We had only written the pilot of Halt and Catch Fire when we read Soul of the New Machine. That book had a huge impact not only on the content of our show, but the tone. The humanity at the center of the work. The book is still on my desk and will be forever. We owe Tracy a lot.

Holy shit we might have a cure for sickle cell anemia

I designed a lil fantasy keyboard on a plane. Two Tabs, bigger and simpler modifier keys. Bonus: A bit more symmetry. (The original is in the second image for comparison.)

In this promotional photo from Apple, the headphones are more expensive than the computer.

When researching for my Fn/Globe essay, I found that Centre Pompidou’s site has a bunch of cool photos of Richard Sapper’s IBM PC Convertible models and prototypes. Really fun to see a computer evolve this way. www.centrepompidou.fr/en/recherche...

I am planning a trip to (South) Germany in a few months. If you have any recs for tech history, museums, industrial sites, nerdy things, I’d appreciate them. Stuff like Deutsches Museum, the cool train in Wuppertal, Arithmeum and Analog Computer Museum, ZKM, Landschaftspark… Thanks in advance!

Boom! Had a great ight show over the skyline tonight. Here’s my first big lightning shot of the season. This is a 2-frame composite. Best as I can tell, two large, branching bolts struck the eastern antenna mast of the Hancock. #wxsky #ilwx

I think my dream keyboard would have a slightly wider Tab that would be split into two, Back Tab and Forward Tab. Tab is such a heavily used key that it would be nice to give it more to do, and free up ⇧ to mean something else, too.

I wrote an essay about the history of the [Fn] key, and my annoyance with how Apple has been handling it for the last many years. Hope you enjoy it! aresluna.org/fn/

Internecine. Diegetic. Vis-à-vis (in preposition form).

Never forget: 8 years ago a random person on Craigslist wrote the most effective ad for the Toyota Corolla, ever.

A very good use of Gorton.

I’m writing an essay about Fn (and Globe) keys on the keyboard. If there’s anything on your mind: any questions you have, or any trivia/interesting things you know of, or any personal experiences, please let me know! 🙏

Did Apple explain why they abandoned the snapping/magnetic/shape-changing iPad mouse pointer announced in 2020, and went to a more traditional arrow last year?

@snell.zone Hi! Quick note that this link is malformed and doesn’t work without cleaning:

I’m gonna salute every snowplow that passes me.

Mayor Brandon Johnson announced “Abolish ICE” as the winner of a citywide snow plow name contest. He had earlier given it a “full and complete” endorsement.

@chimeracoder.bsky.social Sorry to bother you, but still thinking of your 2015 essay (and I put it in my book, too!) and was wondering – did it get better since? Can you write your name in Unicode? I tried to figure it out for context clues, but alas I am not sure I know the answer.

I would love an app that looks something like this.

Arguably not an answer to the question AT ALL but when I was working at a Polish videogame magazine in the 1990s, they allowed me to review the first Grand Theft Auto. I was a nobody, but so was the game; no one could expect how big it’ll become in the next three decades.

I have a friend who said, of Starfleet Academy, that this took them out of it - that seeing a person in a wheelchair in the 32nd century seemed unrealistic, since medicine in Star Trek "should be able to cure whatever was wrong with them." That's not the case, for any number of possible reasons.

They simply can't help themselves. It's utterly pathological.

@lunarboy.com Re: rogerwong.me/2026/02/the-... In my world, ideally you have to do both at the same time. Sometimes the UI will inform semantics. Sometimes the perfect model cannot be expressed in an interface anyone likes. “No plan ever survives a contact with the enemy,” and so on.

I was so frustrated with the amount of mistaps that seemed to be happening in Bluesky iOS app search history (I tap one item and I get the results for another) that I analyzed the targets via iPhone Mirroring and indeed, they are very heavily imbalanced. @bsky.app, can you fix please?

Thete are coffee table books with photos of Braun equipment, Apple computers, collections of corporate brand standards, typeface specimens etc. But outside of some nostalgic video game coffee table books, have their ever been books showing primarily software? Graphical user interfaces or apps?

There’s been chatter about The Moylan Arrow recently – the indicator showing which side of the car fuel intake is on. Which made me think: What would be the equivalent of this in software?

My buddy and I are running a UX book club, and the next thing we want to read is a book not written by a white guy. I’m looking for recommendations – thank you! Already on our list: - Brenda Laurel, Computers As Theatre - Erika Hall, Just Enough Research - Lucy Suchman, Plans and Situated Actions

So in between the Melania thing and the X not being blocked from the App Store thing, Tim Cook is so not meeting this moment that he practically invented a time machine.

I linked to the excellent holdcomputers.com before, and today I’m back in love with the aesthetics of all of these photos of people fixing computers and electronics in Hungary, decades ago.

I was curious if the classic DOS font would look different with the same letterforms, but with actual proportional widths. It’s kind of… maybe interesting? It’s far from finished – kerning is really hard! – but if you are curious, you can download and play with it here: aresluna.org/Ac437_Acer71...

The pet influencers are pissed.

This is a really great essay.

I’ve been working on this for a while, but let’s make it official: I started a little Tumblr-like microblog about software craft and quality! You can sign up via RSS or a weekly newsletter digest. There’s already almost two months of content, if you just want to check it out. unsung.aresluna.org

Cleveland’s Regional Transit Authority’s logo is actually really good.

Gorton in Cleveland!

Morning

I came to visit the Ohio State Reformatory because of the Shawshank Redemption connection, but I had no idea they also shot Tango & Cash here. I was obsessed with that awful movie as a kid.

I wanted to add a good table of contents UI to some of my more intense essays, and I liked the end result so much I wrote a deep dive on the design details of the solution I came up with: aresluna.org/design-detai... I am curious what you think of it, plus of me talking about it this way!

What are you favourite well-made apps and sites? Phones and computers alike. Doesn’t have to be “pretty,” but well-made according to whatever definition works for you.

On the off chance someone reading this has experience: Has anyone successfully output video showing Display P3 color space? I am taking screen grabs of something I am working on, and the only promising lead so far is using Animated AVIFs, but they seem to be struggling with 30+ fps.

Bill Watterson is my favorite cartoonist. I adored the relationship btw Calvin and Hobbes as a child. But as I've gotten older, these strips feel even more tender and insightful. My respect for him grew when I learned of his stance against merchandising. Such principles are almost unheard of today.

One of these weeks where a tough design problem is going so well I could be kicking myself for procrastinating with approaching it for almost a year… but the truth is it’s probably going so well *because* I’ve been low-key thinking about it for that amount of time.

I wrote a photo essay with 20+ of my favourite tech museums in the world, and tried to figure out what makes a great museum in the process. I am very curious what tech museums you like – and why! aresluna.org/fav-tech-mus...

This all seems pretty unbecoming of a FIFA Peace Prize winner

Watching Gattaca and The Truman Show and thinking of an alternate universe where Andrew Niccol’s career went… differently.

Once again, Stanislaw Lem was so terrifyingly prescient. His books Eden and Fiasco (both excellent reads) were basically about this, “the breakdown of shared reality.”

Kudos to Stranger Things for keeping the opening credits synced to music on a strict 3–1 beat throughout its entire five-season run. This would be so so easy to renege on, but someone cared. 👊 www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO-w... www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHO...

spent a few liminal nights before the turn of the solar calendar finally doing something about the bitsy tab i've had open in my browser for over a year and learning/bumbling through the making of this tiny dumb game play it here: wolfchirp.itch.io/rendezvous

Basically a flawless movie.

*in Mary McDonnell‘s incredulous voice* …whaaat?