Excited about an imminent series of newsletter posts about some fun keyboards I found since finishing the book. Subscribe here if this is interesting to you! newsletter.shifthappens.site

I dare you to find a more impressive bezel. (This is from a tram museum in Melbourne.)

I can’t find whom I picked this idea up from a few years ago, but I’m paying it forward: Every year I put this up on the wall, and every evening I try to write something I liked about the day I just had (if anything).

1. Looked up “reticle” to make sure I’m using it right. (It’s spelled “reticle” and “reticule,” apparently.) 2. On that page, noticing a photo of a cool device using Gorton. 3. Now I have that device.

This is an incredible consistency.

In my greatest hour of need, where were you

Throwback to me sneaking in signatures into my books! Signing the books after they’re assembled and packed is a logistical nightmare (you don’t want to have to repack and reship books at your home), and I find bookplates to be clumsy…

I just revisited a little piece I wrote about ten years ago, about TV clock idents. Turns out: · There is at least one person out there in the world who also recreates TV clock idents in JavaScript · The Polish TV clock wasn’t even Polish! aresluna.org/the-clock/

Fonts are in the news, so I'm going to take the opportunity to port over an old thread: what was typography like in the Soviet Union? Spoiler: they did not just have 1 font everyone had to use. As a matter of fact, there were 39. One of them, you can see here, used to great effect for "Chernobyl."

This is genuinely a really fun keyboard anecdote and I have never heard of it before. With Tom Scott and the Map Men! youtu.be/TuAc-hsH8XM

It’s been snow time in Chicago for about 10 days now!

I wonder if the LINC computer from 1962 is the first pixel font on a display, ever. The font was 4x6, and the small screen seems to hold only 25x12 characters. I’m curious if it was designed by Mary Allen Wilkes?

Amazing. Apparently I take enough photos of Sneakers-related stuff that my Photos app is now detecting Robert Redford and Dan Aykroyd as my friends.

'Tis the season once again! Around this time of year, people who strung their Christmas lights the wrong way start wandering into hardware stores looking for what they later find out is often called a "suicide cable."

It turns out I took 1,203 new photos of Gorton ever since publishing the essay about it in February.

A really interesting (to me) Gorton case study. Same building in Chicago, two sides of the same doorway, and the letterforms are different! Maybe shows how many copies of Gorton were there, modified and shared carelessly?

from my team

Gorton in Hong Kong confirmed!

I’ve noticed a bunch of intercoms in Hong Kong have this animation of a cat on a loop:

I’m so excited for this book.

@bzotto.bsky.social Good luck! Backer number 5!

In Chicago today.

@halideapp.bsky.social Is it known that assigning Halide to the camera button and invoking it when screen is off leads to a strange experience where the live preview doesn’t show, but the camera still works? iPhone 17, stable iOS. Default Camera app doesn’t have this problem.

Name a movie from its Gorton appearance! Can you name all four? (Ordered easiest to hardest.)

One could make an argument that the Canon Cat prototypes in some ways look even better than the final result.

Wanted to give a shoutout to the excellent work of The Digital Antiquarian, whom I only discovered a few months ago. www.filfre.net/sitemap/

A cool retro tech aesthetic: an abandoned comms room in a Nowa Huta (Cracow) steelworks – named after Lenin originally.

@plumberduck.bsky.social repeatedly → reportedly? www.avclub.com/riyadh-comed...

I have always been surprised the programming text editors don’t include semantics in ⌘F, for example “ignore matches within comments/commented out code” or “find only within string literals.” Does this exist, and I’m just using bad editors?

😍😍😍

A 2-pixel tall pixel font. (!) joefatula.com/twoslice.html (And a quiet celebration of redudancy built into languages.)

With the Trump Administration about to roll its ugly occupation into Chicago, I wanted to write a little lyrical love letter to the city. dansinker.com/posts/202…

Just when you thought you have seen every possible arrow key layout…

I’m glad you can still occasionally be surprised by something uncharted on Google Maps.

I just put online the chapter from my book that talks about all the myths and mysteries about QWERTY and Dvorak. You can read it here: aresluna.org/the-primitiv...

I posted online the 2023 essay that was available as a Shift Happens booklet before: The convoluted history of Return and Enter on keyboards. aresluna.org/the-day-retu...

I don’t know what’s the best/most interesting of Soviet clones of tech from elsewhere… I mean, surely Buran, but I like this one, too.

This is a really well done video and I learned so much from it. Those AirPods are clever little devices. youtu.be/PB_8dGKh9JI

You know what would be really nice? A really simple digital watch whose only “smart” function is mirroring in some way what Dynamic Island does on your iPhone. That’s it.

I finally updated my homepage! It’s not really flashy in any way, but it has a lot of links to what I’ve done over the last years. If you like my work, chances are you will find here something you enjoy. aresluna.org

Visiting Hong Kong and Taiwan later this year for the first time. You know what I like: urbanism, old technology, cool stories, beautiful nature. I’d be grateful for any tips and recommendations!

Saw this in Brooklyn today. A perfect visual joke.

@chicagocta.bsky.social Do you know what is the name of the artist/artists? bsky.app/profile/ares...

Art from the just-opened new L stations in Chicago.

Do you have any favourite photo essays/travelogues? I’m trying to understand what makes the best ones work. I don’t *think* it is just photos, but maybe some tricky-to-balance interplay between photos and story?

A few people reminded me recently how ten years ago I translated into English a short (sci-fi-ish) 1976 story from my favourite writer, Stanisław Lem. I just moved the story from Medium to my site for a nicer reading experience, if you want to give it a shot! aresluna.org/one-hundred-...

I wrote something new! It’s a UI design history essay about Mac’s Control Panel, and it uses emulation in some… maybe new and maybe interesting ways? aresluna.org/frame-of-pre...

@jonas.do waxy.org/2025/07/weat...

HAPPENING NOW: A MASSIVE crowd has gathered at Daley Plaza in Chicago for a “No Kings Day” rally against Donald Trump (Video: Luis Emora)

Chicago a few hours ago