Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

Well, this sucks ass.

A drop-in replacement mechanical keyboard for the Atari 400's membrane, that respects the unique design of the computer

The argument is simple: why build something yourself, in JavaScript, when the browser can do it for you? Whatever you build, it’s likely to have poorer performance and worse usability than something the browser could just give you out-of-the-box.

Thoughtfulness about our craft and our relationship to the tools seems like an antidote to atrophy of mind. In an era where we can make literally whatever we want, what parts of the output or process are non-negotiables?

The missing GUI for personal agents. Television gives you and your agent a visual space for creating and working with artifacts.

Building the future on 1982 hardware. A devlog about Vectrex engineering, modern indie dev, and the code that connects them. Click to read Vector & Vertex, by Roger Boesch, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

RSS/Atom to Discord bot — each feed gets its own channel, organized by category

The idea is simple. You point Wireburst at your RSS feeds, tell it what category they belong to, and it creates a Discord channel for each feed nested under a category group. New items show up individually. No algorithm. Just a channel you can glance at when you feel like it and ignore when you don’t.

Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

If you are a 20th century relic like me, it is incumbent upon you to remind the generation that grew up inside the algorithm that another world is possible, and that we know this because we lived it. We were able to style a MySpace page in any way that we wanted; the code for LiveJournal was entirely open source so there was no part of the algorithm that was unknowable. A blog like the one you’re reading right now could be made by anyone, and put up for pennies, and nobody could stop it from being read by millions of people. (And that last one? It’s still possible.)

[car dealership waiting room] Me: [chanting] knobs, knobs- Other car buyers: knobs, KNOBS Car salesman: [pounding desk] KNOBS, KNOBS, KNOBS!