2025 Tedium Highlight by Ernie Smith: When tech giants aim outside of their core competencies. 

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Ernie Smith’s 2025 Highlights

March 2025

Everything To Everyone

Companies like Amazon and Apple are attempting to do business in so many spaces that, when the cracks show, they really show. Hence why Apple Intelligence looks like a hot mess right now.

Tiny Type On Yellow Pages

Why AT&T had to redesign its primary phone-book font in the late 1970s to keep with the times, and the clever typographical trick it used.

Dial-An-Advertiser

Considering the long history of phone books, particularly the Yellow Pages, where local businesses learned all the marketing tricks they eventually brought to the internet.

Mission Drift

If a company or service you rely on changes owners, you can’t be guaranteed that its mission will match what you’ve come to expect—even if, at least initially, it seems like everything’s on track. Hence why I returned a new messenger bag.
February 2025

Framing Element

The really exciting part of Framework’s latest product release cycle is the cheap 12-inch laptop—not the beefy desktop machine. That tiny laptop seems to have nailed its target audience.

Hooked On Velcro

How Velcro became one of the most important inventions of the 20th century, despite simultaneously gaining an unfashionable reputation.

Windows On Linux, The Clever Way

Forget WINE; a weirdly fascinating technique to make Photoshop work on Linux involves chopping up a remote access client into a windowing interface. It’s wild, but it kinda works.

The USB That Wasn’t

A few years before the Universal Serial Bus took over the world of peripherals, another upstart standard aimed to do the same thing. And I’m not talking about FireWire.

New Rust, Old Drama

The periodic Rust-induced conflicts happening with the Linux kernel hint at underlying generational problems facing the project. And it’s already led a prominent maintainer to quit.

The Legacy Of SNARF

BuzzFeed, the ultimate social media team player, decides that it needs a social media platform of its own. In the process, it gave us a crazy new buzzword.

The Eggshell’s Outer Shell

Just in time for the eggs to completely fall out of the affordability range of the middle class, let’s talk about egg cartons.

Broken Bits

Bitly, the link-shortening service used by millions, decides it’s going to drop an ad between you and your link. Don’t like it? It’ll cost ya.

The New DVD Bargain Bin

A major studio is apparently treating YouTube as a place to drop some of its archive films that have lost their cinematic luster. My mind is admittedly blown.

A Dossier Container Dossier

How we got Manila folders and envelopes, and what “Manila” means in the context of said folder. Hint: It’s not a color, and you may find the source surprising.
January 2025

Don’t Call Me, I’ll Call You

On large language models, artificial intelligence, DeepSeek, and trying to find the middle lane between skepticism and surety. I mention bionic arms a lot for some reason.

Just Moving Data Around

We take the idea of copying files across folders and drives for granted today, but the guy who invented the original tool considered it a leap of faith.

My Big Dumb Webmail Client

They say you don’t know what email’s all about until you’ve built a webmail client of your own. I guess I kind of get it now.

This Is Definitely A Test

The history of color bars, the most common television test pattern out there, and what they actually do. (Also, Netflix has some weird test programming.)

Good Look Taken

A believed-to-be-forgotten “lost” episode of an old Ernie Kovacs show is about to resurface on YouTube after 65 years. Here’s how it happened.

RIP Power Player

On the passing of Mark Discordia, a ’90s video game fan who got a troll’s welcome to the internet. He was a plumber who loved Mario. Nothing wrong with that.

Saving One Screen At A Time

Pondering the screen saver, a cultural artifact which can mean one of two things: Fun animated graphics and screens that automatically go dark. The difference matters.

Pinpointing The Actual Problem

A blog post from Automattic lays out their decision to pull back on the WordPress project. But in the process, the company may have accidentally explained why competitors were able to one-up them.

Tic-Tac-D’Oh

Dell decides to rebrand its machines along a 3x3 grid—and ditches a number of popular product lines along the way. (Was it worth it?)

Divisible By 5

That feeling of dread that you’re feeling about 2025 doesn’t need to need to define the way you approach the world. Perhaps you need a push.

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