- The key difference between a calque and a loanword is that a loanword isn’t translated into English whereas a calque is. – surprisingly not via kottke, although he posted it, too!
- Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Jose Molina are television writer/producers with over forty years of combined experience — on shows including Lost, Firefly, Sleepy Hollow, and Helix — and they have a great podcast.
Should We Be Punching Nazis? You already know where I stand on this.
- My sons and I love Cautionary Tales, the Tim Harford podcast about mistakes and what we should learn from them. (He’s also written a children’s book, The Truth Detective: How to Make Sense of a World That Doesn’t Add Up.)
- Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of futurists hoping for immortality
- Is your heart a hardworking pump or a mystic miracle?
- What are Progressive Web Apps?
- You are the captain of a starship, about to embark on a long journey to a strange planet. You must hire a crew and buy supplies for the long journey ahead, then deal with all sorts of adventures and problems along the way. Space Awesome is a lovely little retro game similar to Oregon Trail* or Zork*. (You can play a complete game in a few minutes.)
- The Comprehensive Guide to Building a Realistic R2-D2 Replica
- A wall of ice the size of Rhode Island is heading toward a penguin-packed island off Antarctica.
- Once again, fans of the Buffalo Bills are the class of the NFL. They’ve raised over $100,000 with a GoFundMe for a diabetes charity supported by Mark Andrews, the Baltimore Ravens player who lost a fumble and dropped what would have been a game-tying catch in his team’s AFC divisional loss to the Bills.
- JK Brickworks is a site with instructions for lots of fun LEGO MOCs.
- “Wikenigma is an encyclopedia of known unknowns. That is, a listing of ‘scientific and academic questions to which no-one, anywhere, has yet been able to provide a definitive answer’.” – via kottke
- Oh, wow. This is awesome. The Public Domain Image Archive is a hand-picked collection of thousands of out-of-copyright works, free to browse, download, and reuse. – via @austinkleon
Bongo la, bongo cha cha cha
In which I explain the lengths to which I’ll go to preserve the integrity of my 30+ years of mp3 metadata
- “Productivity dysmorphia is the inability to see one’s own success, to acknowledge the volume of your own output.” – via Tom Whitwell
- How NASA has kept Apollo moon rocks safe from contamination for 50 years
- Everything you ever wanted to know about the history of tiki culture
- The Day the Music Burned is the story of the 2008 Universal fire.
- The current Banana Republic is nothing like it was when I was a kid. You can learn all about the company’s history at Abandoned Republic.
- The Launch is the story behind the 2019 debut of the Cosmic Crisp apple.
- The Ultimate Guide to Building a Hot Wheels Race Track
- For a little while now Apple has allowed you to tag someone as a legacy contact who can access and download the data in your account after your death. You can find the feature on the Sign-in & Security tab under your Apple Account at the top of the Settings app on your iOS device.
- If you ever find yourself hungry in Amsterdam, I urge you to try the pink mayonnaise french fries at ‘t Pareltje.
- Explaining how fighting games use delay-based and rollback netcode – How to design your game for optimal play over a network
- Bad news for insomniacs. New research highlights how chronic, insufficient sleep can impair your body’s ability to manage blood sugar – even if your weight stays stable. – via Arnold’s Pump Club
- “The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish.”
- Another good example of enshittification: Companies tend not to pass cost savings from efficiency gains onto consumers… they just sell people more of it. – via kottke
- The Ten Commandments of iOS Development
- At some point I really must make these artichoke soufflés. They look delicious and have been on my to-make list for years.
- When My Father Talked About Larry Bird: The Boston Celtics legend was the north star of my youth, present in every debate and stretch of silence with my dad. This was true on the night when my world stopped, leaving me on a sidewalk seeing stars.
- On Bill Watterson’s Refusal To License Calvin and Hobbes is a great read. Let’s call this reverse enshittification. – via Links You’ll Love
- “If a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance.”
- Do your shoelaces sit crooked? Do you retie your shoes several times a day? These are both signs of a Granny Knot. Learn the trick for keeping your shoes neatly and securely tied. – via Jodi Ettenberg
- Handy tool if you ever deal with email configurations: Quickly view your DomainKeys, DKIM, and SPF validity, and SpamAssassin score with DKIMValidator. – via @ofaolain.com
- Even the best parents of the best kids have had this thought: “Children are overbearing, supercilious, passionate, envious, inquisitive, egotistical, idle, fickle, timid, intemperate, liars, and dissemblers; they laugh and weep easily, are excessive in their joys and sorrows, and that about the most trifling objects; they bear no pain, but like to inflict it on others.” – Jean de La Bruyère, via Daily Dad
- The International Energy Agency has said the electricity usage of data centers worldwide might double in just four years. US electricity demand alone could jump 20 percent by 2030, driven mostly by AI. – via @longreads.com
- No. I don’t think I’ll ever get over Macho Grande.
- Were Back to the Future and The Goonies set on the same day? – via kottke
- Here’s a faithful recreation of me in the 1980s explaining my IT job to my grandparents at Christmas. It also perfectly mimics how I imagine I sound any time I talk to my teenager about pretty much anything. (But the danger presented by a poorly-maintained turbo encabulator is no joke!)
- Reverse Engineering Call Of Duty Anti-Cheat
- There are some hidden gems on this MacStories Best Apps of 2024 list.
- I have a generic digital photo frame at home that’s on its last legs. I got it well over a decade ago and was never thrilled with its buttons or input options, but at the time it was pretty awesome. Since then I’ve purchased multiple Pix-Star frames (website, Amazon) for far-off family members; I’m not a huge fan of those, either, and I don’t feel they’re worth the price tag. I just saw the Aura frame recommended in the hiro.report newsletter and it looks pretty nice, but it’s also pretty expensive. I’ve got at least two ancient iPads Mini collecting dust and am going to try repurposing those instead. (I’ll keep you posted.)
- To age on the internet is to exist in an accidental version of [a] time tunnel.
- I’m wondering for how long what you don’t know can’t hurt you. It’s definitely not forever, but it is still for today.
- I just received a text message that read, “Please be advised that we are currently conducting a lockdown drill at [your son’s high school]. This is a routine practice to ensure student and staff safety. Thank you for your understanding. STOP to end”
What a utopia it would be if simply texting STOP to end was actually the solution.
- Jumblie is yet another fun little word game you can add to your morning routine of Wordle, Connections, &c.
- The appeal to nature fallacy is not a viable healthcare strategy. Sometimes “all natural” is far better, but other times nature tries to kill us. – via @kmpanthagani.bsky.social
- Matthew Green wrote a post about how AI will interface with end-to-end encryption. TL;DR: Maybe not so well! – via @matthewdgreen.bsky.social
- Related: Another day, another horrific and troubling example of AI going wrong – via @emily.space
- Related: Scientists covered a robot finger in living human skin.
- Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. Unfortunately those who do study history are also involuntarily dragged along for the ride.
- In college a friend suggested I read The Myth Adventure series by Robert Asprin. At the time it had been almost a decade since I’d read The Hobbit and the rest of Tolkien, and I thoroughly enjoyed returning to stories of dragons and wizards and swords. It looks like they’re no longer being published, but if you’re into that sort of tale, I’m sure you can find them used somewhere.
Pampelone
In which I complain about an inexcusable lack of customer service
- Scientific American published a list of all the interesting things to see in the night sky in 2025.
- Spotify’s Secret Star Wars Easter Egg: The Hidden Lightsaber Feature (I don’t usually stream music, but this is pretty cool.)
- Are you responsible for designing or developing any type of authentication for a website or app? Take a second and read the UX of login codes by Brad Frost.
- “You can’t speak to the weather’s manager. Mother Nature has no concierge. Your investment portfolio will not halt an inferno. A college degree won’t tame the blaze. In the way we all inhabit the same Earth, we are all made of blood and flesh that burns the same.” – via The Handbasket
- Own a Kindle? You can read the complete works of Shakespeare for free.
- The Jabberwocky was one of my mom’s favorite poems. I love that I can still recite most of it from memory and it always makes me think of her.