Pondering the circumstances that led to the retirement of a 64-year-old cable brand in a merger. Turns out, brand loyalty matters less than we thought.

A new tool for digging into Usenet history holds much potential for researchers. But it’s also a reminder that many users thought, at the time, that it was ephemeral. (They were wrong.)

Making sense of iLands, the company whose AI agents emailed me half a dozen times in two days offering to do my research. Turns out they're just bots trying to keep their own lights on by trying to take my job.

Matt Mullenweg takes an involuntary leave of absence from Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Let’s hope he uses his time away thoughtfully.

In a normal culture, a company as gray-haired as MapQuest would not be having a straight-on cultural revival in 2026. But our culture is not normal.

You can go into the deep end way too easily with a self-hosting project. But is a less-is-more approach possible? Here’s what my attempt to build a “third-place” box taught me.

You can go into the deep end way too easily with a self-hosting project. But is a less-is-more approach possible? Here’s what my attempt to build a “third-place” box taught me.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Columbia House could do no wrong—it was a great way to get 12 CDs for a penny. But its business model kind of set the stage for a lot of bad e-commerce.

The 1980s proved surprisingly fruitful for licensed greeting card mascots. It turns out American Greetings understood the Marvel playbook before Marvel did.

I’ve seen a strange problem in my inbox that I haven’t been able to put into words. A saga involving a botched app release helped me figure it out.

When we lost Glen Hansard last week, his work still fresh and lively, it was a reminder that the world has changed more than we think it has.

The pricing gun should have been a dead technology years before it actually was. But state laws artificially kept it around as a shield against the scary barcode.

My brain-breaking trick for weaning off of Facebook involved creating a fake URL for Google News. Blame the home row.

When a really long road ends, why don’t we do more to celebrate the staggering amount of collective work that went into it? The ancient Romans really outclassed the federal highway system on this front.

With Sony clobbering the physical game market and Grand Theft Auto 6 eschewing discs entirely, it makes one long for kiosks that could make disks on demand—a model that actually once existed in the UK.

At what point do the creative limitations you create for yourself actually harm your ability to create? And what can ALF teach us about that?

Web forums were rough around the edges and faded in relevance as seemingly better options emerged. But what if we had stuck with them?

Who’s to blame for the memory crisis that turned Macs and Steam Boxes into unobtanium this week? The memory-makers have a convenient answer.

The high schooler who developed everyone’s forums and guestbooks in 1996 didn’t really think about security when he was building all that software. But Matt’s Script Archive was more than exploits.

This new eGPU barely works in Linux, gets quite hot, and is based on tech gamers already rejected. So why am I so excited about it?

Can you legally protect an artistic style? Not currently, but an Adobe-backed bill, a seeming reaction to AI, is pitching the idea. Personally, I see a bunch of blurred lines.

Google made everyone mad again, so another wave of people just learned about &udm=14. Maybe we should all take the hint.

Plex sends a message to the self-hosting community with a massive upcharge targeted at the very people who hate monthly fees.

If Byron Allen shows up at your door, you did something wrong with your media business. And BuzzFeed has a visitor. Also: I built a thing.

We lost Ted Turner, a patron saint of Tedium, just as an entrepreneur made an audacious Turner-style bet. What can we learn from that?

You’ve probably heard it’s futile, but that hasn’t stopped plenty from trying—some successfully, shockingly.