Tedium: The Dull Side Of The Internet
@tedium.co
A newsletter dedicated to all things offbeat. Long twice-weekly, now just listening to our gut. (Please don’t shove politics into our replies, thanks.) Subscribe: https://tedium.co/
It’s Monday afternoon. It’s lunchtime on the East Coast. While you’re at our desk avoiding the LLM which is trying to keep you productive, read a long piece about pricing guns. It’s a more interesting technology than you’d guess. tedium.co/2026/08/01/p...
Why Pricing Guns Stuck Around After The Barcode
In the showdown between barcodes and manually placed price tags, the pricing gun should have lost. But states, unions, and consumer advocates kept it around.
tedium.co
omg some delicious history of the pricing "gun." Never a dull moment with @tedium.co
Why Pricing Guns Stuck Around After The Barcode
In the showdown between barcodes and manually placed price tags, the pricing gun should have lost. But states, unions, and consumer advocates kept it around.
tedium.co
Just updated the Tedium Shopping Network with some pricing-gun-related gear. shopping.tedium.co/finds/perco-...
Make This Pricing Gun Your Weapon Of Choice | Tedium Shopping Network
A handheld price gun with enough adhesive labels to mark down an entire discount store, one clack at a time.
shopping.tedium.co
Ernie Smith@ernie.tedium.co · 4d agoI wrote a hell of a lot of words about pricing guns, which were once ubiquitous parts of grocery stores, but faded out thanks to the barcode. However, state laws ensured they stuck around a lot longer than you’d expect. tedium.co/2026/08/01/p... new @tedium.co
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. https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/17399769/pricing-guns-vs-barcodes-history
Why Pricing Guns Stuck Around After The Barcode
In the showdown between barcodes and manually placed price tags, the pricing gun should have lost. But states, unions, and consumer advocates kept it around.
feed.tedium.co
The pricing gun isn’t dead, but it was kept artificially relevant for decades, for reasons that might sound familiar to skeptics of electronic shelf labels. tedium.co/2026/08/01/p...
Why Pricing Guns Stuck Around After The Barcode
In the showdown between barcodes and manually placed price tags, the pricing gun should have lost. But states, unions, and consumer advocates kept it around.
tedium.co
You know how much of a dark pattern Facebook is? Simply typing “fa,” two home row characters, is enough to trigger it in most browsers. I had to come up with a brain hack to stop typing it and visiting this site I freaking hate. tedium.co/2026/07/27/f... new @tedium.co
My Brain-Breaking Trick to Quit Using Facebook
Struggling to quit Facebook? Maybe it has something to do with the home row of your keyboard. Here’s how I fixed it.
tedium.co
My brain-breaking trick for weaning off of Facebook involved creating a fake URL for Google News. Blame the home row. https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/17388904/facebook-home-row-keyboard-trick
My Brain-Breaking Trick to Quit Using Facebook
Struggling to quit Facebook? Maybe it has something to do with the home row of your keyboard. Here’s how I fixed it.
feed.tedium.co
Although we’ve gone to the end of the road, still we can’t let go … tedium.co/2026/07/17/t...
Terminus History: What Happens When A Road Ends
Why do major highways end anticlimactically? The Romans revered boundaries as sacred, but U.S. interstates just fade out. Is it a cultural thing?
tedium.co
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. https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/17382177/terminus-road-ending-history
Terminus History: What Happens When A Road Ends
Why do major highways end anticlimactically? The Romans revered boundaries as sacred, but U.S. interstates just fade out. Is it a cultural thing?
feed.tedium.co
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. https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/17381035/edos-disk-copying-system-history
The Forgotten Kiosk Concept That Physical Media Needs
Sony and GTA 6 are killing physical games. But EDOS, a former UK kiosk concept, shows we could still have on-demand disc burning. Bring it back!
feed.tedium.co
Want to be creative and successful? Don’t be like the dude who came up with the idea for ALF. tedium.co/2026/07/09/a... new @tedium.co
Boxed In: The ALF Lesson on Creative Limitations
ALF was a huge hit, but Paul Fusco’s strict rules for the character limited its long-term potential … and his career. There’s a lesson in that.
tedium.co
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? https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/17375642/alf-paul-fusco-creativity-constraints
Boxed In: The ALF Lesson on Creative Limitations
ALF was a huge hit, but Paul Fusco’s strict rules for the character limited its long-term potential … and his career. There’s a lesson in that.
feed.tedium.co
Don’t box yourself in so much that you keep falling through trap doors, like the creator of ALF did. tedium.co/2026/07/09/a...
Boxed In: The ALF Lesson on Creative Limitations
ALF was a huge hit, but Paul Fusco’s strict rules for the character limited its long-term potential … and his career. There’s a lesson in that.
tedium.co
Web forums were rough around the edges and faded in relevance as seemingly better options emerged. But what if we had stuck with them? https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/17371410/online-web-forums-retrospective
What We Lost When We Quit Using Crappy Old Web Forums
Old web forums were poorly coded and rough around the edges, but maybe we gave up on them too quickly in the social media era.
feed.tedium.co
Best finding when writing this: BBCode, the tool we used to add links, images, and giant text to the Something Awful forums, has had an unusual resurgence as a scripting language for the game-building engine Godot.
Ernie Smith@ernie.tedium.co · last mo.Let me pose an existential question: Would we have been better off if we never had a single place where we could all post snarky quips, but instead used a bunch of shitty web forums that barely worked? Mayhaps. tedium.co/2026/07/01/o... new @tedium.co
What if internet culture remained built around intermittently working Web forums that we could barely keep online? tedium.co/2026/07/01/o...
What We Lost When We Quit Using Crappy Old Web Forums
Old web forums were poorly coded and rough around the edges, but maybe we gave up on them too quickly in the social media era.
tedium.co
“Whether it is rising utility bills, unsustainable demands on our water, nonsensical tax incentives or the loss of farmland and rural ways of life, people are asking a very basic question: who is this ultimately serving?” www.404media.co/bodycam-foot...
Bodycam Shows Moment Cops Arrested a Man for Speaking Too Long at Data Center Meeting
We spoke to Darren Blanchard, the man arrested while speaking out against data centers at a community meeting. He's sharing the bodycam footage of his arrest for the first time with 404 Media.
404media.co
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. https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/17369108/apple-micron-ram-shortage-vertical-integration
RAM Crisis: Apple Found Something It Can’t Vertically Integrate
Apple loves vertical integration and famously hates being held up by suppliers. But it may have met its match in the RAM crisis.
feed.tedium.co
Apple, the master of vertical integration, may have finally found something it can’t vertically integrate: RAM. tedium.co/2026/06/27/a... new @tedium.co
RAM Crisis: Apple Found Something It Can’t Vertically Integrate
Apple loves vertical integration and famously hates being held up by suppliers. But it may have met its match in the RAM crisis.
tedium.co
I decided that I needed to write a bit about Matt’s Script Archive, the website that armed hundreds of thousands of weekend website makers with the forums and guestbooks they needed back in 1996. Just one problem: The scripts were horribly insecure. tedium.co/2026/06/22/m... new @tedium.co
Matt’s Script Archive: The Scripts That Reshaped The Web
The high schooler who developed everyone’s forums and guestbooks in 1996 didn’t really think about security. But Matt’s Script Archive was more than exploits.
tedium.co
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. https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/17365463/matts-script-archive-retrospective
Matt’s Script Archive: The Scripts That Reshaped The Web
The high schooler who developed everyone’s forums and guestbooks in 1996 didn’t really think about security. But Matt’s Script Archive was more than exploits.
feed.tedium.co
Odds are if you ran a guestbook on the internet in 1996, you got it from a high schooler named Matt. tedium.co/2026/06/22/m...
Matt’s Script Archive: The Scripts That Reshaped The Web
The high schooler who developed everyone’s forums and guestbooks in 1996 didn’t really think about security. But Matt’s Script Archive was more than exploits.
tedium.co
Relive what a 1994 forum was like. Check out my hosted recreation of W3 Interactive Talk, the first-ever Web forum. (And keep in mind that this is 32-year-old code, don’t use a password you need!) wit.tedium.co
WIT - W3 Interactive Talk
wit.tedium.co
Ernie Smith@ernie.tedium.co · 2mo agoSome people relax by fishing or picking up a hobby. I relax by figuring out how to run 32-year-old forum software produced by the W3C in a Docker container.
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? https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/17359582/gigabyte-aorus-5060-ti-ai-box-egpu-review
AORUS RTX 5060 Ti AI Box: Portable eGPUs Are So Hot Right Now
This new Aorus eGPU barely works in Linux, gets quite hot, and is based on tech gamers already rejected. So why am I so excited about it?
feed.tedium.co
Recently I took a journey with a portable eGPU. And honestly, I kind of love it—even if it was a massive pain in the ass to set up in Linux. tedium.co/2026/06/10/g... new @tedium.co
AORUS RTX 5060 Ti AI Box: Portable eGPUs Are So Hot Right Now
This new Aorus eGPU barely works in Linux, gets quite hot, and is based on tech gamers already rejected. So why am I so excited about it?
tedium.co
Not everyone can bring an external GPU to a coffee shop, but not everyone is a nerdy as us. tedium.co/2026/06/10/g...
AORUS RTX 5060 Ti AI Box: Portable eGPUs Are So Hot Right Now
This new Aorus eGPU barely works in Linux, gets quite hot, and is based on tech gamers already rejected. So why am I so excited about it?
tedium.co
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. https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/17355475/adobe-creator-act-style-protection-commentary
Adobe’s CREATOR Act: A Can Of AI-Flavored Worms
Can you legally protect an artistic style? Not currently, but Adobe is pitching the idea with a bipartisan bill. Personally, I see a bunch of blurred lines.
feed.tedium.co
