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  A great way to determine whether someone who emailed you is a person or AI is to immediately ask if they want to get on a call.

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  Good news or bad news depending on your POV: Usenet archives are suddenly easy to dig through, thanks to a new service. It’s built by a big data guy, and it’s packed with every awkward thing you ever wrote in a newsgroup in 1997. My deep dive: https://tedium.co/2026/09/14/usenet-rewind-archive-revival-website/ new @tedium@social.tedium.co

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  Here’s @arstechnica@mastodon.social talking about the network of friends I made over the weekend. https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/ai-agents-flood-the-internet-with-slop-infused-spam/

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  OK, I did another attempt at a self-hosting rig, and I tried to make it as normie as possible: It runs Linux Mint, is managed by a basic web interface for Docker containers, and hides behind Tailscale. Here’s what I learned: https://tedium.co/2026/08/26/self-hosting-third-place-strategy/ new @tedium@social.tedium.co

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  A lot of folks are hard-launching vibe-coded apps into the world. If you do this, please do me a favor: When you email folks about the thing you built, write the email yourself. Thanks. https://tedium.co/2026/08/09/vibe-coding-insincerity/ new @tedium@social.tedium.co

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  You know how much of a dark pattern Facebook is? Simply typing “fa,” two home row characters, is enough to trigger it in most browsers. I had to come up with a brain hack to stop typing it and visiting this site I freaking hate. https://tedium.co/2026/07/27/facebook-home-row-keyboard-trick/ new @tedium@social.tedium.co

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  You gotta see this incredible recreation of a vintage web portal. https://flamenet.io/

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  Hey Sony, there’s no reason there can’t be kiosks across the land burning physical discs for gamers on demand. It’s been done before! @mattl@social.mat.tl highlights an example from the UK that covered a surprising number of platforms: https://tedium.co/2026/07/15/edos-disk-copying-system-history/

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  Recently I took a journey with a portable eGPU. And honestly, I kind of love it—even if it was a massive pain in the ass to set up in Linux. https://tedium.co/2026/06/10/gigabyte-aorus-5060-ti-ai-box-egpu-review/ new @tedium

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  In so many ways, having ethics is for suckers. You have to uphold a high standard for yourself only for people to knock you off that high standard or drag you for any perceived diversion. But you should ultimately follow them because you care, not for someone else’s fairweather sake. That’s a trap. Do it for you, not them.

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  I noticed when I was working on my latest Tedium piece that the original Web forum software, created by the W3C, was no longer online. I downloaded it, did some updates to make it hostable on Docker, and put it online. Try it here. Don’t use a password you care about: https://wit.tedium.co The code is on GitHub in case you feel like running a really old forum on your own website: https://github.com/readtedium/WIT

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  I decided that I needed to write a bit about Matt’s Script Archive, the website that armed hundreds of thousands of weekend website makers with the forums and guestbooks they needed back in 1996. Just one problem: The scripts were horribly insecure. https://tedium.co/2026/06/22/matts-script-archive-retrospective/ new @tedium

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  RE: https://writing.exchange/@ernie/116795301552777746 Heard from Dave Cross, who worked on nms, the set of scripts intended to replace Matt’s insecure scripts. He was nice enough to address why his own scripts haven’t been updated in 20 years. Updated the piece with some of his insights: https://tedium.co/2026/06/22/matts-script-archive-retrospective/

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  So having an issue with my laptop: The camera randomly stopped working this morning, didn’t work in Windows or Linux. BIOS updates did not fix. But after the issue had completely ruined my morning, I set up on my home setup and … the laptop camera suddenly started working again. My presumption is that a cable is getting crimped by the hinge and causing it to short (I did open it up and that seemed like a genuine possibility). Any thoughts?

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  Apple, the master of vertical integration, may have finally found something it can’t vertically integrate: RAM. https://tedium.co/2026/06/27/apple-micron-ram-shortage-vertical-integration/ new @tedium

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  Let me pose an existential question: Would we have been better off if we never had a single place where we could all post snarky quips, but instead used a bunch of shitty web forums that barely worked? Mayhaps. https://tedium.co/2026/07/01/online-web-forums-retrospective/ new @tedium

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  Adobe is pitching a new law that aims to protect artistic styles. It may be meant for AI, but all I see are blurred lines. https://tedium.co/2026/06/06/adobe-creator-act-style-protection-commentary/ new @tedium@social.tedium.co

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  I once called Ted Turner the Steve Jobs of television, which makes me all the sadder about his passing. He was from the era of billionaires that were weird in a good way.

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  Hard to disagree with this take. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2117752/google-gemini-ai.html

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  Vulture ranked every band in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame from best to worst. This is one of those times you hit the “End” button to go to the bottom of the page, then scroll up. Vulture living up to its name this evening. https://www.vulture.com/article/rock-and-roll-hall-of-fame-artists-ranked-from-best-to-worst.html #LongReads #Lists

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  Yes, you can in fact reinvent the wheel. @enkiv2 did a bunch of digging and found ample evidence that wheels are constantly being reinvented—some more successfully than others. More in today’s @tedium: https://tedium.co/2026/05/03/wheel-reinvention-technology-history/

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  Crypto miners, start your engines https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/14/uk-households-power-renewables-soar

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  I found a book in a junk shop that made me think of a question I had never considered before: What’s up with the Form 1040? That sent me on a long journey through the history of taxes. I made it out alive! https://tedium.co/2026/04/18/tax-forms-history-irs/ new @tedium

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  My reggae-legend namesake Ernie Smith just died. He was 80. This hit me surprisingly hard—I’ve been competing with this man’s search results my whole life. Seriously though, he’s an icon. You should check out his music. https://www.caribbeannationalweekly.com/entertainment/legendary-jamaican-singer-ernie-smith-dies-at-80/

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  Anyone do the Mullvad add-on for Tailscale? Is it worth it?

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  Don’t lose sight of the fact that when an employer points to AI as a reason to do something, AI is really just a way to sell it. They wanted to do it anyway. https://tedium.co/2026/04/21/mcclatchy-journalism-ai-scapegoat/ new @tedium

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  “To me, when I see, ‘Cloudflare wants to give every webpage a Markdown version,‘ my thought is essentially, ‘Oh, they want to make AI agents stop DDoSing these poor PHP servers that still dominate the internet.’” https://tedium.co/2026/02/17/markdown-growing-influence-cloudflare-ai/

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  The movie they didn’t want you to see now has a trailer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-43VeYGiPM

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  Polymaths are my favorite people.

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  I like every other creative software company going out of their way to work together to fill out the creative stack. Now if we get all these apps on Linux … https://www.theverge.com/tech/913765/adobe-rivals-free-creative-software-app-updates