2024 Tedium Highlight by Ernie Smith: Jon Stewart helps Comedy Central stay the course. 

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Ernie Smith’s 2024 Highlights

April 2024

Berliner Goes Tabloid

Considering the tale of the longtime NPR editor who decided to pull a Bulworth at the tail end of his long career.

It’s Easy. But Is It Easy Enough?

Self-hosted apps are having a moment, but people are still a little freaked out by them. Could a Flatpak-style approach to self-hosting help matters?

What’s A Workgroup?

How groupware gave us the first glimmers of what collaboration could be like in the online era, then became so pervasive that we don’t even think about it anymore.

The Post-SEO Era

What happens when a news site launches that basically ignores the SEO orthodoxy? Easy: They do fascinating stuff. Hence, Robinhood’s Sherwood.

My Final Hackintosh Rodeo

As we near what might be the final days of Hackintoshing, I tried out a VM-based technique for installing MacOS, complete with full-speed GPU, and you know what? It worked amazingly well.

Three Flavors, One Carton

Explaining why the multi-layer Neapolitan ice cream exists, and why it’s never actually appeared on a space shuttle despite strong suggestions otherwise.

The Venue’s Too Small

A popular indie-pop band announces just ahead of the beginning of a major arena tour that their show can’t fit in the minor-league hockey venue they chose.

xz, tarred

One of the most common programs in computing history gets nailed by a supply-chain attack—almost exactly a decade after Heartbleed highlighted similar structural weaknesses in the FOSS ecosystem.
March 2024

Recapturing Real Time

A decade ago, real-time social news coverage was a machine that simply worked. With our recent social media disarray, it feels broken. Can it be fixed?

The Value Of A Promise

When you hear a company like Substack or Canva make a promise, you may get pretty cynical that they’re going to keep it. Honestly, I get that.

A Creative Market Reset

Canva’s purchase of Affinity creates a new market dynamic for creative professionals, and it could have ripple effects as big as AI.

Songs About Superman

Why was alternative rock inundated with hit songs about Superman throughout the 1990s and early 2000s? Consider the monoculture.

The House Always Wins

The drama around G/O Media, including the mess with Deadspin I wrote about last week, points to the ways that the individual suffers at the hand of corporate greed.

Hackintosh In The Pastintosh?

If the Hackintosh ecosystem is about to fade away, it’s because it fulfilled its purpose as a way station between two vastly different eras of Apple.

Digital Training Wheels

Looking back at a bunch of toy electronics that may have latently inspired the tech that we use today. Might as well hook ’em young.

Linux Lessons (So Far)

My Linux journey has not been all sunshine and rainbows, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. A few thoughts.

Spinning The Dead

I am so obsessed with trying to figure out who Deadspin’s new owners are that it led me to some late night spam-blog sleuthing.

Circles And Slashes

One of the best-known icons of modern society is a classic example of a symbol—it’s easy to spot, but hard to explain. Who came up with it?

Save Our Emulators

Nintendo’s strong-arming of the Switch emulator Yuzu shows how little the company understands its own fan base. Emulators will not die so quietly.

When The Ware Isn’t Firm

A viral car review by tech-reviewing’s biggest name highlights the all-too-common pitfalls of shipping before the firmware is ready.

Luster Lost

Pondering the way that physical objects, like newspapers and photos, degrade over time, and why digital objects won’t fade in exactly the same way.
February 2024

Missing The Human Touch

Tech and creativity once had a symbiotic relationship in the push towards innovation. As generative content matures, it feels like they’re starting to diverge. And that’s bad for creative people.

When Stewards Go Astray

A pair of recent controversies around the tech-publishing giant Automattic raise an important question in my mind: Do we have to worry about the future of WordPress?

Create For Yourself

With disruption hitting the media industry acutely in 2024, now is the time to lean into owning your creative work. Have a say in your creative destiny.

Losing The Buzz, Keeping The Heat

BuzzFeed’s sale of Complex Networks (minus Hot Ones) shows how on the ropes the one-time media innovator really is. It feels reflective of the rest of the industry, too.

Spammy Saturday

A fediverse spam crisis highlights an inherent flaw in the decentralized social networking model: Some people are bad at updating and maintaining their apps.

The Liaison

How firmware became the layer between our hardware and software experiences. It was only sorta like Halt and Catch Fire.

The Web App Switcheroo

In its quest to do as little as possible to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, Apple randomly kneecaps web apps. Also: Am I sending this newsletter to fake people?

Retro Zeitgeist

Jon Stewart’s fascinating late-career return to The Daily Show is further evidence that linear television is no longer what it once was.

The Sneaky Standard

How Intel screwed over a standards body in the midst of giving computer users one of the most resilient technologies around.

sudo embrace

Microsoft’s decision to introduce sudo for Windows is strangely symbolic of how influential UNIX has been even on non-UNIX ecosystems.

Remaking Podcasts For Text

Podcasts are far and away the great example of how RSS can empower creators. Today’s thought experiment: How can we bring these benefits to written content?

The Ballad Of Mark Discordia

Considering an infamous target of trolling in the early online era. Did the middle-aged Nintendo fan really deserve it?
January 2024

Cache Clearing

Google appears to hide away an important feature from its search engine—an easily accessible cache of search results. (It’s still there, if you know where to look.)

No Frame Of Reference

The mixed-feelings reviews about the Framework 16 laptop show how complicated it is to pull off the hat trick of ambitious, powerful, and repairable.

Locked Up In Regions

The history of region-locking, a once-unintentional process of keeping devices built for one region from being used in another. (Now Apple’s doing it.)

The YouTube Boogie

A livestreaming pianist accidentally steps into an international incident—and nobody ends up looking particularly good.

Cropping Into A Debate

I took a pretty rough swipe at GIMP last week, and rather than letting sleeping dogs lie, I’d like to explain my POV on the popular open-source image editor.

Counterfeit Computing

Discussing the piratical efforts to rip people off by counterfeiting computer hardware. It’s been happening for more than 40 years.

Out With The Pitchforks

What Condé Nast did to Pitchfork this week is a travesty, and worse, it deeply misunderstands the publication Pitchfork was becoming.

Making My Linux Move

Why I decided to mostly move to Linux in 2024, and what I’ve learned in the process of that move.

What Was ISDN?

For decades, the telephone industry supported a new technology designed to make copper lines more useful to the average consumer. It’s great—if you’re a voice actor.

Barely Minimum

Substack favors the quick fix for its moderation crisis over the fundamental change, leaving a lot of longtime users in the lurch.

Mac All The Keyboards

The standard Macintosh keyboard layout makes it easy to add writer-desired special characters without pulling up a menu or relying on software trickery. Here’s how to get it on Linux and Windows.

Snapping The Cable

2024 feels like the year cable television is going to lose a lot of its cultural influence. Here’s why.

The Gator Bites Back

Facebook’s new “Link History” anti-feature reminds me of a very old data-siphoning trick: Create something of nominal value to convince consumers to give up the goods.

We Beat The Machine

The story of a 13-year-old gamer crashing the NES version of Tetris in a record-setting run is one of the best stories we have going right now.

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