Closing the door on another year. Here are some random links.

• Mesmerizing: Wintergatan – Marble Machine, a musical instrument that uses 2000 marbles. It’s like that computer-animated marble music video, but in real life. (Check out the pinned comment on that computer-animated marble music video.) Bonus: Somebody actually created a real-life version of the computer-animated video. ( Another video.)
• Are Rotisserie Chickens a Bargain?
• Public transportation and/or train nerds are anxiously awaiting the opening in 2026 of the final segment of Sound Transit Line 2, which will establish the light rail connection from the Eastside cities of Bellevue and Redmond to Seattle and other locations. That final segment is a trip over a 2km-long floating bridge, the second-longest floating bridge in the world. (The longest is its sibling that crosses the same lake just a little bit further north.) Here’s a 40-minute documentary on the challenges of building this final segment.
• I have noted in the past that the person who knows the most about a subject is often the least qualified person to write the documentation for it. This is demonstrated to comic effect by “How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner.” Note that a more realistic step 2 would be “Next edit the configuration file” without ever saying where the configuration file is. If you then ask the author of the documentation where the configuration file is, they’ll say, “Obviously, it’s in folder/hidden/deep/in/the/file/system, assuming your jabbernock uses standard kleptomitrons. Otherwise, it’s in a folder named after the kleptomitron’s pintafore.” You know the pintafore’s name, so you figure can go to that folder, but wait, where should you go looking for that folder? “It’s in folder/overlooked/pintafores, of course.” A lot of time, the problem isn’t that the instructions don’t make sense, but rather that the instructions are incomplete because they assume that you know how the system works and how it reached its current design.
• The country that broke Kotlin: “Logic vs language: How a Turkish alphabet bug played a years-long game of hide-and-seek inside the Kotlin compiler.” If you’ve been paying attention to globalization, you already know what the problem is.
• I tracked down Microsoft’s original UI designer to get the true story: Wes Felton does some (gasp) legwork and gets the facts about the origin of the infamous “Hot Dog Stand” theme from its creator, Virginia Howlett. You might remember the name Virginia Howlett because the last part of her name is the ett in the Windows font Marlett.
• The Michael MJD YouTube channel covers old technology, and one episode took a look back at the Microsoft Plus! Dancer, a program that displayed a dancer on the screen that matched whatever music was coming out your speakers. I have no information to add, aside from noting that I learned that one of the swing dancers also worked as a database administrator for King County.
• I’ve gotten used to seeing my articles summarized and reposted (“for content!”), though sometimes it’s a case of “You successfully summarized a 500-word article in 2000 words.” Sometimes the extra 1500 words come from complete fabrications. For example, one site magically promoted Dave Plummer to head of the Windows 95 shell porting project, even though I wrote only that he was a member. (I don’t even know who the head was. It was just Dave and Jon and Julie and Bryan and some other people.) One site that does this sort of content-reposting with some regularity recently took my article about Microsoft Studios adding a hardware staging room and somehow represented it as “Bill Gates built a secret lab”. As far as I know, Bill Gates had nothing to do with this room, and it’s hardly a secret lab. I mean, if it were a secret lab, then it would have failed at its job because nobody would be using it!

See you next year.