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My favorite UX metaphor, the scrolling window manager, is having a moment—and it’s for pretty dank reasons. I was a pretty early adopter of perhaps the best GNOME extension, PaperWM , which displays your windows as sliding frames that move fluidly with the press of a keystroke. When everyone was going nuts over tiling windows, I was quietly calling this scrolling style the real innovation in windowed computing. (For the uninitiated: Think of it kind of like swiping between virtual desktops on Wi...

Rumors of OnePlus’ possible death are heating up, which would be a real shame, given how much the smartphone market has already contracted. It’s not true, but their grip is slipping. With all the panicked chatter about the OnePlus brand over the last couple of days, I have a useful anecdote to add. And it involved a recent trip to the very T-Mobile store I first got acquainted with the OnePlus brand, which has largely treated me pretty well. But on that day, I briefly pondered if I would be happ...

The tale of the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart, the place where hits go to die—in some cases, over and over again. Let’s talk about the chart through the lens of its two most iconic artists. Today in Tedium: If you’re an artist who has multiple songs on the overhang of the Hot 100, can you really be called a “hitmaker”? For much of Billboard’s history, the Hot 100 has frequently appeared with an unusual sibling chart called the Bubbling Under Hot 100 Chart, which is where songs go if the...

How the virtual machine, a foundational element of cloud computing, found its modern footing after a couple of scientists proved a couple of theorems wrong. Today in Tedium: Is there a technology that is more taken for granted in modern computing than virtualization? It’s an essential part of so many parts of modern computing, including cloud infrastructure. One could draw a straight line between virtual machines, which found their footing on x86 at the turn of the 21st century, and the myriad s...

The number 26, which gets back-burnered compared to numbers with neater divisibility, is an essential digit. And you’re gonna be hearing all about it in 2026. Hey all, it’s our annual lookahead, which we’ve done every year since the start of this crazy thing. (To give you an idea, here’s last year’s .) This covers a lot of ground in a very broken-up format. Hope you dig! Today in Tedium: In 2017, Google corporate parent Alphabet founded a holding company called XXVI Holdings , named for the numb...

The absurd comedy of errors that led to the year’s best feature story is almost too silly to be believed. But it happened. OK, next up on our year-end closeout is the best feature story of the year. In case you missed or best online video award, check it out here ! I don’t think you can talk about good feature articles in 2025 without talking about the amazing journalism being conducted day after day during the first three months of the year. The political climate seemed to be changing by the ho...

One of the best videos of the year came from someone who once publicly quit YouTube. It’s a multi-hour epic—and it’s stuck with me for months. Hey all, Ernie here with the first of our year-end Tedium awards. We’ll be giving out three this week, along with our year-end piece. Anyway, here are our picks for best online video of 2025: Lindsay Ellis has a well-earned distaste for YouTube, having earned a massive audience over a long period and seeing all the upsides and downsides that come with tha...

The unexpected connection between advertising, a 1975 novelty song, CB radio, and some of your favorite modern Christmas tunes. Hey all, Ernie here with a piece from David Buck , who decided to offer a cultural contrast to my piece on CB radios from earlier this year. This time, we’re diving deep into “Convoy” territory—and beyond. Today in Tedium : “Breaker one-nine, this here’s the Rubber Duck. You got a copy on me? C’mon.” If you recognize this phrase or were around during the 70s and 80s, yo...

Tedium’s annual last-minute gift guide presumes you’re going to give your loved ones gifts on the 26th … or let’s be honest, the middle of January. Today in Tedium: If you’re reading this and just getting started on your Christmas shopping, what are you doing, honestly? You might want to stop reading and get on that. But before you do, maybe actually sit back down and read this. Tedium covers a lot of weird stuff every single year, and this year (though the schedule has admittedly slowed—working...

On bottle deposits, cheap local commercials, projectile-style turkeys, union-busting grocery stores, and the friend of mine who showed me the ropes. The best place to start this story is with Al Kessel. He was an icon of local television commercials in Michigan. His strategy for his commercials was basic but effective. He’d show up in the commercials, sharing his latest deals, holding the products to show them off. The ads would always show up on Wednesdays, and you would always wonder what he’d...