Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List More from anderegg.ca
I was late to the party, but I played Luck Be a Landlord last year and really enjoyed it. It’s a deckbuilder where you build combos by manipulating the icons in your custom slot machine. I linked above to the Steam page, but it’s on just about every platform — I played through it on iOS. TrampolineTales, the indie developer behind Luck Be a Landlord, released a demo for Maze Mice as part of Steam Next Fest. I got around to giving the demo a shot today and I loved it! The game is a slightly weird mix of Pac-Man and Vampire Survivors where time only progresses when you move. You pilot a mouse around a cardboard maze and collect XP gems to earn new weapons and passive effects. You’re being chased by cats and ghosts — the cats follow your path exactly around the maze, and the ghosts ignore walls as they move directly toward you. The time progression system is fun, and I found myself just squeezing through some tight spots by tapping the arrow keys. There’s some light strategy required to herd your foes away from the gems you want to collect. You can check out the Steam page for Maze Mice and give the demo a go on macOS or Windows. If you liked Vampire Survivors, I think you’ll have a good time with this as well.
I was recently on-site with a client and noticed that one person was using the new “Macintosh” screen saver that was added in macOS Sequoia. If you haven’t seen it, here’s a video of it in action. I knew that the screen saver had released, but I was very happy with Relay’s St. Jude screen saver by James Thomson. Happily it turns out that you can run two different screen savers on macOS if you have more than one monitor. To get this working under macOS Sequoia, first make sure your monitors set up as different “Spaces”. You can do this by heading to System Settings ➔ Desktop & Dock, and under the “Mission Control” section, make sure “Displays have separate Spaces” is enabled. Then you can head to System Settings ➔ Screen Saver, and turn off “Show on all Spaces” to the left of the preview thumbnail. Now you can use the drop-down below the thumbnail to choose which monitor you want to configure. I chose to set up the Macintosh screen saver on my secondary monitor, which is in portrait orientation. I set it to the “Spectrum” colour setting (same as in the example video linked above), and also enabled “Show as wallpaper”. This has the nice effect of having the screen saver ease out of its animation and into the desktop wallpaper for that monitor when you wake your machine. I switched to the Mac in 2002 with the release of Mac OS X Jaguar. Previously, I lived in the PC world and didn’t have much love for anything Apple-related. After I switched, I found myself curious about the earlier days of the Mac. This screen saver made me want to dig further into some of the details. A nice effect of the screen saver and its wallpaper mode is the subtle shadowing on the chunky pixels. I’m assuming this is a nod to the Macintosh Portable and its early active-matrix LCD. The screen on the Portable had a distinctive “floating pixel” look. I love how this looks, though I think it would have been a pain to use day-to-day. Colin Wirth produced an excellent video about the machine on his channel “This Does Not Compute”. You can see the some close-ups of the effect starting around the 2:30 mark. Watching the screen saver also had me curious about what version of system software was being shown off. Turns out it’s more than one. Two tools I used to start looking into this were GUIdebook’s screenshots section and Infinite Mac — a site that lets you run fully-loaded versions of classic Macs in your browser. I was most fascinated when the screen saver scrolled over versions of the Control Panel. Especially the version from System 1. You can see this starting at 0:12 in the example video. This thing is a marvel of user interface design. Pretty much everything that can be configured about the original Macintosh is shown, without words, in this gem of a screen. Low End Mac has a good overview of what’s going on here, but I feel like it’s the sort of thing you could intuit if you played with it for a minute or two. One thing I learned while writing this is that you can click the menu bar in the desktop background preview to cycle through some presets! My only nitpicks about this screen are that it uses a strange XOR’d cross instead of the default mouse pointer. I’m assuming this was to make it easier to edit the desktop background, but it still feels like an odd choice. Also, the box with controls how many time the menu blinks is one pixel narrower than the two boxes below it. This would have driven me insane, and I’m amazed it still looked this way System 2.1. The Macintosh screen saver shows its time based on your system clock. I use 24-hour time, and that’s respected in the screen saver even when it’s showing the original Control Panel. This, ironically, is an anachronism. 24-hour time wasn’t an option until System 4. The screen saver also includes a version of Control Panel from System 6. You can see this at around 9:08 in the example video. This Control Panel shows its version as 3.3.3 in the bottom left. I believe this makes it System 6.0.7 or 6.0.8. You can run System 6.0.8 using an emulator on Archive.org. While this version allows for many more options, it’s far less playful. This general style — with the scrollable list of setting sections on the left — started with System 4. System 3 had the last all-in-one Control Panel layout. System 7 migrated to the Control Panels folder, where each panel is its own file, and you could easily add third-party panels to the system. Anyway, this has been far too many words about a screen saver released eight months ago. If you find this interesting, I encourage you to give the Macintosh screen saver a go. I also recommend poking around at old versions of classic Mac OS. I had a lot of fun digging into this!
Today, Alec Watson posted a video titled “Algorithms are breaking how we think” on his YouTube channel, Technology Connections. The whole thing is excellent and very well argued. The main thrust is: people seem increasingly less mindful about the stuff they engage with. Watson argues that this is bad, and I agree. A little while ago I watched a video by Hank Green called “$4.5M to Spray Alcoholic Rats with Bobcat Urine”. Green has been banging this drum for a while. He hits some of the same notes as Watson, but from a different angle. This last month has been a lot, and I’ve withdrawn from news and social media quite a bit because of it. Part of this is because I’ve been very busy with work, but it’s also because I’ve felt overwhelmed. There are now a lot of bad-faith actors in positions of power. Part of their game plan is to spray a mass of obviously false, intellectually shallow, enraging nonsense into the world as quickly as possible. At a certain point the bullshit seeps in if you’re soaking in it. The ability to control over what you see next is powerful. I think it would be great if more people started being a bit more choosy about who they give that control to.
Yesterday, the Mastodon team announced it would be handing over control of its project to a new non-profit organization. The timing of this announcement is perfect given everything that’s happening with WordPress, Meta, and… well, everything else. To date, I think Eugen Rochko has done an excellent job stewarding Mastodon, but I also might have said the same thing about Matt Mullenweg a few years back. Why gamble when you can set up safeguards? Not to dwell on the WordPress, but I came across a shockingly prescient post from 2010. It lays out potential conflicts of interest between Automattic and the open source WordPress community. 1 Just about every warning from this post has come to pass in the last few months. It’s exactly these sorts of things that Mastodon looks to be trying to prevent with this new organizational structure. The re-org should also give Rochko more time to focus on product design, which sounds like a win in my book. At this point, I don’t think Mastodon will ever take over the world, but it’s a cozy place with stellar 3rd-party clients. It’s also where a large contingent of the Apple/tech cohort continue to hang out. Bluesky has really taken off, but Mastodon is still a big part of my social media diet. Yesterday also saw the launch of the Free Our Feeds campaign. I’m honestly not sure what to make of this, but I think John Gruber had a great take. The organization is requesting “$30M over three years” to launch “a new public interest foundation that puts Bluesky’s underlying technology on a pathway to become an open and healthy social media ecosystem that cannot be controlled by any single company or billionaire”. Only, that’s also Bluesky’s goal. I’ve written before about my hesitations around the protocol powering Bluesky, and I think that a competing “AppView” would be welcome — but it’s unclear if that’s what Free Our Feeds is going for. They mention wanting to build a second “relay”, though I don’t know if they’re talking about a Relay in the AT Protocol sense. Another canonical Relay would be a good start, but wouldn’t counter any issues if Bluesky started going off the rails. I wish the Free Our Feeds people all the best, but I hope they provide a more detailed plan soon. Until then, I think I’ll just continue to donating to Mastodon’s Patreon. Just watch out for the comment section. It really hasn’t aged well. ↩
More in technology
Another day, another opportunity to rate my 2025 Apple predictions! iPad Here’s what I predicted would happen with the base iPad this year: I fully expect to see the 11th gen iPad in 2025, and I think it will come with a jump to the A17 Pro or
Home file servers can be very useful for people who work across multiple devices and want easy access to their documents. And there are a lot of DIY build guides out there. But most of them are full-fledged NAS (network-attached storage) devices and they tend to rely on single-board computers. Those take a long time […] The post A lightweight file server running entirely on an Arduino Nano ESP32 appeared first on Arduino Blog.
This weekend, a small team in Latvia won an Oscar for a film they made using free software. That’s not just cool — it’s a sign of what’s coming. Sunday night was family movie night in my home. We picked a recent movie, FLOW. I’d heard good things about it and thought we’d enjoy it. What we didn’t know was that as we watched, the film won this year’s Academy Award as best animated feature. Afterwards, I saw this post from the movie’s director, Gints Zilbalodis: We established Dream Well Studio in Latvia for Flow. This room is the whole studio. Usually about 4-5 people were working at the same time including me. I was quite anxious about being in charge of a team, never having worked in any other studios before, but it worked out. pic.twitter.com/g39D6YxVWa — Gints Zilbalodis (@gintszilbalodis) January 26, 2025 Let that sink in: 4-5 people in a small room in Latvia led by a relatively inexperienced director used free software to make a movie that as of February 2025 had earned $20m and won an Oscar. I know it’s a bit more involved than that, but still – quite an accomplishment! But not unique. Billie Eilish and her brother Phineas produced her Grammy-winning debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? in their home studio. And it’s not just cultural works such as movies and albums: small teams have built hugely successful products such as WhatsApp and Instagram. As computers and software get cheaper and more powerful, people can do more with less. And “more” here doesn’t mean just a bit better (pardon the pun) – it means among the world’s best. And as services and products continue migrating from the world of atoms to the world of bits, creators’ scope of action grows. This trend isn’t new. But with AI in the mix, things are about to go into overdrive. Zilbalodis and his collaborators could produce their film because someone else built Blender; they worked within its capabilities and constraints. But what if their vision exceeded what the software can do? Just a few years ago, the question likely wouldn’t even come up. Developing software calls for different abilities. Until recently, a small team had to choose: either make the movie or build the tools. AI changes that, since it enables small teams to “hire” virtual software developers. Of course, this principle extends beyond movies: anything that can be represented symbolically is in scope. And it’s not just creative abilities, such as writing, playing music, or drawing, but also more other business functions such as scheduling, legal consultations, financial transactions, etc. We’re not there yet. But if trends hold, we’ll soon see agent-driven systems do for other kinds of businesses what Blender did for Dream Well Studio. Have you dreamed of making a niche digital product to scratch an itch? That’s possible now. Soon, you’ll be able to build a business around it quickly, easily, and without needing lots of other humans in the mix. Many people have lost their jobs over the last three years. Those jobs likely won’t be replaced with AIs soon. But job markets aren’t on track to stability. If anything, they’re getting weirder. While it’s early days, AI promises some degree of resiliency. For people with entrepreneurial drive, it’s an exciting time: we can take ideas from vision to execution faster, cheaper, and at greater scale than ever. For others, it’ll be unsettling – or outright scary. We’re about to see a major shift in who can create, innovate, and compete in the market. The next big thing might not come from a giant company, but from a small team – or even an individual – using AI-powered tools. I expect an entrepreneurial surge driven by necessity and opportunity. How will you adapt?
Gary Marcus: Hot Take: GPT 4.5 Is a Nothing Burger Half a trillion dollars later, there is still no viable business model, profits are modest at best for everyone except Nvidia and some consulting forms, there’s still basically no moat, and still no GPT-5. Any reasonable person
If you hear the term “generative art” today, you probably subconsciously add “AI” to the beginning without even thinking about it. But generative art techniques existed long before modern AI came along — they even predate digital computing altogether. Despite that long history, generative art remains interesting as consumers attempt to identify patterns in the […] The post This vending machine draws generative art for just a euro appeared first on Arduino Blog.
