Simon Willison: “Battle Drones is heavily vibe coded — I’ve reviewed almost none of the code, and it’s built in a language (TypeScript) that I’ve hardly used myself.” There’s a French steampunk version too.

This exhibition of ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) by Utagawa Hiroshige at the Tokyo National Museum was great. Awesome to see these prints in person.

London’s Natural History Museum has announced the winners of the 2026 Wildlife Photographer of the Year, a competition that has been going since 1965. You can see a gallery of all the winners on the competition website (and also places like The Guardian and The Atlantic.) Photos above by Kutub Uddin, Amelie Davis, Michał Michalski, James Lewin, and Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas. Tags: best of · best of 2026 · photography

How to Install an App on Your Commodore 64. “Oh, don’t worry, you’ll just need to type in the code for that program. There’s an article explaining what MLX is, which you can read really quickly on page 93, and then you’ll find the code for it on page 94.”

The Tiny Computers app lets you play with old computers on the iPhone Duo. Ten machines included: “Macintosh, Commodore 64, IBM PC, Amiga 500, Windows 95, ThinkPad, iMac G3, iBook G3, PowerBook G4 and Windows XP.” XP even crashes sometimes. Love this.

The One Question I Can’t Stand at Restaurants. “The idea of a restaurant I’d never been to using a dossier on me to decide, say, where I should sit, what I was likely to order, even whether I should be given a reservation at all, gave me chills.”

“US households are paying 62% more for drinking water than they did a decade ago — outpacing inflation, grocery prices and household incomes.”

Seems like it’s a good time for an open thread. I cannot remember what number we’re up to, so it’s “Potato”. I just had french fries for lunch and ate the longest french fry I have ever seen.1 I should have taken a photo, but I was in consumption mode and not attention mode....

“an interesting linguistics find! so I’m reading this text from 1908 and it keeps referencing ‘hp’ in the context of ‘not being at full hp’ ‘applying your full hp to a task’ etc.” But it’s not hit/health points…

For more than a year, marshalled by animator Andy Bailey, more than 1000 artists collaborated to create a hand-drawn, shot-for-shot, animated, flipbook version of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The entire three hours. 120,000 individually ...

An archive of Omni magazine (1978-1995), courtesy of the Internet Archive. “Omni was a science and science fiction magazine published in the US and the UK. It contained articles on science, parapsychology, and short works of science fiction and fantasy.”

Railpass simulates a train ride in your browser window using real video footage. Choose from trains from around the world or add some weather to the mix. Sound on for the best ride.

This Is What It’s Like to Spend Your Life in Prison. “None of us want to be defined solely by the person we were in our youth, or by the worst thing we ever did. The men serving life without parole feel the same way.”

The winners of the 2026 Epson International Pano awards were announced recently, featuring some of the best panoramic photography in the world. Alan Taylor at the Atlantic shared some of his favorites and I shared some of mine above. Starting at the top, photos by Xuecheng Liu, Shimon Perlstein, Tomás Sánchez Ruiz, Preeti & Prashant Chacko, and Daniel Viñé Garcia. P.S. In case you were wondering about the aspect ratio of panoramic images: according to the submission rules, the image’s longest side needs to be at least twice the length as the shortest side. Tags: best of · best of 2026 · photography

“Scientists have made a breakthrough toward the mind-bending goal of creating computers made of brains by demonstrating that human neural tissue can classify letters of the Braille alphabet.”

The title of this video is The Fastest Downhill Run Ever. I don’t know if that is true, but oh my god does it look dangerous to go this fast on a mountain bike through the streets of Genoa. (It looks slightly less nuts in the non-POV, but not by much.)

Sometime in the past few years, media sites like Bloomberg, The Economist, The Atlantic, Defector, Talking Points Memo, and the NY Times started offering a way for subscribers to share paywalled articles with friends and followers. These are commonly referred to as gift link...

“A SpudCell can grow, copy its DNA, divide in two, and start its cell cycle all over again. But this cell is made by people, created from lifeless ingredients.” Um, what?

Bastardica is “a foundry for bastard web fonts. Mix, stretch and/or squish them.” E.g. Nervous Sans: “Arial is stacked five times, pseudo-randomly twitching out of line.” I quite like Impacter.

How did life on Earth arise? Three of the biggest inflection points were ~4 billion years ago when life first emerged, ~2 billion years ago when eukaryotic cells appeared, and ~580 million years ago when life got big.

For CBS News in 1985, Charles Kuralt profiled bike messenger David Leopold.

I don’t go slow. I don’t stop for red lights. I go against traffic. I disobey every traffic law there is.

Great street footage of NYC from 40 years ago. You might think that Leopold ended up as a stain on the pavement. In 2010, CBS News did a follow-up on him:

See also Leopold on David Letterman from 1985.

Tags: Charles Kuralt · cycling · NYC · video

The Library Is Closed. Feel Free to Come In. “In communities where workspaces are scarce, libraries are welcoming visitors outside of staffed hours. All they need is a library card.”

Tiny People in a Big World is like a birdwatching guide, but for people-watching. “I made this campaign to produce a book that will help you notice and appreciate the tiny people who pass through your big world.”

Link Loop is basically a 2D version of Portal. Looks fun!

Ambient Earth is a 7.5-hour, real-time, 4K, remastered video of the orbital view from the International Space Station. Seán Doran took almost 49,000 images from 27 time-lapse sequences captured from the ISS by astronaut Butch Wilmore, repaired, remastered, and interpolated...

“Japan launched a $578 million mission Monday on a five-year expedition to land on the largest moon of Mars and retrieve samples for return to Earth.”

Find the Place You Love. Then Move There. “The reward from moving just because you want to is hard to defend logically. Some people will think you are crazy…”

I remember this 90s TV commercial for 93.7 The Edge, a Minnesota alternative radio station, very well. It features very non-alternative old people reciting lyrics like “bow down before the one you serve” and “Winona’s got herself a big brown beaver”.

Gregory Wieber does these engaging, info-rich videos on tech history — I posted his HyperCard Changed Everything video back in the spring. For one of his latest videos, Wieber goes through a short history of Christopher Alexander’s landmark book, A Pattern Language (Bookshop), which anyone interested in building anything should at least have paged through once in their life,¹ and how his work inspired not only object oriented programming and the invention of wikis, but also SimCity and The Sims.

1. The Timeless Way of Building is shorter, less dense, and perhaps a better introduction to Alexander’s ideas about patterns. ↩

Tags: Gregory Wieber · simcity · The Sims · video games · Will Wright

New book from James Gleick about the history of the telephone. “It gave us the party line, the busy signal, dial tones, wiretapping, the late-night DJ, and the booty call. It magnified the possibilities of government, of business, of friendship, of love.”