Foggy in Chicago today.
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Marcin Wichary
@mwichary@mastodon.online
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Writing about software craft and quality: https://unsung.aresluna.org / Wrote a book about the history of keyboards: https://shifthappens.site / Designer / Typographer / Occasional speaker / Chicagoan in training
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Joined November 07, 2022
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Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
I was hoping for your help with something.
Is there a particular font that’s instantly recognizable to someone who lives where you do, and appreciated/recognized/hated there, but completely unknown elsewhere? Something on road signs, street names, transit, infrastructure, stuff like that? I’ll share some examples in the thread.
I’d love to learn more about these. I’m not afraid of links in languages I don’t understand, ha.
(Also please repost for reach if you are willing!)
Thank you!
Not sure this is useful for anyone, but Shift Happens is now in collections of Harvard University and Providence Public Library, in addition to 15 previous ones:
https://shifthappens.site/#libraries
The book was not traditionally published, so most of these acquisitions are because of individual patrons/backers – thank you!
If I play a YouTube video for ~3 seconds and leave, it becomes marked as completely watched, with the red line extending all the way under the thumbnail. It’s been like this forever.
Does anyone know if this is a bug, or intentional? It’s frustrating to me.
(Apple TV.)
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The tab with the setting is called “AI innovations.” Eat my whole ass!
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I need to finish that Unsung blog post about the damage the iPhone switches/toggles have done. I think this is a pretty good example.
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Since people are already asking:
The nature of my work means I try to stay as close to a typical user’s experience, which means using Chrome without an ad blocker, because I believe this is still the most common desktop setup.
I might reconsider that for my own sanity, though.
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Who greenlights this kind of stuff? There are so many whitespace rivers and so much strange alignment that it becomes so much harder to quickly orient yourself and make decisions. And CleanShot is a place where settings are not just one-and-done. You mess with settings all the time, like in the view below:
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Nevermind! I “hacked” (edited) the download URL and I’m back on 4.8.10.
This is the same menu as I showed above, by the way.
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A small sidebar: I consider it in small part macOS’s fault in not reigning that in. Apps can easily add global shortcuts and it’s really hard to debug which app reacts to one, especially if the reaction is not obvious.
At Figma, I created an entire internal doc (“Shortcuts not working”) to track common offenders (e.g. 1Password, I don’t remember others).
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(But CleanShot team should know better. You don’t have to follow the OS if it jumps off the roof.)
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It literally conflicted with their own shortcut in web dev! https://issues.chromium.org/issues/480172712
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The funny thing is that while HIG cowardly washes its hands off the whole “checkboxes or toggles” debate, even here the CleanShot team didn’t follow the HIG suggestion of:
“In general, don’t replace a checkbox with a switch. If you’re already using a checkbox in your interface, it’s probably best to keep using it.”
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/toggles
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If anyone is curious, I discovered it by pressing Ctrl+G in Nova to go to a specific line in code.
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My filed issue was marked as duplicate of another issue that I don’t have access to. (That also probably explains why I couldn’t find any “prior art,” which I tried to do as a responsible bug filer.)
God, what I wouldn’t do to take a look inside
Throwback to the Figma user who said “I will give you a million dollars if you build X” (I forgot what it was. Links?) and then he actually sent us a million dollars… sort of.
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Not that I expect much, but I filed it here: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/536579239
Okay, does anyone else who has a cat also sometimes almost tears up seeing them simply sleep peacefully? Or just me
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Alas I don’t have a backup of version 4 executable, but if anyone has it still and can hook me up, please reach out! I also contacted CleanShot support to ask how can I downgrade.
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By old-school, I mean stuff like this:
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@anildash@me.dm I know it’s not going to happen, but a real cool move would be to make it an MX stem keycap.
Aah, there’s this interesting old Zuse/Seifers SM 1 computer with a fascinating-looking segmented display, but I can’t find any other photo than this one.
Link: https://archive.org/details/rechnenmitmaschidebe/page/90/mode/2up
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I posted about it here so it’s more on the record: https://unsung.aresluna.org/chromes-breaking-and-entering/
Throwback to the time I’ve been trolled by the IT team at Medium.
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@colinstu@birdbutt.com Oh wow, I forgot I use Ivory. There is no affordance so you have to know to tap but indeed, it works!
Minesweeper on Apple Lisa! That’s pretty cool, just because Lisa had practically zero third-party sofware, and I think absolutely zero games. https://youtu.be/0SnadQGIZtI?si=F5svjFSjjK7uNcJE
You know that joke that at every olympics they should start with regular people from the street participating, just so the viewers can truly realize how impossibly hard those competitions are?
Today I saw something really cool – an arcade Pac-Man game modded so it starts at the last possible level, 255. You finish it, and the next level is the famous kill screen.
I didn’t manage to finish it.
I wrote about one of my favourite small big invisible interactions, and a strange design inspiration that stuck with me all the way since the 1990s: https://unsung.aresluna.org/unsung-heroes-repeat-in-excel-97/
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@jmeowmeow@hachyderm.io @enkiv2@eldritch.cafe I spotted AI companies/teams having some common fears like “lagging behind on learning/building a corpus of data,” which they use to validate launching things early and opting people in.
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@midnaw@idtech.space Sorry, Ctrl+G. I edited immediately, but I think you saw the original post. On a Mac, Ctrl+C wouldn’t be *that* common anyway – for Copy, that’s ⌘C.
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@wdormann@infosec.exchange Someone suggested this might be a) because I’m signed in and/or b) because I pay for some plan that has Gemini.
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@mxchara@seattle.pink @atax1a@infosec.exchange That’s ⌘G on a Mac, not Ctrl+G.
I *think* on Windows the Gemini shortcut is Alt+G.
RE: https://mastodon.online/@mwichary/116952836351215165
What a fall from grace. I remember Chrome being the browser that tried to protect the users from websites’s bad behaviour. Now the operating system needs protection from Chrome’s.
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What the actual hell.
Chrome installed a *global* Ctrl+G keyboard shortcut to launch Gemini even if I’m using a different app, and didn’t ask me about it.
Sort of a random + very specific question: do you know of any composer (social media, CMS, etc.) that allows you to switch accounts in the middle of composing, and remember the text already written?
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@jla@typo.social What do you use, out of curiosity? (Given the nature of my work, I think it’s good for me to use the browser users use most commonly, hence Chrome.)