I still listen to the soundtracks of Myst and Riven by Robyn Miller as background music, it takes me back to the wonderful comfort zone of my 486 DX4 Compaq Presario.
Seeing those game boxes on the store shelves, picking them up and looking at the artwork…
Just download the audio with yt-dlp and transfer it to your iPhone.
"In iOS 26, you can find and make custom ringtones easily from the Files app by long-pressing an audio file (under 30 seconds) and choosing "Use as Ringtone" from the Share menu, a big simplification from older methods needing GarageBand or a computer."
I'm giving Apple the benefit of the doubt until macOS 27 (but I'm still on 15.7.4 hehe).
Mac OS X and Aqua wasn't very well received either at launch.
A similar thing happened with the flat design of iOS 7.
Apple's pattern is initially going overboard with a new design and then scaling it back slowly like a sculptor.
I think they're happy with this method, even if things miss at first the big changes usually create a lot of hype and excitement for the masses.
The vast majority of users don't care about the finer things, Apple knows that the nerds can sweat it out until they straighten things out at which point everyone is happy in a hero's journey kind of way.
I just hope this pattern stays true and that this isn't an inflection point.
Adding from Mac perspective, I am also keeping an eye on Linux. I’ve hit a wall with Mac window management, and find the operating system just gets in the way for professional use across multiple of their digital “desktops”. I have no useful way to isolate work streams, and would gladly move to something better.
The blocker for Linux for me as someone who wants some level of reliability has always been fiddling with low level config, but now with Claude Code, low level config appeals!
There's a mix of both worlds that I've tried for a while and want to pick up again in 2026:
Use macOS so that I can utilize the great hardware and the well integrated drivers (e.g. sleep, performance, silence), but then for each project / work stream just fire up a lightweight linux VM fullscreen and do everything related there. E.g. all browser windows/tabs, apps, file explorer windows, terminal sessions.
When I stop working I pause the VM. When I need to continue everything is as I left it.
The main reason why I stopped was that the 2d hardware acceleration for Linux didn't work in UTM.app. I think I'll just need switch to Parallels or VMWare
Keep an eye out for PopOS Cosmic. I have daily drived it since alpha with admittedly some issues, but I see the improvement! Unlike a lot of other "Just Works" distros, it actually has proper tiling, and unlike the specialized tiling WM's I don't have to configure a bunch of stuff!
I do heavily configure applications, but all of these are terminal based now-a-days.
Bartosz Ciechanowski's blog brings back the joy of surfing the web during the heyday of Adobe Flash (minus the 100% CPU).
It's so much fun manipulating things, exploring and getting surprising feedback.
I know it's not really fair to compare this highly scientific masterpiece to the artistic flash websites of the past, but for me at least it immediately evokes the same feelings.
Tangential, but Flash had a nice side effect that the "app" could be exported in a self contained way via SWF.
Exporting this site for example in a future proof way is not that obvious. (Exporting as pdf wont work with the webgl applets, exporting the html page might work but is error prone depending in the website structure)
50 years from now, flash emulators will still work on swf files, but these sites might be lost. Or is there a way to archive sites like this?
A couple days ago, someone published their archive of HN that works in any browser.
Archiving sites is easy anyway. I wrote a Scrapy app that archives everything within the a specific fandom on Ao3. TH hardest part is remembering how beautiful soup queries work.
I mean highly dynamic, entirely frontend sites like these are hard to archive, since you have to really preserve every bit of JavaScript dependency, including any dynamically loaded dependencies, and rewire everything to work again.
And then hope that whatever browser features you rely on aren't removed in 20 years. Flash applets from 20 years ago are usually more self-contained and Just Work if you have a functioning runtime (either the official one or Ruffle)
I strongly suggest you try (the selfhosted version of) Browsertrix from Webrecorder, it's really well done, actively delevoped and can export the website as .wacz without problem.
> 50 years from now, flash emulators will still work on swf files
I'm not sure 50 years from now there will be flash emulators. Who is going to write on for the XP3.12345235 Fruity Ununpentium Silicon x256^2 neuralink devices.
Didn't Flash die because iPhones weren't going to support it? So one of the major OSes people spend most of their lives on can't even run SFW files. Can Android? I've honestly never tried.
Assuming RAM and GPU prices come down again so that we can afford to buy our own hardware instead of running everything in the cloud, which forbids "nefarious" software. /s?
"That famous quote, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," isn't actually by Voltaire, but was written about him by Evelyn Beatrice Hall in her 1906 book The Friends of Voltaire, summarizing his views on free speech, though he strongly championed it, notes the BBC and Quote Investigator."
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.” — Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Well, impossible to prove of course but it reminds me of Ingvar Kamprad (the man behind IKEA) who used to drive an old Volvo when in Sweden to appear as a "man of the people".
In fact he had his main residence in Switzerland and was filthy rich which is a bit of a hard swallow especially in Sweden, a country still very much affected by the "Law of Jante".
A reporter that was doing a documentary about his wealth asked him once directly when stepping out of his old Volvo and Kamprad kinda lost it; it was a big kerfuffle at the time on the telly.
For those paying attention it was really revealing about the true nature of the man (let me add he was a young Nazi back in the day).
Most people came to his defense like the red-blooded capitalist gentleman commenting above about Buffet being a 100% American.
The older generation still swallow the farce hook, line and sinker. For the rest of us it's pretty clear it was a well thought-out facade to placate the plebeians to sell more cheap furniture.
I didn't know that, talk about being late to the party.
On a tangent I also found this recently about Le Corbusier:
---
Research from the last decade, primarily from a series of books published in 2015 and released correspondence, has confirmed that the influential modernist architect Le Corbusier was a fascist and antisemite with ties to the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime in France.
https://youtu.be/eyGU6pGf_VI
You've got a lot to learn before you beat me. Try again, kiddo!
reply