Tedium

Newsletter author here. I run two actually—Tedium (https://tedium.co/) and MidRange (https://midrange.tedium.co). Yes, they work. Beyond the ROI benefits already mentioned by other folks, it’s seen as an “owned” platform, something that you control, versus social media, where the platform is operated by someone else. You can make changes and adapt more efficiently to subscriber needs than somewhere like social media, where platforms are reshaping things that can affect your ROI without your input. For that reason alone, I can understand why newsletters matter to a lot of media outlets and e-commerce folks alike.

I think the average article in the Atlantic was clickbait. I saw some irony in an Atlantic article recently that pronounced the Atlantic as one of the few successful quality publications in the digital age. I thought the Atlantic was great in 2000, but today I think the article generation process starts with "let's pick a clickbait topic" and then "let's write a clickbit headline" and they go from there. I think https://tedium.co/ is an example of a quality publication for the web, and it's good enough that I can no longer mock Medium by calling it "Tedium" because "Tedium" is actually better!

Another good read that's akin to Pricenomics is Tedium: http://tedium.co. I get it about once a week in my inbox, and unlike most email newsletters I actually read this one.

For a number of years, a lot of people have said that “newsletters are the new blogs” — and to a certain extent that’s true. During TinyLetter’s heyday, it was often easier for someone to create a newsletter and send it to people that wanted to read it than it is to setup a website and deal with what the entails (which sadly, in 2019 is more complicated than it was in 2006). But setting up a newsletter isn’t without its own costs and considerations. What platform do you use, how much does it cost to send emails (something that’s hard to ascertain if you don’t know how many subscribers you have), checking formatting for various mail clients and services, avoiding being marked as a spammer, etc. And that’s before you get into the aspect of creating the newsletter — which again, TinyLetter aside, is often difficult because most newsletter services are geared towards marketing/customer acquisition, rather than something akin to a blog. And if you want to charge for your newsletter, that’s another challenge. You have to figure out a payment processor, a membership signup system, deal with account issues, etc. For the Ben Thompsons’s of the world who were early/pioneered the game of paid subscription newsletters, the investment costs of infrastructure and technology is probably worth it. But for many others, it’s not. So Substack has the potential to be that defacto place/platform. I see it as trying to be the Blogger or WordPress.com for content-based newsletters,…

For an article so certain about ethics, it ironically undercuts its own ethos: https://tedium.co/what-is-tedium/ > If you like strange and unusual descriptions of common things, explained in extreme depth, the Tedium newsletter is a great place to look for those, because it’s what we specialize in. Rather than focusing on viral things, we instead write about things that would never go viral on their own, that need context and storytelling around them to highlight their importance. Sometimes, the best stories haven’t been properly contexualized. There’s room for someone to do that, and that’s where we come in. I don't think their mission statement covers ongoing internet dramas & cancel campaigns. Rather, this article feels like mission creep, lacking novel insight. For me, the only new info I caught is the author's intimation that the founder of Framework laptops should be canceled.

Their article about the Fisker review by MKHBD (https://tedium.co/2024/03/04/mkbhd-fisker-negative-review-firmware/) is also great. It expands on the idea that: the malleable nature of software in the modern era means that it’s now possible to release products before they’re actually ready.

That's true. It's been noted that, "The things that make TikTok or Twitter worth reading are generated by users who feel like they’re creating things."[1]. So the platforms and their defenders may try to portray users as getting something for free, the reality is that the users themselves are the ones that create the "something" that has real value. Almost anyone on HN will tell you they can effortlessly create a Twitter/reddit/IG clone, but they're wrong: They're only creating a mechanism. The real value lies in the content. 1 https://tedium.co/2023/06/21/reddit-api-free-rider-problem/

There's a local makerspace that uses PeerTube for its video projects. A lot of it is old public domain movies and stuff inspired by less old things still in copyright. https://vod.newellijay.tv/ https://mountaintown.video/videos/local?s=1 You probably heard about it recently if you subscribe to Tedium: https://tedium.co/2022/10/21/new-ellijay-tv-diy-tv-network/

Congrats to Vivaldi! There is a good interview with Vivaldi founder on Tedium [1] where he basically says that because most browsers are built on Chromium nowadays, you have to innovate on features and that is the direction they took. And really the number of features in Vivaldi is staggering including some great ones like Tab Stacking and Tab Tiling. But adding this many features took a toll on performance and it is about 25% slower than other Chromium based browsers. Also I assume that is the reason why is there no Vivaldi on iOS. [1] https://tedium.co/2021/02/05/vivaldi-browser-history-profile/

If the PowerPC to Intel transition was any indication, they'll do just fine. Most consumers won't care, or will want to wait until Apple works out the kinks. To put it a different way: the initial sales of the ARM-based chips won't be as strong as you think they might be, or as wide spread. Having both Intel and ARM based systems in the market will even out the sales. History is repeating itself, it's worth reviewing the previous transitions before making assumptions. - https://everymac.com/mac-answers/macintel-faq/why-did-apple-switch-to-… - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%27s_transition_to_Intel_processors - https://tedium.co/2020/06/16/apple-powerpc-intel-transition-history/ - https://mashable.com/2016/06/29/intel-macs-at-10/

https://tedium.co —- lots of fascinating pieces of older technology there.

Tedium is actually the name of a fairly popular mailing list [0] about weird backstories to phenomena in everyday life. [0]: https://tedium.co/

I completely agree, and Tedium is probably what you're looking for: https://tedium.co

Here are some of my favorite non-programming ones: * https://californiasunday.com - super interesting articles, beautiful design and photography * https://inside.com/readthisthing - 1 interesting piece of journalism per day * https://tedium.co - weird deep dives on random topics. This week was on adhesive licking stamps * https://stratechery.com - high quality essays on tech * https://nytimes.com/newsletters/morning-briefing - daily summary of news. NYT has it's biases but the daily briefing is useful for picking up on stories quickly and deciding what's worth reading more about. Lastly, I have a small newsletter of my own where I send out a weekly-ish plaintext email with interesting articles, essays, and links that I've found. You can check it out at https://tinyletter.com/levthedev. I'd love feedback on the format/content.

Tedium - http://tedium.co Deep dive on obscure subjects twice a week. Recomendo - https://www.getrevue.co/profile/Recomendo Quick little tips for tools (software and others) that you'll find useful in many ways. From Kevin Kelly of Wired.

There's a good one on internet (and non-internet) culture at http://tedium.co/

tedium is good https://tedium.co/

Just the links from…

>Can you imagine not having anywhere to buy food and having to drive 3 hours just to get it?< That's a very real and serious problem for low-income and fixed-income consumers...many of whom are forced to shop wherever they reasonably can... There are many "food deserts"--areas where it's difficult to buy affordable good quality food--in the U.S., especially in sparsely populated urban and rural areas... It's true that if the need (demand) is great enough in an area a retailer of some sort will probably eventually open shop to fill the void...waiting for that to happen can be very painful for the poorest consumers... The best hope for communities abandoned by Wal Mart may turn out to be franchises related to the "dollar store" concept... How Dollar Stores Were Planted in the South and Bloomed... http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-dollar-stores-were-planted-in… Dollar Stores: Big Business, Rock-Bottom Prices... http://tedium.co/2016/01/19/dollar-stores-analysis/

Appreciate the advice! Took me a little bit to figure out how to do this, so I'll drop a useful guide: https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/

Surprising that nobody's talking about the non-AI Google - https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/

That happened with the Mac in the mid 90s and Apple closed the deals immediately when the clones started to sell well, because they were better machines than the ones Apple sold. If Apple didn't stop the clones they would be a software company by now and we'd probably have a PC market with 90% of Mac compatible machines and 10% of Windows PCs + Linux. The first link I googled about it is https://tedium.co/2025/09/02/apple-macintosh-clones-history/

In the article [0] (also posted on HackerNews [1]) they share a link to page, which is a guide how to run new Affinity (v3) using Wine/Bottles combo [2]. [0]: https://tedium.co/2025/10/30/canva-affinity-free-loss-leader-strategy/ [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45771211 [2]: https://affinity.liz.pet/

Reminds me of printing cards at home. Reading, I almost skipped over where this referenced Print Shop, as I didn't recognize the name. Their article for that, https://tedium.co/2016/06/02/the-print-shop-banner-decade/, is ridiculously nostalgic. I think I can hear that main banner printing.

Widely known. https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/ <- note the date.

Perhaps over fears of their shows getting leaked early. Apple apparently has people using Remote Desktop for severance: https://tedium.co/2025/03/29/severance-apple-remote-editing-weirdness/

OSF/1 is the closest that microkernels ever came to being used in general purpose operating systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSF/1 The only still living variant is AIX. Some of the code is in the XNU kernel, although that is a monolithic kernel rather than a microkernel. Apple converted it to a monolithic design for performance reasons. That said, this article suggests that AIX is not using a microkernel either: https://tedium.co/2019/02/28/ibm-workplace-os-taligent-history/

CGA would beg to differ. https://tedium.co/2017/06/15/ibm-pc-cga-graphics-cards-legacy/

Surprisingly the link doesn't contain any screenshot of the software. I remember using a software named "Print Master" around those years and I was wondering if the two were related. It seems that the latter was essentially a clone of the former [1], and the companies involved got into a lawsuit. The link also contains screenshots of both, which bought back nice memories of printing banners and calendars. [1] https://tedium.co/2016/06/02/the-print-shop-banner-decade/

Founder Dr. An Wang set up the company to have tight control of the stock via his family. He elevated his son, Fred, to president. While Dr. An Wang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Wang) was a genius and pioneer in computing, his son was not up to the task of running the company and the coming PC revolution caught him flat footed. The company never really recovered. https://tedium.co/2017/02/14/wang-computers-history-demise/