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Tedium. The newsletter all your other newsletters look up to.

Since 2015, Ernie Smith's Tedium has been hunting for the end of the long tail, and we've yet to find it. But we'd sure love it if you followed us on our journey. Especially now that we're ten friggin' years old and we're still using a Street Fighter II slogan as our subscribe button. Validate the use of obscure video game slang as a successful subscription strategy. Click the button.

 

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Could &udm=14 Break?
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Could &udm=14 Break?

That popular single-serving site I built to work around Google’s AI snippets could, unfortunately, see an infusion of AI soon. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

By Ernie Smith • March 14, 2025
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Shaking The Wasp’s Nest

Looking back at Gamergate, a flash point in internet history, and what it has to tell us about our current moment.

By Ernie Smith • March 11, 2025

Everything To Everyone

Companies like Amazon and Apple are attempting to do business in so many spaces that, when the cracks show, they really show. Hence why Apple Intelligence looks like a hot mess right now.

By Ernie Smith • March 8, 2025

Tiny Type On Yellow Pages

Why AT&T had to redesign its primary phone-book font in the late 1970s to keep with the times, and the clever typographical trick it used.

By Ernie Smith • March 5, 2025

Dial-An-Advertiser

Considering the long history of phone books, particularly the Yellow Pages, where local businesses learned all the marketing tricks they eventually brought to the internet.

By Ernie Smith • March 4, 2025

Mission Drift

If a company or service you rely on changes owners, you can’t be guaranteed that its mission will match what you’ve come to expect—even if, at least initially, it seems like everything’s on track. Hence why I returned a new messenger bag.

By Ernie Smith • March 1, 2025

Framing Element

The really exciting part of Framework’s latest product release cycle is the cheap 12-inch laptop—not the beefy desktop machine. That tiny laptop seems to have nailed its target audience.

By Ernie Smith • February 26, 2025

Hooked On Velcro

How Velcro became one of the most important inventions of the 20th century, despite simultaneously gaining an unfashionable reputation.

By Ernie Smith • February 24, 2025

Windows On Linux, The Clever Way

Forget WINE; a weirdly fascinating technique to make Photoshop work on Linux involves chopping up a remote access client into a windowing interface. It’s wild, but it kinda works.

By Ernie Smith • February 23, 2025

The USB That Wasn’t

A few years before the Universal Serial Bus took over the world of peripherals, another upstart standard aimed to do the same thing. And I’m not talking about FireWire.

By Ernie Smith • February 17, 2025
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