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Cropping Into A Debate
My post about moving to Linux last week didn’t necessarily set the world ablaze—at this point, Linux users are less like Never Nudes and more like loose seals—but it did draw a little bit of...
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The YouTube Boogie
Brendan Kavanagh is a man who has a lucrative gimmick. Also known as Dr. K, Kavanagh plays boogie-woogie music on public pianos for audiences of passers-by in London train stations. He then uploads...
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Locked Up In Regions
Today in Tedium: It’s not unheard of for smartphones to be tied to specific countries—until recently, for example, OnePlus limited its midrange R line to the Indian market—but the decision by Apple to...
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No Frame Of Reference
When I acquired my new laptop recently, I did a lot of research and homework before I pulled the trigger, and ended up deciding that my primary metric for purchasing (a high quality, possibly OLED,...
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Cache Clearing
I have to imagine that Google did not make a lot of money from people pinging its search engine for cached website results, but making it convenient to access was a service to searchers. It was also...
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The Ballad Of Mark Discordia
Today in Tedium: Game culture has never been a high-minded affair, and if anything has been willing to bury itself in norms that align with other 12-year-old interests during the 1980s, including...
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Remaking Podcasts For Text
The RSS format is very close to its 25th anniversary, which hits next month, and it is an important tool, if a somewhat neglected one. It makes the internet better, but it often does not get the...
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sudo embrace
It’s the best tweet that, as of this writing, nobody appears to have liked very much. On Thursday, in the wake of a public announcement that Microsoft was adding sudo support to Windows, Bob...
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The Sneaky Standard
Today in Tedium: Computing has changed a lot in the past four decades, and one of the biggest changes, perhaps the most unheralded, comes down to compatibility. These days, you generally can’t fry a...
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Retro Zeitgeist
Seeing Jon Stewart on The Daily Show for the first time in nearly a decade was a throwback of sorts—and one that occurred basically because both parties needed one another. Stewart, who faced more...
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The Web App Switcheroo
It’s unusual that Apple seems to have used the Digital Markets Act, a regulation intended to get it to be a better commercial citizen, to show how terrible it can be when it doesn’t get its way. Apple...
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The Liaison
Today in Tedium: In 2006, the Nintendo Wii’s software was running a little behind its hardware, and that meant problems for the console’s initial release. How’d Nintendo deal with it? Well, on some...
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Spammy Saturday
The percentage of people getting spam on the fediverse appears to have been relatively small—one poll I saw on Monday suggested that just 6% of roughly a thousand people had experienced the...
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Losing The Buzz, Keeping The Heat
Just as I was writing this, some terrible rumors about the future of Vice started emerging which totally caught me off-guard—and feel strangely related to this piece I wrote below on a competitor of...
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Create For Yourself
Today in Tedium: One of the first full-length articles I published for public consumption on the broader internet—rather than the visual blurbs I posted on my old site, ShortFormBlog—has become...
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When Stewards Go Astray
Automattic is an important company in the history of the internet. Not only is it one of the first examples of a company that found success with a foundation of open-source software, inspiring many...
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Missing The Human Touch
First off, a quick follow-up to yesterday’s post: I just got word from Automattic directly that Jetpack content will not be included in any AI data/content sales. So I guess that’s good news. If I...
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Luster Lost
Hey all, Ernie here with a refreshed piece from 2021. With the recent conversation around the risks digital assets face, I thought it might be good to resurface this piece about the risk physical...
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When The Ware Isn’t Firm
As I wrote about recently, the concept of firmware has largely been a good thing for computing, allowing devices to be improved and tweaked as necessary. And when something goes wrong, it makes it...
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Save Our Emulators
Nearly 30 years ago, in late 1996, I uncovered my first emulator. It was the pre-NESticle days. It barely worked—I want to say it was iNES, which had been limited on Windows machines—but it was so...
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