From the Tedium Archives: Before the MP3, MIDI files ruled the internet. 

Mastodon Bluesky No Man’s Land
More Attention Ploys

Mind The Pregap

Pondering the compatibility issues and complications of a clever element of the audio CD hidden track boom: The before-album pregap.

Keys To The Future

Thoughts on a new phone keyboard from an organization that is making a convincing case we need to rethink our discussion around FOSS and self-hosting.
Screenshot from 2024 05 22 16 50 37

Last night, I had an idea to make a website based around Google’s new “Web” view. And here’s what I ended up making—a very barebones front end that makes Google’s web search easier to find. I built it in an hour.

Welcome to the Tedium LLC empire, udm14.com.

Controlled Panic

An upcoming iteration of the Linux kernel could take a user-friendly direction: A Linux version of the Blue Screen of Death, complete with QR code.

The Art Of Annoyance

When it comes down to it, it’s best to think of advertising as a coordinated, decades-long campaign to annoy the heck out of you. And it works pretty well.

Paramount Concerns

In an immediate austerity measure after a failed merger, Paramount kills a ton of online content—an ironic move for a brand that has long exploited nostalgia.

The Northern Mariana Touchdown

After years in a British prison, Julian Assange is going back to Australia—minus a short layover in one of the world’s most remote places. As day trips go, it’s fascinating.
Screenshot from 2024 05 19 20 23 29

Our share buttons are now passive aggressive. We were impressed by Ben Werdmuller’s ShareOpenly tool, which is simple, tracking-free, and works on a lot of networks. So we decided to be an early adopter of the share-anywhere technology. But in the process of adding it, we made the buttons for the other networks more discouraging. Enjoy the new gray Twitter share button.

Turn Off The Pillow Machines

Amazon’s plans to shift its packaging strategy points at a new front in the lengthy tug of war between paper and plastic—a war that started in grocery stores.

Finish The Job, Adam

If Meta is going to support the fediverse, it needs to actually support people who don’t live on Threads. No lip service. No half-finished betas.

When Robots Aggregate

The mess between Forbes and Perplexity AI highlights how soulless and extractive aggregation can be in the wrong hands. It’s the wrong direction for LLMs.
Tedium is a labor of love and appreciation.

Is it weird to say we love the internet? Because at Tedium, we love the internet—as a source of never-ending research, a vessel for new ideas, and a great historical deep dive. Since 2015, we’ve been throwing two newsletters a week into inboxes the world over, and count more than 12,000 regular readers. And we’d like to keep it going a while longer, so help by sponsoring an issue or supporting us on Patreon. But please: No backlink requests.

What is Tedium? | Support us on Patreon | Share your ideas! | Privacy Policy | Advertise With Us | RSS feed | Ernie on Mastodon

Disclosure: From time to time, we may use affiliate links in our content—but only when it makes sense. Promise.

P.S.: If you email me asking about doing a guest post or posting a backlink, you forfeit ownership of your site to me.

Proudly built on Craft CMS using the Bulma framework.

Copyright © 2015-2023 Tedium LLC. All rights reserved. Please, try the fish.