From the Tedium Archives: The quickly forgotten phenomenon of scrambled television stations that ran over the air on UHF signals. Not everyone had cable TV at first. 

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The Can That Always Can

The history of WD-40, a chemical substance with an unusual origin story and a rust-fighting ability that has become a standby of workbenches the world over.

Dead on Archival

Considering the challenges that face shuttered newspapers with decades or even centuries of material to preserve.

Weapon of mass dimensions: Michael Pick, a.k.a. The Casual Engineer, has developed a gigantic Nerf gun that’s 12 and a half feet long and weighs more than 200 pounds. It is an impressive way to deploy Nerf darts as needed. Is your mind blown? Yeah, so’s mine. Be sure to check out my story for Vice on his giant Nintendo Switch.

Pushing Photos Through Wires

The technology used to distribute photos through news wire services inspired a whole bunch of innovations with use cases beyond newspapers. Like television.

Tuned Out

Why children’s radio—a format once important enough that Disney undermined a competitor to dominate the radio dial—has largely disappeared from the airwaves.

The Scrolling Orb

The evolution of the trackball, which is more than an upside-down mouse. It's the Royal Canadian Navy’s greatest gift to modern-day computing. Really.

Open To Conversion

From PCX to TGA to VRML, considering a number of image formats that the world forgot. Not every image standard is going to last, no matter how pretty it is.

v4

Tedium has a new, fresher coat of paint, with a design intended to get you to dive in even deeper, if you so choose.

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.

The Cold Cocktail

How NyQuil, the over-the-counter cold medicine of choice for millions of sniffling people, innovated by combining a bunch of drugs together in a novel way.

Dancing With The Walking Dead

Zombies are a big part of pop culture, but songs about them are not—except for one performed by the King of Calypso himself, Harry Belafonte.
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