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Cloudflare’s new attempt to win over the hearts of developers could help keep a few ancient WordPress sites from falling off the internet. That‘s a good thing. Cloudflare started its life nearly 20 years ago, and I found out about it basically because I was running a blog—and obsessed with keeping it online. ShortFormBlog was many things, but the most important was that it was barely held together technically because I did not know what I was doing back then. I learned so many things about conte...

As Apple hits its 50th anniversary this week, we got a chance to talk to its forgotten third founder: Ronald G. Wayne. Apple is honestly a footnote in his long life. Quick programming note: Starting this week, we’re doing a bit of a throwback and going back to our Tuesday/Thursday roots. And in honor of that, we’re sharing a great interview we recently did. Today in Tedium: Recently, I had the chance to talk with a guy whose life, which is past the nine-decade mark, has been defined by just two ...

Once upon a time, self-hosting used to be a cost-effective thing. Is it still a good option for fending off SaaS as the prices keep creeping up? Today in Tedium: It’s a tough time to be a financially-conscious computer user. We’re living deep in a RAM crisis, and you’ve probably heard the stories about well-spec’ed computers slowly suffering from a nagging case of Unobtainium. Meanwhile, SaaS just keeps SaaSing, with costs adding up (and tech companies getting bigger) every month. In the past, m...

By ditching the Mac Pro so close to its 50th anniversary, Apple is making a statement of intent for its next 50 years. A mere six days before the 50th anniversary of Apple, the company quietly did something it has clearly wanted to do for a long time. It killed the Mac Pro , a device with a lineage that dates back decades. While it has only been a Mac Pro since 2006, its real roots probably lie in the PowerMac G3 Blue & White, the first new tower produced since Steve Jobs’ return to Apple. T...

When every discussion feels flat, how do you fluff it up? The answer, to me, is to eat fewer pancakes. Pancakes are not my favorite thing to make. They require me to make a messy, gloppy mixture of wheat, milk, and eggs. They come out imperfectly every time. And when you’re done with them, you’ve created a bunch of heavy, saggy discs. (However, not floppy disks.) But they can be made quickly, and by the thousands. There’s a reason why greasy spoons the world over specialize in pancakes: Anyone c...

One of television’s most important business models—syndicating first-run content to TV stations looking to fill airtime—might be losing strea … er, steam. If you’re a longtime reader of Tedium, you might be aware of my ongoing fascination with first-run syndication—TV shows that skip the network and instead get sold to local channels to air whenever. In the days before we found a fourth network , this model was an essential part of what made independent stations work. Some of the most popular te...

What’s the least you can do to build an effective paywall for creators that’s mostly open-source? If we can figure that out, that might make it easier to cut out the big platforms. One of the reasons why companies like Substack have such a strong hold on creators is pretty simple: It’s hard to build a paywall. You have to deal with a lot of really hard stuff, like logins and payment methods. And you’re dealing with vendors left and right. Your readers’ passwords get spread around the internet li...

I once turned down Substack because of their design limitations. As they emerge yet again in the news cycle, I thought I’d make my point with some of that design stuff they don’t do. So, this is not a normal issue of Tedium. I have been messing around with some email design stuff recently, and I decided to try out an experimental new layout. This was built using MJML , an email scripting tool, and converted after the fact to CSS grid. And it’s about my favorite topic: How much I dislike Substack...

The problem with making coding easier for more people is that it makes spam more conventionally attractive. Which is bad. I have a problem: Unlike most people, I actually read my spam folder on a regular basis. (Often, they’re some of the most interesting emails I get.) I find spam to be intriguing, interesting, and often highlighting some modern trends. And sometimes, it surfaces something I actually care about that missed my other folders, like an upcoming interview I’m excited to share with a...

For some reason, a bunch of big companies are really leaning into Markdown right now. AI may be the reason, but I kind of love the possible side benefits. So, here’s something that I didn’t expect to be saying in 2026: There seems to be a nonzero chance that Markdown might become the new RSS. “Whoa, crazy talk! It’s not even a protocol!” I hear you saying. But the evidence has seemed to pick up of late in a couple of different directions. The first is the budding interest in publishing on the AT...

Why do corporate restructuring plans get code names the way operating systems do? And why are the names often so bizarre? Today in Tedium: Recently, Amazon did something kind of annoying in the midst of doing something painful. It laid off a ton of people, but in the midst of doing that, it accidentally dropped an email revealing the layoffs early, before people got laid off. That email revealed that this layoff had an official code name, “Project Dawn,” which presumably speaks to the idea of wi...

Design is perhaps the software paradigm most wedded to the mouse and the GUI. But there’s no reason it can’t be text-driven. To me, the hard part about being creative is that you’re always trying to look for a new path. Sure, you’ve done things a certain way for a long time, and it’s worked for you. But it’s hard not to want to dabble in new directions just to see where it takes you, and hope that it shakes out a new idea or two. Which is perhaps the reason I’ve started to fixate on a weird idea...

Mass layoffs are a fact of life in journalism. Your favorite writers and editors have dealt with them. But they weren’t supposed to happen at The Post. Over the last week or so, I’ve been dealing with a bit of a nightmare. Our upstairs heat pump system got frozen over because of the recent weather issues—and the temp did not tip above freezing for days. So we were stuck away from our house for an extended period, having to check on it periodically to make sure things didn’t get too bad. But then...

A mostly unknown townhouse in Manhattan was the site of a small but significant moment in the history of 20th-century American literature. It also gives insight into how modern society defines its history. Hey all, Ernie here with a piece from an old friend— Andrew Egan . This is his first piece since 2023, and we’re happy to have him back on here once again. I’ll be back at the bottom of the piece with some interesting links. Anyway, over to Andrew: A favorite pastime of tourists visiting New Y...

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...