#Notes
August 5, 2026
August 4, 2026
Notes for August 4, 2026
Native Apps Should Be Avoided Whenever Possible — No One's Happy
Apple requires apps to submit a privacy manifest disclosing what data they collect. The White House app declared an empty array. Zero data collection. Meanwhile, the actual binary contained ten analytics frameworks, including the full OneSignal SDK with a sub-framework specifically for location tracking. The GPS pipeline polled precise coordinates every 4.5 minutes in the foreground and every 9.5 minutes in the background, syncing everything to OneSignal’s commercial servers. A boolean flag in OneSignal’s server responses could remotely enable or disable GPS tracking without an app update and without Apple review.
I didn't know this was even possible if the dev didn't list what data was collected in the App Store. Like I thought there was actually some kind of review process besides "trust me bro" but I guess not. Pretty scary stuff:
Governments are some of the biggest buyers. Military and intelligence agencies purchase location data from prayer apps, dating apps, and fitness trackers. Immigration enforcement uses it to locate and detain people. Police departments buy it to surveil suspects, protesters, and entire neighborhoods — sidestepping warrant requirements entirely. Courts have issued “geofence” orders demanding records on every device near a location at a given time, sweeping up everyone at a political rally, a school board meeting, or a gun show alongside any actual suspects. After Roe v. Wade was overturned, law enforcement used location data to track trips to abortion clinics. None of this required a court order, because the data was commercially available.
I've always said the web is my favorite OS. Beyond the privacy angle, most apps are usually trash anyway. Miniflux is more functional and to the point than any native RSS reader I've ever installed on my phone.
Social media apps are the worst. Tumblr is unusable in app form if you don't pay $7 a month to disable ads every other post. Same with Reddit, only the ads are posing as real posts these days, so I guess it's mostly useless whichever way you access it. I quit TikTok entirely because it still kept running in the background, showing me targeted ads about something I mentioned 20 minutes ago, even with Background App Refresh disabled. There is no web version, so I moved on. Fuck em. If there's a mobile web version of something, that's what I'm using.
Also worth mentioning, half of the places I spend my time online are web-based anyway; Atmosphere apps, Fark.com, Lemmy... Just use the website.
I know I'm rambling at this point, but even back in the day when smartphones first started coming out, the thing I was most hyped about was that you could carry around a web browser in your pocket wherever you go. Sometimes I wonder what things would be like if Firefox OS didn't violently crash and burn.
via nooneshappy.com
Jonah Hill's Jiu-Jitsu Training Means He'd 'Annihilate' Anyone Calling Him Fat Guy From 'Superbad'
"My favorite thing is people are like, 'Oh, Jonah Hill, fucking fat guy from Superbad,'" Hill said. "And I'm like, 'I would fucking annihilate you, dude. I'm not kidding you. Try it. If you see me, try it, dude. Bring it. Who's got it?'"
What a tool lol I guess I'll just remember him as the crack smoking business guy from Wolf of Wall Street who thinks he's invincible.
via complex.com
NASA Backs Wild Plan for a Laser-Powered Drone to Explore Giant Caves Below the Moon's Surface
The U.S. space agency announced that it will fund research by Austin-based Stone Aerospace, Inc. to develop a tethered lunar-spelunking drone—powered via laser light that will be beamed through a system of fiber optic cables conjoining it to a lunar rover on the Moon’s surface.
Love this. Maybe the caves will be full of mole people. Who, hopefully, aren't too pissed off about Elon's rocket crash landing there tonight.
via gizmodo.com
New AI Chatbot Turns Out to Be One Overworked Guy Answering All the Messages by Hand
“My answers will be slow. They probably won’t be correct, or maybe they could be, but they’ll be very cryptic,” said Bryant. “You will have a bad experience with ChatTJB.”
This is cute! And it only takes roughly eight glasses of water per day to run.
via futurism.com
Pokémon Red/Blue 3D Mod Gets New Features Including Third-Person Camera
Dramatic Shape's Voxel Mod is a game changer. So many people on social media are raving about this mod, and rightfully so. It's easy to set up, runs on a number of devices including your Mac, and makes the original Pokémon adventure feel like a brand new game.
The OG Pokémon games are, what, like 30 years old? And they're still absolutely legendary. Idk how many times I've played through Yellow... but it's a lot. One of the first games I ever got for my Gameboy Pocket when I was a kid 🥲
This mod looks sick! I wish it was a traditional ROM patch so I could play it on my Anbernic handheld, but there's a lot going on here so I get why it's not. And it probably wouldn't run too great on an underpowered emulator console anyway. Definitely going to check this out when I get home tonight.
via retrododo.com
August 3, 2026
Notes for August 3, 2026
I went on a work trip - and realised I'm bisexual
I love a good coming out story. Especially when yourself is one of the people you're coming out to. I was in my mid 20s — around the same age as the author when I came out as bi. I didn't even admit it to myself until then... I just thought I was a little more feminine than the typical truck driving, motor cranking, gun shooting friends I hung out with.
One thing I’ve learned throughout my journey is when living as only part of myself, it was far more exhausting than I realised. Stepping into my full identity brought me a kind of joy that changed everything.
I kinda blindsided everyone when I was ready to come out. I met a guy during a night out at the bar with friends and brought him home to the after party. Everyone was so accepting of it and I immediately felt a million pounds lighter. Well aside from one guy who nearly had an existential crisis when he saw us kissing, but that's neither here nor there. That was almost ten years ago, and even though I've now been with a cis (but also bi) woman for about eight years, it's still an important part of my identity.
via metro.co.uk
How to Find an Elusive Four-Leaf Clover
My girlfriend is surprisingly good at this. She can always find at least a couple four leaf clovers within a minute or two any time she tries and I have never found one in my entire life. Makes a lot of sense. I can't even pick out my car keys from other random junk on the kitchen table half the time.
Can Haptics Improve Typing Accuracy on Smartphones? – Boréas Technologies
The mobile physical keyboard had an 89.6% level of accuracy, the haptic-enhanced touchscreen keyboard had an 80% level of accuracy and the non-haptic touchscreen keyboard registered an accuracy level of only 65.8%.
This is insane. It feels like a life hack. I've been bitching about how bad the iPhone keyboard is for years, but I always had haptics turned off because I thought it would save a little battery. Last night I turned it on to see if it made a difference and my typing instantly improved. So much that I had to google it to make sure I wasn't crazy and that's where I found this article from 2019.
via pages.boreas.ca
This Just In: Milwaukee Transit Passes
The design of the passes was utilitarian and banal until the 1930s when they brought the production in-house and added color, public-service announcements, information about local events, and illustrated depictions of civic history.
It's easy to forget how colorful things were back then, since we view it mostly through a black and white lens. Would love to see more hand-drawn art with some color instead of the sanitized greyscale corporate minimalism of today.
How headlights got brighter, whiter, and more blinding after dark
These things are a fucking nuisance. I've had to flip my rear view mirror up in the DAYTIME they're so bright. If you're behind me with these on the highway, I'm going down to 45mph until you pass me.
via arstechnica.com
August 2, 2026
Notes for August 2, 2026
The glorious burden of stockpiling little glass jars
Who DOESN'T have a few dozen of these lying around?
via vox.com
I ♥ RSS
Originally posted to Hacker News and linked to by the guy who invented RSS before coming across my dash: I ❤️ RSS:
Put the badge on your homepage and submit your URL. Once we’ve checked the link back and found your feed, you’re on the list — and in an OPML subscription list any reader can subscribe to in one action.
It's a blog directory like ooh.directory or blogroll.org kinda. But with an emphasis on RSS feeds, and making it easy to subscribe to the firehose through OPML.
via iheartrss.com
MySpace for iPhone in 2010
Some nostalgia from the liminal space between when the internet was a place you only accessed through a beige tower and the beginning of smartphones.
Jacques Vallée Spent 70 Years Investigating UFOs. His Final Journal Says the Mystery Is Bigger Than Aliens.
This is a really interesting read if you're into the search for ET. But like everything else in that area of interest, we're just left wondering. But that's kinda his point; it's a highly speculative field with little evidence and lots of personal testimony.
His final journal does not solve the UFO mystery. It shows why the mystery has survived every effort to solve it: weak evidence mixed with strong experience, secrecy mixed with ignorance, physical anomalies mixed with human meaning, authentic witnesses mixed with opportunists and a culture that demands certainty before the facts can support it.
we don't shame smart glasses wearers enough
Three are two main things here that are terrifying:
These glasses are also vulnerable to attacks, and I'm sure if nudifier apps are already a thing now, it won't take long for live nudification on the glasses. Them wearing smart glasses is in solidarity with the panopticon we are in, with all the pranksters, pickup artist, street interviewers and other online scum who embarrass, scare and harass strangers (especially women) to generate views on social media, and all the disgusting people who generate nudes of people non-consensually via AI.
[...]
Smart glasses wearers can tell people all they want that they are not like that, but no one should believe that. They rely on people not being able to spot the glasses, not knowing what the consequences are, or not knowing what the recording light is for, and their reassurances are worthless as other wearers modify their glasses so the recording light is always off.
[...]
You have to understand that the wearers are playing a significant part in not only gathering faces in motion (for companies like Clearview.AI), but also training spatial data for AI to act in three-dimensional space - eye, head and body movements, hand-eye-coordination and more. This, undoubtedly, will not only be used in autonomous AI weapons, but any context where bots are supposed to replace humans negatively.
Nudify everyone in Costco while providing training data to kill people with the bravery of being out of range. Got it. You're a fucking Stephen Miller tier creep if you own a pair of these.
via blog.avas.space
America's Kinkiest States [Say It With A Condom]
From NYPost.com:
The new study conducted by Say It With A Condom ranked every state by quantifying everything from how many times residents get it on each week to searches for sexy online content and visits to adult-only stores.
In Ohio, we do it missionary style no more than once every two months, with the lights off. The only states that ranked less kinky than us at #45 were Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida and Texas.
via docs.google.com
August 1, 2026
Streaming apps killed the radio star
Ever since Napster first came out,
I'll try that again:
I haven't listened to the radio much since music streaming services leveled the field.
Before that, like everyone else, I pirated everything. Back then you had iTunes and a massive media library of questionable origins — presumably on an external drive connected via FireWire. Everything from Stevie Nicks to Cradle of Filth was filed away in there. Before that you bought everything on CD. And that's as far back as I'm going.
But discovery was always the radio back then, you know? There weren't algorithms telling us what's Hot and Trending. If you were lucky, you lived somewhere with at least one cool station. At the very least, you had shit on MTV like Headbanger's Ball or whatever else was on in the daytime. Even MySpace was a better way to find good tunes than the front page of Apple Music.
We had a cool station in Columbus for a while called CD 102.5. They played GREAT alternative stuff. I could sit there with a pen and notepad and come up with all sorts of music to download eventually, years later, legally add to my Apple Music library for a reasonable monthly subscription fee.
I have totally been sleeping on radio since CD 102.5 went away. And it's not even just Spotify and Apple Music changing the game. It's algorithms; Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube... it's where the influencers are influencing. And where Content goes viral in ways that weren't even possible until pretty recently.
With radio, you have a person with good taste in music curating good music. If it's a station worth listening to, anyway. That's the spirit of this blog, or at least what I'm going for. Trying to find interesting links and curate them into a daily post for... well, mostly for me.
The other night, I went over to Radio Garden to browse around but I didn't know where to start, so I did some digging online and found my latest hyperfixation: KEXP in Seattle.
And this post isn't an ad for them by any means. I like the music they play, but not everyone has the same taste as me. They play a lot of old alternative stuff, a little punk, electronic, and even some death metal every now and then. It's a little bit of everything I listen to, and a lot of it is bands I've never heard of. Plus, with radio you get DJs adding some banter after every few songs. It feels more alive than being alone with an app for the car ride to wherever you're going.
The biggest thing for me is remembering that there are still some really good radio stations on the airwaves. I like consuming things that are curated by people instead of computers.
I realized pretty quickly that I really have no interest in Radio Garden. One good station is enough for me right now, so I got the standalone app for KEXP and now I can favorite the weird, obscure shit they play when I hear something I really like. For the last few years, I've been listening to the same artists I found on CD 102.5 back in the day, most of the Fat Wreck Chords and Epitaph catalogs, local bands from when I was a teenager, and a few newer artists sprinkled in.
There are so many great things we have access to, and idk if it's just because I'm online too much or if it's the same for everyone, but it's easy to forget about "obsolete" tech. Forgotten mediums like radio or even the small web. All of this shit is so punk. DIY, human-made, community funded. There's a lot more noise these days, but a lot of the old, discarded stuff has never truly went away. You just have to know where to look.
July 31, 2026
Notes for July 31, 2026
List of active Forums on the web: Forum Revial Movement - Fight for forums on the internet and maintain knowledge, in-depth discussions & the freedom of speech - Active Forum Directory
Forums have played a big role in making the World Wide Web great in the first place. They acted as a melting pot for knowledge and communication between users around the whole world. A whole culture evolved around forums. Not one, but many. Forums served a purpose. They still do. Forums are meaningful. Still. Since the breakthrough of social media and platforms like Discord, forum usage has been in decline for years now. A lot of forums have died already or are abandoned but there still are very active forums and great niche forums with low activity that need us to repopulate 'em. We really should make a turn as the internet society and start using forums again more often. We as well should download and dump forums to be able to archive what once has been written.
I've been so hyperfixated on blogs the last few years, I totally forgot forums used to be so big. They're just as important to the small web / indie web / open social web movement as blogs, if you ask me. I've been hanging out (mostly lurking) on 32-bit Cafe lately and it's unlocking a lot of old memories of browsing stuff like the ESP Guitar forum, XDA Developers, and other sites I used to frequent back before Discord and Reddit stole all the thunder from forums.
What sucks about Discord or Facebook communities is that they're a walled garden for anyone who doesn't want to go through their KYC process and register an account. And before Reddit became the main content of Google search results, forums were king. I dont know that we could possibly get back to how it was in the good old days, but the Forum Revival Movement is a great place to start.
Another cyclospora outbreak grows, source still unknown: FDA
Oh good. This just keeps getting better. Luckily, my autistic ass has been on a steady diet of McDonald's and other highly processed food products since I was in pampers. I knew ordering my McDoubles with only ketchup wasn't for nothing. I'll pass on the blueberries too, for now.
via thehill.com
AT Protocol helps attack a lot of these problems. Not by replacing RSS, but by providing better foundation for the data that RSS currently holds.
I love RSS, but it's a pretty old technology that hasn't changed a whole heck of a lot in a long time. I still use it daily, through Miniflux. And even for my paid podcast subscriptions I always opt for the RSS feed to plug into Overcast instead of paying through Apple Podcasts with an in-app purchase.
I think the Atmosphere could provide a pretty nice upgrade; adding a layer of functionality on top of an already great technology, just like it's doing with the web itself.
Introducing the Forkchop:
Winamp is back, with Deezer-powered streaming
Winamp and Deezer announced a partnership on Wednesday that will let Deezer power a new Winamp premium subscription. Deezer supplies the white-label streaming technology and its global licensed catalogue. Winamp keeps its own brand, its own look, and its own idea of how a music player should feel.
God damn it. I already pay for the Apple Music family plan, now I'm gonna have to try this on top of it. There's no way I could talk the rest of the family into switching to Winamp.
via thenextweb.com
July 30, 2026
Notes for July 30, 2026
I'm kinda bummed out I'm just now finding out about Fark. It's one of the OG link-sharing sites, pre-dating both Digg and Reddit. Digg tried to re-launch recently but apparently it had a big AI slop problem, so Kevin Rose promptly shut it down and went all in on AI with the re-launch, unfortunately.
Fark still has that old school web charm and a solid little community. I like Fediverse stuff like Lemmy and Piefed, but Fark just has so much more character... it feels like one of the last places online you can find truly interesting links instead of the standard viral news and cirklejerks you find somewhere like Reddit.
It's definitely worth checking out if you miss the wonder and exploration of places like Stumbleupon, Reddit when it was still good, and Digg in the 2000s. And definitely consider subscribing to Total Fark or dropping a donation if you end up as obsessed as I am. I've been glued to this website since I saw Drew's post last night.
Comcast store punished low sales by smashing pies in workers' faces, lawsuit claims
A Comcast store in Plainville, Connecticut, “had a policy that the highest-ranked Retail Sales Consultant for the prior month was instructed by his or her supervisor—Ms. Peterson, the Comcast Store manager—to tie the lowest-ranked sales consultant for the prior month to a chair in the back office and thereafter assault that person by violently smashing a cream pie in their face,” the complaint alleged.
That's the confidence boost you need when you aren't making ends meet this month at your commission-based job... sounds about right for Comcast.
via arstechnica.com
New Pinterest alternative just dropped on the Atmosphere. It looks really, really good. I played around with it for a minute but I've never been big into Pinterest so I don't fully understand what I'm doing. I feel like I missed the boat on that whole thing. I was already on Tumblr back in the day when Pinterest first launched, so I didn't really have a need for another photo blogging app. Then when Tumblr enshittified I was kinda burned out by then, so I never gave it a chance. Seriously looks like a viable alternative if you're into that kinda thing though, and it's designed to be "enshittification proof."
Terry Godier is rolling out a mysterious new app next week 👀
No idea what it is, but I've been loving his cozy RSS reader Current — not to be confused with the ATProto Pinterest alternative I mentioned above, Currents. It's one of the few that sync natively with Miniflux and it has a peaceful UI that just gets out of the way so you can read. Looking forward to finding out about this new thing next week.
Also worth mentioning, Current just had a pretty big update that fixed a lot of bugs and added Feedly support.
Nowadays, everyone uses the same 3 sites for "content" (mind you, I detest this word) and personally, I feel this leads to homogenization. Everyone is playing under the same "rules", the same algorithm and the same potential user base.
There is much value to being outside the curve. Sometimes, it is good to ignore viral trends and do your own thing in your own pace, even if the former feels more enticing and immediately rewarding.
Authenticity is gold in the age of AI-everything.
iOS 27 public beta 2 feels less like a beta than iOS 26
I installed iOS 27 Public Beta 2 last night. I'm not shy about admitting I'm just an end user, so I never do in-depth analysis or technical reviews on stuff like this. But I've gotta say, as some guy just using my iPhone Air for writing, web browsing and every other typical thing you'd expect from your average user, this is the most stable public beta I've ever tested out since switching from Android to an iPhone 13 about five years ago.
After using it all day, (so far) it feels less like a beta than the latest stable version of iOS 26. Even with all the AI shit indexing and optimizing in the background for the last 20+ hours, it's more responsive and snappy than 26. Noticeably. You can adjust the "liquid glassiness" of the UI from a slider in the settings app. While it doesn't completely shut off Liquid Glass, it looks much less glossy and even the icons feel more flat and less cartoony with it cranked up to the highest opacity setting.
Safari got some minor changes too, like the tab for your favorites, bookmarks, reading list and history at the top of the start page. They tweaked the look of the address bar too; mostly to add a tab button to the right and completely hide the menu. You now have to long-press on the address bar to bring up a hidden menu with all the things you'd expect; add to bookmarks, share, close tab, ask Siri, etc. Tbh it looks like they're trying to mimic the functionality of Quiche Browser a bit, if you're familiar with that.
And the biggest part you'll either love or absolutely despise: the new Siri chatbot. I'm not the biggest fan of AI in general, but I'd be lying if I said it's not something I use sometimes. I have the same gripes as everyone else, but it's so good for researching things you can't find on the handful of good search engines that are still left out there.
Disabling Siri is always the first thing I do when I get a new iPhone. A built in voice assistant sounds good on paper, but Siri has always been notoriously terrible. At least as long as I've had an iPhone. That's no longer the case.
Even in this preview version it's so fucking good. It does use a blend of "private cloud" and local models, so I don't know how private it truly is. But holy shit it's good. I still don't know how I feel about a chatbot indexing everything on my phone; having access to all the personal stuff and whatnot. But if these phones are already shipping with special chips made specifically for AI, I might as well at least try it. I'm just stoked that Siri actually does something now. Aside from being a mostly functionless quirk of the os that usually responds with "sorry, I can't help with that."
I probably won't use it for much other than more involved search queries when I'm researching something. But it's surprisingly good at digging through your photo roll with prompts like "find every picture of me with a black and white cat" or searching text threads like "find the text where Tom mentioned the name of that really good Korean restaurant in Dublin six months ago."
I wouldn't recommend being a dipshit like me and installing it on your daily driver, but so far it feels like an immediate upgrade from iOS 26.
Update: 24 hours later. I fear that Siri and Search may never be finished optimizing.
July 29, 2026
Notes for July 29, 2026
I am obsessed with Chainsmoker Cat 🚬😸
Yani is a catgirl with a seriously bad smoking habit. Every time she tries to quit, she becomes weak to the cravings and gives in almost instantly. Behind on her rent and unable to hold down a job, her friends and sister rally around to help her out. But when she’s using her pee to put out cigarette fires, they may just have their work cut out for them.
Reminds me of when I was in my 20s, inhaling more Marlboro red smoke than oxygen. It's so trashy and cute and gross.
We discovered a new variant of Super Mario Bros.
Long read about stumbling across a mostly unknown, late variant of SMB and Duck Hunt. I love obscure gaming history like this.
via nintendowire.com
A thought that I've been having lately, albeit in a larval stage, is that "Art is basically pretty much any human activity that AI managed to ruin." ... This is why I will respect any art from any human artist of any skill level. I will cherish anything my friends and fellow artists make, and encourage them to pursue their ideas even if they are not to my taste. Because art is only as engaging if it tells the story they really want to tell.
AI has oddly helped me with succumbing to perfectionism for this reason. Whether it's writing blog posts, music, a little drawing, or even my shitty handwriting, I'd rather be a little quirky and off than run everything through a chatbot and get something dull and sanitized.
That being said, I don't think you should have to go to extreme lengths just to prove you didn't use AI:
More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’
“I find myself writing less mechanically,” she says. “I have this urge to make little mistakes, like winks to the reader, to show that there’s a human behind the words. Like: What if I just invented a phrase? What if I did something unexpected with my punctuation?”
Sounds like things are getting too spicy for the pepper.
I mean unless you're a professional journalist, I don't think you need to take it so serious. It just needs to be human. Personally, I don't have an urge to make mistakes, I'm just kind of an idiot. And that's okay 🤪
via wired.com
Woman helps husband recover from brain surgery in bizarre fashion
... After a few years of doing this, Song somehow managed to accidentlly bite one of Zhao’s toes. For the first time in years, her husband’s foot twitched.
There's gotta be more to this story lol
July 28, 2026
Notes for July 28, 2026
Disney Has Met With Macaulay Culkin About New Home Alone Movie: Report
“I’m either a widower or a divorcee. I’m raising a kid and all that stuff. I’m working really hard and I’m not really paying enough attention, and the kid is kind of getting miffed at me, and then I get locked out,” Culkin explained. “My son won’t let me in,” he continued. “And he’s the one setting traps for me. The house is some sort of metaphor for our relationship.”
via consequence.net
Killer whales sink another boat off the coast of Spain — why are they still doing this after 6 years?
The whales are alright 🤙
via livescience.com
Stop Talking To Me, Google Search
One thing that bugs me about this is the assumptions these offers make about why I’m searching for something. This is by design–Google wrote in the blog post about its May update that the new search is “[d]esigned to anticipate your intent.”
They're giving computers anxiety as a feature. I don't want a search engine to try and anticipate what I might want to search. I'm not in that big of a hurry. Take your time and relax, little robot.
via aftermath.site
Jeffrey Inscho
I love the idea of smashing the machines that consolidate power and marginalize swaths of people, but the internet is not the enemy here. If anything, the (responsibly used) internet could be a key enabler and vehicle for growing the movement to smash the machines.
I like this take. There's a balance between high tech AI everything and living in the stone age, you know? I've always been a tech nerd, but I think at some point we need to forget about progress for the sake of progress and just slow down. My favorite video games were all made in the 90s. I like stuff recorded on analog equipment and listening to vinyl. I wear a wrist watch that does nothing but tell the time. I don't even hate AI entirely, I just think we need to slow the fuck down and live in the present sometimes.
via staticmade.com
Miyamoto was pleased the Switch lasted 8 or 9 years, believes customers ‘aren’t always looking for the best specs’
What draws people to Nintendo consoles, then? Obviously, the unique games it creates. “At Nintendo we always offer ‘styles of play that only we can create,’ and this includes the [hardware] interface,” Miyamoto states. Comparing the Switch to smartphones, he elaborates, “Our console has the benefit of being faster and more flexible [to develop for] compared to smartphones. When creating for general-use platforms, the workload is higher as you have to ensure it is compatible with all versions [of smart device].”
I can't even tell you how hard PlayStation and Xbox people try to convince me not to buy Nintendo products. Before I bought the OLED switch, all of my friends told me it's a waste of money because the specs are shit and none of the good games are available for it. Meanwhile I'm having a blast playing the retro console catalogues you get with Switch Online, all of the Mario games, Borderlands 1-3, and every metroidvania I can get my hands on.
I don't like realistic war simulators, or racing simulators... I don't like any super realistic games tbh. I want to get baked and jump inside of a cartoon. Nintendo has had that locked down since the 80s. I'm going to hang on to my OLED Switch until they launch a Switch 2 with the OLED screen; I literally couldn't care less about specs.
...although I am a little bummed out I haven't been able to play Borderlands 4 yet.
via nintendowire.com
July 27, 2026
Notes for July 27, 2026
'Glad the Children Were Not Hurt': A Viral Video Claiming to Show Kids Chasing ICE Agents With Water Guns Has X Divided Over What Really Happened
Wild how sensitive a bunch of nazis are to a little water lol fuck those guys. The kids are alright.
via dailydot.com
AI-generated fake historic images are destroying our past, present, and future
I could find at least one solid reason every day on why gen AI images are a plague. As a side note, I also think it's a little sus that extraordinary things like "UFO disclosure" didn't start to happen in a meaningful way until AI got good at shitting out pictures that are almost impossible to distinguish from reality. What do we really have left when we can't trust anything we hear or see?
AI-generated ‘doctors’ peddling fake cures on TikTok are a ‘huge danger’, experts warn
I miss when the only medical advice people trusted from online was when WebMD told you it was probably cancer.
via thenextweb.com
How The Watchmen Inspired Comic Sans - Doc Pop's Weblog
Comic Sans is pretty popular lately for whatever reason. Here's a post from Doc Pop on its origins:
Did you know that Comic Sans is heavily based on the lettering of dark, gritty comics like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns
He renders a few panels from classic comics in the font, next to the original font for comparison. Neat!
via docpop.org
Four bytes could freeze any Pentium in 1997
I get all pissy when the supercomputer in my pocket takes five seconds to load a web page sometimes. Reading stuff like this is always a welcomed reality check. Tech has come a long way in the last 30 years.
via boingboing.net
Cassette simulator rewinds digital audio to a more analog time in hiss-tory
The project, available on GitHub, is called "Audio Cassette Simulation" and uses FFmpeg to transcode audio files to get that "wish I'd bought some decent tapes instead of the superstore's own-brand" sound.
This sounds kind of dumb at first, but I get it. I play old video game ROMs with CRT filters and shaders to make my LCD monitor look like a 40 year old TV set. I listen to music on vinyl for the old school experience, even if I'm pretending it sounds so much better. Never forget where you came from 📼
note: yes I know that's a VHS tape emoji. They didn't have any for cassette tapes 😤
via theregister.com
Buc-ee’s sues tiny Ohio minimart over beaver logo ↗
Fuck em right in the Buc-ee. They don't own cartoon beavers. Especially in a town called fucking BEAVERCREEK. It's the American dream though, right? To build a chain store empire and go on a legal rampage against local small businesses just to be a nuisance after you barge in on their territory?
↳ via msn.com
The Phone in Your Hand ↗
Stole this from Kottke, thought it was pretty neat. When I was growing up, if you wanted to tap into cyberspace, you had to do it through a beige tower with components that plug in like giant Legos and weren't even as competent as a $50 budget phone from Walmart today. I definitely take this thing I'm typing on right now for granted. So many impossibly tiny components and other general sorcery going on inside.
Flipping through this, I can't help but think of Terry Godier's beautiful presentation on the Casio F-91W digital watch.
↳ via everythingmachine.io
But can your calculator run Linux? - Raymii.org ↗
My first Linux device was an iPod Nano. Second was a first-gen Xbox. And then I eventually moved on to using it on every laptop and PC I got my hands on after that. It's so capable... it's like a virus that can infect almost any piece of hardware that is even vaguely similar to a computer. And once you get a taste of that, it infects you too. You'll be a Linux nerd forever after that. I've seen people get clunky, pixelated, monochrome ports of Doom running on those Texas Instruments calculators, but never anything like this. Really good deep dive on how to do it if you own a HP Prime G2.
↳ via raymii.org
New study deflates right-wing claim that many trans teens later regret gender-affirming care ↗
New study backs what literally everyone who isn't an transphobe has always known.
↳ via lgbtqnation.com
Archaeologists Discover 'Perfectly Preserved' 70-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Egg in Argentina ↗
First, gain insight into how these fearsome predators evolved. Then you can maybe resurrect the extinct species from a 66 million year slumber, as a little treat.
↳ via thearchaeologist.org
50 things you probably never knew about Woodstock - MediaFeed ↗
Nice little Woodstock listicle I found on Fark yesterday. I think just about everyone who went through a hippie/stoner phase at some point knows about most of these, but it was a fun read nonetheless. One thing I had a little bit off though — I thought Carlos Santana just took a little acid, like everyone else at Woodstock. That's gnarly enough...
I knew the snake story but I had no idea he was up there on mescaline lol what a hardass.
↳ via mediafeed.co