2020 Tedium Highlight by Ernie Smith: Surviving a plague through pop culture. Or trying to. 

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Ernie Smith’s 2020 Highlights

December 2020

So, That Happened

The state of our Tedium in 2020 was, um, have you seen what happened this year? Holy crap, everyone, that was a lot. Let’s assess the damage.

Big Email Energy

Why your favorite email newsletter (not Tedium) always gets cut off by your favorite webmail client. (It may be all the tracking stuff in the links!)

The Gift Of 2020

Sure, maybe this year was a bit of a stinker. But as our last-minute holiday guide shows, there’s still lots of strange crap you can buy people you barely know.

Digital Decay

Why you can’t find the groundbreaking search engine AltaVista on the web anymore. Friends don’t let friends visit Digital.com without knowing the truth.

All You Need Is Weird

The Beatles might have been the most mainstream band in history, but many of their inspirations were hugely obscure—and inspired obscurities of their own.

Hack Back to the Mac

Why the Hackintosh era, even if it looks like it might just dead-end thanks to Apple Silicon, was still a useful phenomenon for the Mac.

Reading Below The Surface

How subcarrier radio signals made room for hidden stations on the FM dial for decades—and help ensure, even today, that everyone has access to the news.
November 2020

Worst Firmware Update Ever

How Sony screwed up 15 years of goodwill with developers and open-source users by removing Linux support from its console—support hacked back in anyway.

By Our Powers Combined …

How the webring became the grassroots tool of choice for sharing content online in the ‘90s. The concept was social media before media was social.

Rock Of Age$

Why the superfan will become ever more important to the music industry over time, or why $1,200 box sets exist despite appealing to only a few people.

Messy Convergence

When technology concepts awkwardly merge together, or why someone thought it might be a good idea to combine a mouse and a telephone.

The Internet's First Election

The web wasn't common in 1992, but presidential candidates notably took baby steps toward the internet that year—Ross Perot in a bigger way than most.

Nonpartisan Zen Arcade

It’s a stressful time in the world, so we reached out to some of our readers and contributors to find out how they’re using tedium to keep sane. It helps.
October 2020

Plastic Pail Perfection

Why McDonald’s is missing a major marketing opportunity by not handing out its ’80s era plastic pumpkin buckets to modern kids. (I feel strongly about this.)

Such Low Heights

Why low overpasses are often so damaging to trucks, RVs, and other large vehicles—and why the ensuing crashes are so fun to watch.

Strip-Mined News

Local newspapers have already faced issues with outsourcing and an array of cuts for years. But the threat is changing—and you should know what it looks like.

Social Media, McAfee Style

The controversial jailed antivirus software mogul John McAfee followed up his virus-fighting work with one of the first social networks. Really.

No More Eternal Septembers

For decades, technical users looking down on the less knowledgeable have set the stage for a lot of bad online discourse. Can those users break the chain?
September 2020

A Plethora of Tweezers

Pondering the way that tweezers isolate things at a small scale, and the fact that you can take an aptitude test to show that you can tweeze with the pros.

FTP Fadeout

The beating heart of the early internet may have been FTP, or file transfer protocol. But after 50 years of mainstream use, its demise may be imminent.

Let’s Talk About Stuff

Every once in a while we just need to randomly write about a bunch of different things that have nothing in common. Let’s open the grab bag, internet.

iBook Stampede

Why did thousands of people trample one another to buy a $50 iBook in 2005? In many ways, it’s a story about a lack of tech access that’s still being told.

It’s All In The Cards

With PCMCIA (also known as PC Card), it was easy to upgrade our old laptops. But for years, the tech was relegated to a depressing bureaucratic fate.

The Glitch Equation

How one of the most famous computer bugs of all time, the Intel Pentium floating-point division glitch, blew out of proportion into a PR crisis.

The Tough Climb

Being creative is easier than ever, yet some are motivated to go down the more complicated road to reach creative nirvana. Why is that?
August 2020

Donglevision

Pondering the many ways that dongles have taken over our lives, for better and for worse. One port will never rule them all, apparently.

Epic MegaFight

Why did Epic Games decide to go scorched-earth on the App Store model last week with Fortnite? Perhaps it reflects the company’s shareware roots.

Putting Beer On Ice

For decades, it was easier to get a bottle of vodka in Iceland than a pint of beer. The reason says more about Iceland’s politics than its temperance movement.

News In Small Bytes

Newspapers said they wanted to protect the print product, but they were raring to go when it came to experimental online news approaches in the early '80s.
July 2020

Blister In The Store

Why plastic blister packs and clamshell packs, despite the near-universal frustration they create among consumers, have become a truism of consumer goods.

Web the RIPper

Most people remember bulletin board systems as having chunky text-based graphics. One developer tried fixing that, but RIPscrip ran head-first into the web.

We Were Promised Skynet

Satellite internet was once seen as a holy grail of connect-anywhere online access. It hasn’t worked yet, but the promise is closer than ever.

No Room for Design

Of the many things that social platforms have taken away from us, perhaps the most disappointing is the freedom to customize our spaces. We need it back.

Blue Flashing Light

Have we let the LED indicator light go too far? These lights are everywhere, and they make it hard to sleep. Here’s a case for some less-annoying indicators.

Having a Cow, Man

From knockoff Bart Simpsons to CafePress ripoffs, what the long association between T-shirts and bootlegging tells us about copyright.

Fourth Failures

The many people who tried and failed to launch a fourth television network in the United States. Regulations and high costs made it harder than it looked.
June 2020

This Is Definitely A Test

The history of color bars, the most common television test pattern out there, and what they actually do. (Also, Netflix has some weird test programming.)

Flight Risk

The in-flight entertainment system was once a novel idea that kept passengers enthralled. Now in the COVID-19 era, it’s both outdated and a serious germ hazard.

Power Outage

Looking back at Apple’s transition from PowerPC to Intel CPUs, and considering why Intel now finds itself in the same position PowerPC did 15 years ago.

The Payment Comes After

Discussing the evolution of the cash-on-delivery system for mailing goods, why it faded out, and where it actually remains in use. Sorry, no “Sorry, no C.O.D.”

Peel The Labels

The evolution of self-stick adhesives, which are basically everywhere—and had a particularly awful name when they were first introduced.

Jagged Little Tapes

These transitional audio recording formats were briefly dominant—then, quickly grew obscure. The further back you go, the more obscure they get.

Now You’re Playing With Power

How I found home networking nirvana with a powerline connection, a form of home networking that might be called poor man’s ethernet. No drilling involved.
May 2020

Bye Bye, Buffet?

The all-you-can-eat buffet is unlikely to survive the pandemic in its current form—in part because sanitation already made it somewhat risky.

Painting Outside The Lines

Adobe was already a big company when it first sold Photoshop, but its biggest competitor, Paint Shop Pro, was built by an airline pilot in his free time.

The Backlink Economy

Businesses want to show up on the front page of a specific search term, and they’re willing to annoy you to get a backlink from you. Please never do this.

Browse Minimally

Perhaps the problem with the modern web browser is that there’s just too much stuff. What if we cut things down to the bare minimum?

The Internet’s Many Branches

The evolution of the top-level domain, a solution to a technical problem that has evolved into something with lots of cultural and marketing value.

Box Office No-Go

Why the conflict over the movie industry’s embrace of video on demand reflects a century-long symbiotic relationship gone sour. AMC is just Trollin’.
April 2020

Byproduct Breakdown

When you hear about economic struggles involving pork or oil caused by COVID-19, it’s worth remembering that their byproducts are everywhere. Yes, everywhere.

Not-So-Clear Channel

In a time of national crisis, an emergent broadcast radio giant, Clear Channel, banned a bunch of songs from the airwaves. Or did it?

Sunday Night Live

While Saturday Night Live might have had the laughs, its short-lived offshoot Sunday Night (aka Night Music) may have been the greatest music TV show ever made.

The Original Internet Bottleneck

Many early ISPs—particularly AOL—weren’t ready to offer unlimited internet access in the mid-’90s. That is, until a surprising disruptor appeared: AT&T.

Culture In A Dangerous Time

Finding comfort in a scary cultural moment from the modern digital landscape. Thankfully, we still have the internet to saturate us in offbeat popular culture.
March 2020

Touch And Go

Pondering the disastrous fate of the HP TouchPad, an early tablet based on WebOS that’s best known for being the subject of a well-remembered fire sale.

Buffering … ⏳

The fact is, despite four decades of evolving technology, video conferencing is a sort of low-level magic that still konks out half the time. Here’s why.

Looking For Reasons To Laugh

Why “canned laughter,” a controversial element of most television comedy, feels so unnerving in its absence—and why it’s so fascinating in the first place.

Thinking In Parallels

Why do we find historical parallels so interesting for analyzing current events like the coronavirus—and what do they leave out, anyway?

Double Vision

The history of picture-in-picture technology, an idea that seems a lot less impressive now than it did in the 1980s, and an era of forgotten set-top devices.

Bread End

Why are the heel pieces, or end pieces, of bread seen as undesirable compared to the rest of the loaf—and what kind of waste does that create, anyway?
February 2020

Stop Stealing My Sign

Yard signs are everywhere during political campaigns, but campaign organizers don't think they actually work. So why do campaigns spend so much on them?

The Internet Of Trash

We may have made a horrible mistake by unnecessarily making our consumer electronics devices smart—and removing generations of future use in the process.

Taking Stock

My longtime fascination with T-Mobile CEO John Legere’s odd slow cooker social media promotion, now that he’s slow-cooked his way through a merger with Sprint.

Impeachment Growth Hacking

The reason we might all be using Netflix today could have a lot to do with a marketing stunt involving the grand jury testimony that got Bill Clinton impeached.
January 2020

Tinker Tech

The Pinebook Pro, a community-built Linux laptop that runs on ARM hardware, offers a few surprises. Fairly inexpensive, it’s the perfect machine for tinkerers.

Throw It In The Pile

The résumé, a document that largely gained prominence in the past half-century, was once a key part of getting a job. Soon, it might just disappear entirely.

The Email Appliance

The story of the MailStation, an information appliance that didn’t do much, really, except send email. That, somehow, makes it even more interesting today.

Moldy Oldie Marketing

How the music industry’s TV-driven direct marketing strategies revived vintage hits, salvaged floundering careers, and brought us Zamfir’s epic pan flute.

My Modular Mind

What makes modular designs great for consumers often makes them troublesome for businesses, or why you can’t upgrade an iPhone these days.

The Inbox Pioneer

For more than 25 years, this newsletter author has been snarking wise about weird news. Here’s the tale of This is True, one of the first inbox success stories.

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