This 9-minute video from PetaPixel probably won’t make much sense for non-photographers, but there is something refreshing about this idea that there are still places where adding software is seen as positive:

The video talks about Tamron’s lenses which have their own software (independent of the camera), and even their own USB-C port.

In a camera lens equivalent of fly-by-wire, the software allows to fine-tune the behaviour of hardware: what should soft buttons do, should the focus ring be responding in a linear or not, or even in which direction should it rotate. However, there are also more complex behaviours – like time lapses with focus pulls – with an interesting interface that’s definitely not beautiful, but I think still worth checking out for how it uses skeuomorphism.

One of my favourite genres is “I’m going to teach you something secretly while you’re having fun.”

This 2020 post by George Cave is ostensibly about Lego interface panels, but quietly sneaks in some stuff about shape coding and other kinds of coding:

The Lego interface panels seem to have a certain hold on people. Artist Love Hultén recreated some of them in a more human-compatible scale and even made them interactive:

It was fun to see one of the most well-crafted of early arcade games, Tempest, in this kind of a view, with the stud reimagined as a paddle controller:

Just earlier this month, designer Paul Stall announced his project M2x2 (the page itself is beautiful and interesting to visit – I paticularly loved the horizontal galleries):

The M2x2 is a functional homage to the classic Lego computer brick, upscaled and re-imagined as a high-performance workstation. […]

If our tools could look as playful as the things we built as kids, would we approach our work with more joy? The M2x2 is just the beginning of a workspace that feels less like an office and more like a laboratory for breakthroughs.

But both of these are enlarged Lego bricks. Three years ago, James Brown a.k.a. Ancient made an effort to embed an LCD screen in a regular-size Lego brick. It’s a fun 12-minute video of the construction process:

If you are into that kind of stuff, Brown followed it up 2 months later by putting a playable Doom inside a Lego brick:

But the most amazing to me outcome was this video, called “Busy little screens”:

A lot of diversity of the original bricks is gone, but it’s hard to expect Brown to recreate and animate them all. It’s a mesmerizing thing to watch nonetheless; one can almost taste a future where the technology will allow for Lego bricks to be animated, but look exactly as they originally did.

The breathing light – officially “Sleep Indicator Light” – debuted in the iconic iBook G3 in 1999.

It was originally placed in the hinge, but soon was moved to the other side for laptops, and eventually put in desktop computers too: Power Mac, the Cube, and the iMac.

The green LED was replaced by a white one, but “pulsating light indicates that the computer is sleeping” buried the nicest part of it – the animation was designed to mimic human breathing at 12 breaths per minute, and feel comforting and soothing:

Living through that era, it was interesting to see improvements to this small detail.

The iMac G5 gained a light sensor under the edge of the display in part so that the sleep indicator light wouldn’t be too bright in a dark room (and for older iMacs, the light would just get dimmer during the night based on the internal clock).

In later MacBooks, the light didn’t even have an opening. The aluminum was thinned and perforated so it felt like the sleep light was shining through the metal:

And, for a while, Apple promoted their own display connector that bundled data and power – but also bundled a bit of data, which allowed to do this:

Back when I had a Powermac G4 plugged into an Apple Cinema Display, I noticed something that was never advertised. When the Mac went to sleep, the pulsing sleep light came on, of course, but the sleep light on the display did too... in sync with the light on the Mac. I’ve tested that so many times, and it was always the same; in sync.

Just a little detail that wouldn’t sell anything, but just because.

Even years later, some people tried to recreate it on their own:

To do this I shifted the first gaussian curve to that its domain starts at 0 and remains positive. Since the time domain is 5 seconds total and the I:E ratio is known, it was trivial to pick the split point and therefore the mean. By manipulating sigma I was able to get the desired up-take and fall-off curves; by manipulating factor “c” I was able to control for peak intensity.

But at that point, in the first half of 2010s, the breathing light was gone, victim to the same forces that removed the battery indicator and the illuminated logo on the lid.

I know each person would find themselves elsewhere on the line from “the light was overkill to begin with” to “I wished to see what they would do after they introduced that invisible metal variant.”

I know where I would place myself.

This blog is all about celebrating functional and meaningful details, and there were practical reasons for the light to be there. This was in the era where laptops often died in their sleep – so knowing your computer was actually sleeping safe and sound was important – and the first appearance of the light after closing the lid meant that the hard drives were parked and the laptop could be moved safely.

The breathing itself, however, was purely a humanistic touch, and I miss that quirkiness of this little feature. If a save icon can survive, surely so could the breathing light.

One of the most potent themes in Stanisław Lem’s writing was the fallacy of first contact.

Lem argued that we are just not ready for an actual meeting with something truly alien. That the most open-minded of us are close-minded on a cosmic scale. That sci-fi made us think that aliens will look like human with prosthetics when good, and insect-like creatures when evil, but sci-fi needs to be self-constrained for all the same reasons; showing us something actually inhuman will immediately render it utterly incomprehensible.

He wrote about it in Eden, and Solaris, and The Invincible, and Fiasco. The last of these is a book I was once so angry at that I threw it at the wall.

It also happens to be my most favourite book, ever.

Anyway. This is a diagram for a single-button flashlight called Andúril 2 (larger version):

I saw it for the first time earlier this week. I was speechless. Maybe a little bit in awe. I know I’m supposed to hate this, but this feels so profoundly… alien, that I don’t know if anything I know applies here. I don’t want to judge it by the wrong set of rules. I want to understand the dividing lines between the UI and its explanation. I want to study it more.

Oh, and because I was curious too – this is the flashlight:

Speaking of hardware: Always loved this 1998 Australian story (magazine scan or an easier-to-read transcription) of a very particular computer virus that did not require any software to spread “like a Sydney bush fire”:

Now it all became clear. One of the female sockets must have deformed when I first reconnected the CD-ROM burner. This forced the two pins into the same hole and shorted them out. Later when this cable was plugged into the JAZ drive, the pins, now bent to go into one hole, deformed the female connector on the JAZ drive. Again pushing the separating plastic over the hole. Plugging another good cable into this newly damaged socket caused the pins of the new cable to be forced together and short, and when this new cable was inserted into the good SCSI socket on the new JAZ drive it did more damage to it. Before I knew it I had four damaged sockets and three bad cables.

I believe the cables and sockets looked something like this:

The story ends with:

I am only glad the [hardware] virus was contained and did not spread to the rest of the world! Can you imagine if this sort of thing happened in a big computer assembly plant?

Turns out, it did actually happened at a computer assembly plant, in 1997.

A fascinating deep dive look at one of the most well-known bugs in computing history, the 1993 Pentium FDIV bug. Ken Shiriff actually grabbed a microscope to analyze the processor and mapped out exactly what happened on the hardware level, and the details of Intel’s (surprising) fix.

Also, an interesting detail of what ended up being Intel’s self-own:

The problem might have quietly ended here, except that Intel decided to restrict which customers could get a replacement. If a customer couldn’t convince an Intel engineer that they needed the accuracy, they couldn’t get a fixed Pentium. Users were irate to be stuck with faulty chips so they took their complaints to online groups.