It's that time again for my weekly update, which includes a short collection of noteworthy finds, posts that inspire, as well as a few reflections from the past week or two. I'll aim to land these in your inbox by the weekend, in time to pair with your morning coffee (or your preferred cup of inspiration).

The Latest Drippings ☕️

  • Apple Music Has a Hidden iPod You Can Play With. Earlier in the week, I had mentioned that I was working on modernizing an old iPod to have a new 3800mAh battery and 256GB of SD storage. I posted, 'Forgot how small, simple and brilliant they were; I'm excited to just focus on listening to music for a bit.' Coincidentally, I wasn't consciously aware that this week marked the 25th anniversary of the iPod. Apple marked the occasion with a fun 404 easter egg: load any Apple Music URL that doesn't exist (in a browser, not the app) and a first-generation iPod appears, click wheel and all, playing 90-second previews. Even better, go to Settings → About, hold the center button, and you get Breakout, the Atari game Woz and Jobs worked on before Apple existed. A wonderful easter egg that reminded me of the joy I used to get from technology. I wrote on my old blog, Furrygoat, in 2005: 'Every time you fire up the desktop, you begin to salivate because it's fun to use. Apple understands that the most important part of designing a user interface is that its job is to create an emotional response with software by creating an experience around it. They understand people.' It's an important lesson for 2026.
  • How LEGO Engineered the Perfect Plaything. I really loved this post on playful tension: 'Playful tension means play can happen only when toy designers create playthings that are "handleable" enough to be meaningful to us, while also being "unhandleable" enough to be exciting. As such, play is a paradox. If play is too handleable, it becomes predictable and trivial. If it is too unhandleable, it becomes difficult, meaningless, or even harmful. Achieving playful tension, however, is not about hitting some sweet spot where the balance is exactly right. Play is more dynamic than that. There is room for the tension to fluctuate between the handleable and the unhandleable, but only up to a certain breaking point. Like a rubber band, it stretches but will break if we pull too hard in either direction.' Two other fascinating nuggets I got from this post: 1) Every LEGO dimension since the late '50s is a multiple of one 1.6mm unit, so a brick from 1962 still clicks onto one from this morning. 2) Godtfred Kirk Kristiansen's 1963 design rule said owning more LEGO should multiply play rather than add to it. And finally, gluing bricks together is a sin, because it kills the reconfigurability.
  • It's Getting Harder to Find the Fun in Technology. 'Personal technology companies seem to just have one mantra, let's extract as much revenue and keep our customers hooked as much as humanly possible. I know this is capitalism 101 but I've had enough.' I've become acutely aware of this pattern in the last year, which is why I've been playing with iPods again: there's a fun that is just missing from technology today. But I love where he lands: 'I don't want to just write about things that annoy me. I want to put positive energy out there given the times we're in.' For me, it's been curiously exploring with the mindset of an 8-year-old, and trying to find where the fun is. Remember: fun isn't the opposite of serious, it's how we survive it.
  • Vibe Coding Is Turning the Music Gear World Upside Down. I'll admit it: I don't think I have any musical ability, but it didn't stop me from ordering one of these M-Vave FM-1 synthesizers (only $79). 'What started as a surprisingly good but basic DX7 clone now supports a variety of synth engines, including virtual analog, sample playback, multitrack sequencing, and a variety of UI designs.' For more interesting ways people are using AI to rewrite the rules of hardware, also check out 'Reverse Engineer Everything' Is the Wild West of AI. People are turning smart picture frames into AI calendars, removing crapware from smart TVs, stripping ads out of baby monitors, and bringing abandoned, bricked Lululemon mirrors back to life. Bending hardware into new things has never been easier.
  • Portal Gun Development. David Smith's Developing Perspective podcast was a new find this week and is now part of my rotation. I loved his metaphor for software development in 2026: the old way was map and compass, deciding at each junction and then walking the trail, while agentic development is 'like if you've ever played the game Portal, where anything you have line of sight to, you can get to essentially instantaneously.' I also appreciated him calling out that working this way is more exhausting: 'the walking part, honestly, as someone who enjoyed software development, that was in some ways the fun part.'
  • HyperCard Changed Everything. Still exploring early-tech nostalgia, I ran across this wonderful documentary on why Apple's HyperCard mattered so much. In some ways, it had the same philosophy as LEGO, interconnecting pieces, but for software. 'The beauty of HyperCard was in its simplicity. The metaphor was a stack of cards... linked to other cards, creating a kind of personal web. Unlike most authoring tools, where creators and consumers are separated by a steep learning curve, HyperCard would offer a gentle slope with five user levels: browsing, typing, painting, authoring, and scripting.'
  • How "V for Vendetta" Became More Than a Movie. If you've been following my writing for some time, you'll know that I was a huge comic book collector in my teens, and one of my favorites (which I still have wrapped in plastic) was Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta. The film adaptation celebrated its 20th anniversary this past spring. 'A testament to the eponymous vigilante's iconic exclamation that ideas are bulletproof, his grinning, mustachioed Guy Fawkes mask has become a popular sight at demonstrations across the globe.' It will be returning to theaters on Nov 1 and 5 (remember, remember).
  • The Real Kevin Bacon. This week's toy, and one of the more clever visualizations I've seen. The Pudding ran the numbers on 169,000 actors and, despite the idea that Kevin Bacon has the most connections, it turns out the real center of Hollywood is Samuel L. Jackson (116 films), followed by Willem Dafoe and Robert De Niro. Bacon ranks 175th.
  • A Stack to Calm the Mind and Stay on Track. I kinda liked the idea that Dave Gauer is pushing here: replace the to-do list with a stack of sticky notes where only the top one is visible. I've been playing a bit with these amazing Ugmonk analog cards which have a similar mindset. This one resonated in particular, 'Removing completed tasks is an act that brings a physical reality to your accomplishment. It can be a whole ritual. You can crumple up the paper or light it on fire. Or store completed tasks in a face-down "done" stack to show how much you've accomplished (you'll probably be pleasantly surprised to flip through it later). It also reveals the next thing to do, which becomes the new active task.'
  • Smart People Love New Ideas, Even When They're Bad. A look at content bias (switching to a new way because it's better) versus maintenance bias (sticking with the old way because it's familiar), and why both are useful. 'You need enough openness to notice a better idea. You also need enough caution not to discard what already works.' The summary at the end, though, is the real kicker: 'A healthy culture needs smart people who can spot new and improved solutions. It needs curious people willing to test new paths. And it needs enough respect for the familiar to remember that not every novelty will necessarily lead to progress.' Guilty as charged; see my annual app purge.
  • The Revised Rules of Engineering Management With Will Larson. A great interview between Will Larson and Gergely Orosz on why engineering leaders need to lean deeply into the technology rather than just bureaucratic oversight. 'One of the worst parts of being an engineering manager in the 2010s is when you join the ranks of engineering management, one of the first lessons you get is like, "Hey, you need to never make a technical decision again." I remember that's literally what I was told, and that's definitely not the ethos today.' It probably annoys my teams how deep I get with the tech, but frankly, that's where the FUN is. Will also has some blunt advice for middle managers: re-skill or retire. He left a 250-person org for 25 people and says he's having a great time.
  • What Happened to the Desktop Metaphor?. 'It is easy to get nostalgic about files and folders, but the old desktop was not some pure or natural way to use a computer. It was an abstraction built on top of a much more complicated system.' An interesting look at the history of the desktop, but also, how important it is to understand the structure. 'The computer has made the structure invisible right up until the moment the user needs to understand it.' Sounds like a metaphor for how many are viewing software engineering these days.

Amor Fati ✌🏻