Our Junk Drawer
Tedium Shorties
They're too short for 3,000-word stories, but too interesting to not write about at all. Meet Tedium’s shorties—the latest quick hits of news and weirdness from Tedium.
Pizza & Pineapple
Is it Pizza Time already? Tedium contributor David Buck recently teamed up with Weird Paul Petroskey to create a music video David’s own novelty song, “Pineapple Pizza.” Whether you love or hate Hawaiian Pizza, the video is guaranteed fresh (your experience may vary). You can watch it here, if you’re interested in such things.
Harmony In Your Hand
“… elites distrusted this easily accessible new instrument as ‘chaotic and culturally inferior.’”
— JSTOR Daily highlights the evolution of the harmonica from piano-tuning utility into full-on fad in the 19th century. Dylan would get his hands on one way later.
Now With OCR
Here's the Mueller Report, fully OCR'ed using Acrobat Pro. I've tested and it seems to have gone through OK. Still loading, give it a second to load into Dropbox. https://t.co/hTYZeOsait
— Ernie Smith (@ShortFormErnie) April 18, 2019
The Mueller Report wasn't OCR'ed, but it's trivial to OCR a document in 2019 if you know what you're doing. Thank you, Adobe, as well as the many inventors that came before you.
Keeps Going, and Going …
“Let’s face it, it was only a screen saver. It didn’t need a lot of depth.”
— Developer Peter Avritch, discussing how he saved his company in the early ’90s by convincing an ad agency to let him make an Energizer Bunny screen saver for Windows.
Music for Plants
In the late ’70s, a Moog expert named Mort Garson recorded an album of music intended for plants called Mother Earth's Plantasia. The album, freely available online, is getting an upcoming vinyl release. Fans of Raymond Scott or Ernest Hood, listen up.
Enough to Pay for Itself?
A surprisingly novel video: A YouTuber explains, in detail, how much money he makes from his channel, in exact detail.
Geoworks Comeback
The '90s operating system PC/GEOS, a suite also known as GeoWorks that we wrote about in 2016, is being revived yet again as an open-source project. TechRepublic has the details.
Emoji Corrections
90
The number of emoji first included in SoftBank's SkyWalker service starting in 1997. According to Emojipedia, this icon set (which yes, includes the poop emoji) predates what was long believed to be the first emoji set, a series released by Docomo in 1999.
An Xbox in Disguise
“And frankly, having a Mac “Property of Microsoft” in a collection is still pretty fun.”
— Blogger Pierre Dandumont explains the story of the pre-release Xbox 360 development kit, which just so happened to be an Apple Power Mac G5.
Bloody Terrible Idea
We suck young blood: As it turns out, the FDA doesn't like it when startups try to claim that giving old people young people's blood is a good idea to help extend their lives. As TechCrunch notes, one firm that has been doing this, Ambrosia Medical, appears to be skirting some important rules—and they needed the call-out.