August 2026

Keeps on giving

Posted on

    Just ran across this now: back in April, Rogue Amoeba redesigned their software-update notifications. This more understated approach is so much better.

    I think a lot of us have grown to regard software-update notifications as annoyances. We’re already besieged by unwanted popups and windows ordering us to stop whatever we’re already doing and do what some external entity wants us to do. Apple’s update notifications, you can’t even turn off; part of my morning ritual is swiping away the stupid “Update iOS” notification that shows up every night.

    It’s unfortunate things turned out this way. Software updates are generally a good thing. It means the software is being supported and improved. Free software updates are even better. The fact that these announcements feel similar to dickovers is, as usual, down to poor—or, perhaps, maliciously self-serving1—UI design.

    Gifts are presented, not thrown in someone’s face. Software updates are a gift. Developers should put more effort into treating them this way.

    1. I’m thinking of Apple here, whose spammy notifications for new operating systems (I consider these ads) cannot be turned off, forcing users who don’t want them to come up with convoluted, albeit very clever, workarounds. Why doesn’t Apple let you turn these off? Presumably because they want high upgrade statistics they can brag about.

      Apple would probably counter by saying that software upgrades benefit users. That is my decision to make, not Apple’s. When a company doesn’t let me turn something off, I assume that whatever it is exists primarily for their benefit, not mine.

      ↩

    When you put it like that

    Posted on

    Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko on doorknobs:

    Doorknobs are the work of the devil, designed only to make people suffer. “Yes, I would like to apply inordinate force on a small slippery sphere” — statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.

    The absurdity of this near-ubiquitous design decision had never occurred to me because interacting with doorknobs is one of these invisible, largely subconscious things one does on an hourly basis without even noticing. But come on—can you argue with the logic here?

    Imagine: Both of your hands are full, and you now have to apply rotational force to one of the least grippable form factors humanity could have invented. Who came up with this?

    Silly Little Plastic Cat

    Posted on

    Ran across Zack Grant’s Silly Little Plastic Cat on Colossal last night. I really enjoyed it.

    I’d heard about the phenomena before: Since the early 1980s, pieces of bright orange #Garfield telephones have been washing up on the beaches of #Brittany. Locals have collected thousands of them, and in some cases use them for decor.

    Rather than being frustrated at the defacing of their shoreline with cartoon #junk, most Bretons seem to have developed an add sort of affection for Garfield—at least the phone version of him—and have adopted him as a local mascot. It’s a strange combination: a part of #France known for its rustic, unchanging nature, represented by a creation that’s as iconic a component of American kitschy consumerism as Mickey Mouse.

    Cute it might be, but Grant doesn’t shy from the larger, unsettling reality of the Garfield phenomena: the whole reason these phones are still emerging, decades later, is because plastic is forever. “The electronics are melted into the rocks now,” one man says. In 2019, a local farmer revealed the source of these things: a shipping container lodged in a mostly inaccessible cave along the coast.

    As a couple people in the film point out, if the contents of a single shipping container can pollute a shoreline for forty years, imagine the impact from however many hundreds are lost at sea each year. One resident sums up what the unending tide of Garfield phones really is: “…catastrophic toxic #waste [and] an ecological time bomb.”

    head-explode-emoji

    Posted on

      Someone figured out how to write functional #DOS programs using only emoji. Including a Mandelbrot generator.

      I wouldn’t have guessed this could work if they hadn’t explained it, but the technique is pretty clever: they realized that #emoji code points (each emoji’s unique ID), when translated to raw UTF-8 byte sequences, can also be interpreted as Intel 8088 machine-code instructions. A carefully arranged string of emoji results in a series of bytes that’s both valid UTF-8 text and an executable DOS program. It’s fun to read.

      As an example, here’s the program running in my mind right now: 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯