What it’s like to travel across the country via Amtrak—and what you need to know if you want to do it yourself.

From table hacks to CSS kludges, these are some of the techniques that helped web developers get their fancy pages on the internet.

A discussion of the ways that large tech companies helped to define the evolution of computer typography. One battle made the CEO of Adobe really mad.

Making room for in-flight productivity has long been a source of both consternation and electronic interference. But for some reason, it persists.

Tedium is slowly working on its glossary over the next year, taking time to develop definitions its subject matter. Today’s starting point? Software.

In a world of media conglomerates, do regular folks have a shot at building TV for themselves anymore? In one rural Georgia mountain town, the answer is yes.

Legendary tech journalist Kara Swisher reveals that even she is not immune to having her old work removed from the internet by short-sighted content management.

The ongoing fight against tape hiss has proven a useful creative tension for the music industry—even if you’re not into lo-fi music recorded on a four-track.

Creators are getting nailed by photographers for simply wanting to celebrate other famous creators. This is backwards, and collectively, we should solve for it.

From CD-ROMs to Star Wars trailers to YouTube, the video format technology that got pushed off to the side as standardization crept in.

Alt-form storytelling, a key magazine-and-newspaper design trend, and hasn’t truly flourished on the modern internet. Axios could go way further than it does.

How the suggestion box, once a simple tool for giving feedback, played a role in the weirder and darker data-hungry present for many companies.

Because we don’t know how to stop doing lists of obscure or forgotten technology, here’s another one on dated networking tech. Apologies in advance.

It’s weird thinking about the way that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine creates deep side effects that have little to do with the original goals of the conflict.These complexities have helped to stress-test our broader global culture. It’s been eye-opening, in a way, to see how quickly companies have shifted their models and their messaging because of the conflict—whether it’s Starbucks or McDonald’s shuttering stores or DuckDuckGo welcoming outcry from conservatives by admitting it’s going to down…

It’s strange to think that I knew what Substack was as soon as it was put in front of me. But I did—it was an attempt to wrap email in a platform, with promising initial promises, but the goal of strengthening Substack itself.Sure, there were a lot of things about Substack that looked good at the outset—the fact that they effectively gave the platform away for free was a vast improvement over the model of charging money after you reached a certain subscriber size—but every new publisher that jo…

In an era when hundreds of free web browsers exist, Orion Browser has a novel idea: It wants to charge money. Why’s that? Simple: It wants to fix the paradigm.

I guess it can be said that when you have a great hammer, everything looks like a nail.And the multitouch interface was a pretty good hammer for Apple as a company, changing the way that its users interacted with its technology solutions over time.But Apple is the kind of company that thinks differently about nails.Maybe Apple has been afraid of seeing the main interface of the Mac as a nail, which is why its screens haven’t made the leap to touch despite the technology being there for years an…

No, it’s not really a surprise at this point that the much-talked-about deal between NVIDIA and ARM has been called off. It was clearly a bad move for the industry, as it would have made every company in the field dependent on a firm that is arguably a direct competitor.The European Union, the United States, and United Kingdom each pushed back against the deal, which started at a valuation of $38.5 billion, but continued to grow in value as ARM’s stock soared during the pandemic. But the signs …

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Ernie Smith who writes the Tedium and Midrange newsletters. A week ago he had a great story, ‘A Chart-Record Feast 🎶’ in Midrange. Here's what I wrote about it: Last week saw two milestones on the music charts. The first is that “All Too Well” by Taylor Swift reached the number one spot on Billboard’s Hot 100, and at

As someone who closely follows the ebbs and flows of the internet, I can’t help but find the sudden, overwhelming hype around “Web3,” essentially the blockchainification of the internet, to be something of a massive bubble.As anyone who has read a Gartner report can tell you, hype cycles tend to crest before they dissipate, and might bounce back after all that.But I think the reason why so many have become overexcited about the possibility of Web3 taking over the internet has much less to do wi…

As Substack reports a million paid subscribers to its newsletters this week, I’m often left wondering what might have happened to the newsletter space had Substack remained a business that only grew as its audience did.Substack started out as a company with a pitch that anyone who wanted to could start a paid newsletter and, with the right amount of work, claim financial independence. But at some point, the company broke this essential model by beginning to accept venture capital money, culmina…

One definite trend with a lot of my writing tends to be a desire to give new types of gadgets a shot before much of the rest of the world gets their hands on them.This doesn’t necessarily mean things like new MacBooks or Surface devices—I don’t have the connections for things like that just yet. But I have found a little niche as someone who writes about new things before they’ve really found an audience or a market.And with that in mind, I’m writing this in Ghostwriter, a Linux app, on a JingP…

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.

A case in favor of browser tab minimalism, or closing the tabs you’re not using. Sometimes, information overload has its limits.