a delightful browser game that teaches you the art and the math of text kerning: If you have played it, you’re still in for a treat, as MacKay under the Method of Action label released a few similar games since: The...

Ilya Birman on his blog talks about interfaces that unnecessarily slow people down, in a series of two posts. In the first one, titled “Let me click,” Birman shows a few places that force the user to go through a roundabout series of clicks, instead of taking a direct route: In Aegea’s comment settings, there is a...

A fascinating 11-minute video by Modern Vintage Gamer about the PC videogame piracy in the 1990s: This is a “no honor among thieves” story about a few groups racing to pirate and release one of the most important videogames in history: 1996’s Quake. There is a lot of interesting vernacular here: leetspeak, nfo...

I believe every modern operating system allows you to set the key repeat rate and the delay before first repeat: By default, on a Mac, the initial delay is 500ms, and the key repeat rate 1000ms. You can adjust both: Initial delay goes from 250ms, to as long as 2s. Repeat rate goes from 2000ms (once every two...

In 2018, Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie teamed up to make a short PSA about the dangers of frame rate interpolation, a.k.a. the soap opera effect: It’s a strangely boring video from the men known for exciting filmmaking, but it captures a fascinating debate. TL; DR of their argument: Home TVs have an option to...

An interesting mechanism in YouTube I just learned of. If you right click once, you get their context menu: If you right click again, you get the native browser menu: This is clunky and not discoverable, but I can see YouTube team’s bind here. As far as I know, it is not possible to extend browser’s native right...

★★☆☆☆ 2018 / 92 minutes General Magic was a company started in 1990 by some of ex-Apple staffers, working on a pocket communication device and its operating system (Magic Cap, sporting a fascinating room user interface). The product launched in 1994, but swiftly failed in the market, similarly to and concurrently...

Have you ever seen this? The best way to predict the future is t̷o̶ ì̴͇n̵͓̆v̶̝̕ȇ̷̝͈̩͊̇̾̄̂̀̈̔̀͛͋͆̓͒͘͝ͅn̸̦̙̣̤͓̜̼͙̲͔̺͚̮̬͆̇̇͐̇̽̒̎t̵̮͎̃̒͒̋̂̏̒̀̿͌͗̄͑̀̀͒̈̚͠͝ ȋ̸̧̛̭̠͈̰̰̦̹̥̜̖̈̂̀̽̿̋̊́̇̍̓̆̉̄̄̊͊̒̎͋̂̒̍̽̄͝ͅt̶̨̢̺̱̻̭̣͉͕̥͚̯͍̣͕͔̬̥͔̘̼͌̉̀̄̊̆͛̽̍̐̔̐̀̾̋̆͒̏̏̋͋̽͗̌͋͗.̸̧̨̧̡̢̪͙̦͙̝̜̦̞̳̤͖̟͍̮͖̘̙̳͉̳̲̲͉̠͎̽̍̓̒̅̿͂͑̎͊̋͒̈́̅̈́̆̽̒͛͐͛̉̀̈́̈̉̏̏̋̒͘͝͝͝ In the...

Nice recent addition to Gmail – a little warning if you’re replying to a thread you were BCC’ed on. Please note that I’m not necessarily endorsing the execution details, as I consider Gmail kind of a clunky operation overall. You can’t swat the message away with a swipe, the wrong quotation mark is used, and I’m...

Some time ago, I shared a video talking about games that leaned into their bugs and made them part of their lore. One not listed there, perhaps because it’s the most obvious example, is Pac-Man’s kill screen. A few weekends ago at an arcade game convention, I spotted something really interesting. It was an arcade...

1. Oh damn, you caught me in the middle of something. I was just trying to make a list of Windows versions for a friend – in Google Docs, of all things. Should be easy. I already grabbed this one off of Wikipedia and massaged it a bit, but it’s still kinda ugly: I don’t love the tight padding here. Let me try...

I spotted this kind of a keyboard shortcut pattern the other day. Here it is in Photoshop: Here it is in DevonThink: And here in Linear: Those “ordinal” keyboard shortcuts feel nice and orderly, and look so elegant, too. But beware! The moment you’ll want to introduce a new option, or even reorder the ones you have,...