Wednesday, January 28, 2026
Tuesday, January 27, 2026
Oakley Meta Glasses Lens Removal Hack
Back story: I bought a pair of Oakley Meta HSTN glasses last summer: I paid $499 for a pair of the first limited edition, with a camera and AI but no display.
There were NO options: you had to get the ones with white frames and bright orange polarized sunglass lenses.
A couple months later they released a range of styles, including one with clear lenses and normal looking black frames, for $399.
Oh well.
My neighbor says they make me look like I'm imitating Elton John but hey what can I do?
Then yesterday it occurred to me that perhaps I can remove the lenses and keep all the rest of the functionality: they've excellent for hands-free video when I'm out running, way better than holding my phone.
I looked online but the only advice I could find for removing the lenses said to grip the frame above and below the lens opening and pull in opposite directions.
After about 30 minutes of screaming and cursing and frustration and tired fingers and wrists, I conceded failure.
I came back the next day, full of resolve and coffee, and after more struggle finally succeeded in removing the lenses.
Sure enough, the glasses are MUCH better without lenses: lighter, but most importantly I can now see stuff clearly and in dim light, and I can wear them over my reading glasses and still see clearly.
Today I decided to revisit this hack, so much to my trepidation I reinserted the lenses (much easier than removing them) and made two videos (Part 1 above, Part 2 below)
demonstrating a technique I discovered in this video.
Long story short: you exert force upwards and outwards at the upper outside corner of the lens enclosure: without much time and trouble, out pops out that portion of the lens followed by the rest of it (intact).
If you're not completely satisfied with this hack or if it results in damage to your glasses, let me know and I will turn your problem over to my Crack Customer Satisfaction Team©®™.
identifont
"Look up a typeface by name and see a sample."
Ingenious.
What could be easier or more useful?
Well, how about the reverse search feature where you if you don't know the name of a font the site can identify it by having you answer a series of questions.
Font information from over 200 publishers.
All here, free — the way we like it.
Are You Dead?
Long story short: Are You Dead? is a new iPhone app that has quickly gone viral in China before spreading worldwide.
It's dead... simple: click on the green button daily (up to every two days) to automatically send an email to your chosen emergency contact that indicates you're still alive.
From the app (top):
"If you haven't checked in for 2 days, the system will send an email to your emergency contact in your name on the next day."
Way better than those stupid red buttons old people wear around their necks that they're supposed to press if there's an emergency.
How about a disabling stroke or heart attack — good luck with that.
What I like is that Are You Dead is literally is built around the concept of the Dead man's switch: if action isn't taken, stuff happens.
This BBC article has more about this app, originally developed for young people living alone but now undergoing a redesign specifically aimed at the elderly in a country where over one-fifth of its population is over 60.
From the app's company website: "We would like to call on more people to pay attention to the elderly who are living at home, to give them more care and understanding. They have dreams, strive to live, and deserve to be seen, respected, and protected."
Find it on the U.S. app store listed as Demumu in Utilities.
99 cents — cheap at twice the price.
Monday, January 26, 2026
A New Home for the Tiffany 'Garden Landscape' Window
Dimensions: Center panel: 124" x 82"; Side Panels: 88.75 x 81.6"
YouTube description:
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Twenty years ago, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen — Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator of American Decorative Arts at The Met — saw photographs of a three-part Tiffany window depicting a lush garden landscape and immediately fell in love with it.
Alas, the window disappeared into private hands until a few years ago when it became available once more and was enthusiastically brought into the Museum's collection.
It was designed by Agnes Northrop, one of Tiffany’s premier window designers and was commissioned by Sarah Cochran, a successful Pittsburgh businesswoman, philanthropist, and suffragist for Linden Hall, the large estate she built in Dawson, Pennsylvania, in 1912.
The careful selection of glass and the cutting into nearly impossible shapes of literally thousands of pieces of glass was done by Tiffany's skilled artisans.
Watch above as the window arrives at The Met where it is carefully studied by Frelinghuysen and Met conservator Drew Anderson before being installed in its new home in the Museum's American Wing.
Sunday, January 25, 2026
Web Design Museum
The Web Design Museum exhibits thousands of screenshots and videos of websites, apps, software, and Flash games from the 1990s to the 2000s.
Fair warning....
Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?
The Neurotic Imposter — 'The Dangers of Feeling Like a Fake'
Manfred Kets de Vries, a professor at Insead and one-time director of that school's Global Leadership Center, wrote an interesting Financial Times article about people who believe they are fakes and liable to be exposed at any moment.
Here's the piece.
- The Dangerous Insecurities Behind Our Masks
In many walks of life there are high achievers who believe they are complete fakes.
To the outside observer, these individuals appear to be remarkably accomplished; often they are extremely successful leaders.
However, they consider themselves frauds.
This "neurotic imposture", as psychologists call it, is not a false humility.
It is the flip side of giftedness and causes many talented, hardworking and capable leaders — men and women who have achieved great things — to believe that they do not deserve their success.
"Bluffing" their way through life, these people are haunted by the fear of exposure.
With every success, they think: "I was lucky this time, fooling everyone, but will my luck hold? When will people discover that I’m not up to the job?"
Neurotic impostors can be found at all levels.
I encounter this type of dysfunctional perception and behaviour all the time — particularly when working with executives in consultancies and investment banks.
Managers should be on the lookout for it in themselves, their staff and their potential successors.
Failing to recognise and deal with neurotic imposture has serious consequences both for individual sufferers and for organisations relying on them.
The term "impostor phenomenon" was coined in 1978 by Pauline Clance, a Georgia State University psychology professor, and Suzanne Imes, a psychologist, in a study of high-achieving women.
They discovered that many of their female clients seemed unable to internalise and accept their achievements.
Instead, in spite of consistent objective data to the contrary, they attributed their successes to serendipity, luck, contacts, timing, perseverance, charm, or even the ability to appear more capable than they felt themselves to be.
Most subsequent studies suggest that men exhibit neurotic imposture too.
How does neurotic imposture get out of hand?
The trigger is often perfectionism.
In its mild form, of course, perfectionism provides the energy that leads to great accomplishments.
"Benign" perfectionists, who do not suffer feelings of inadequacy, derive pleasure from their achievements and do not obsess over failures.
Neurotic impostors, however, are seldom benign in their perfectionism.
They are "absolute" perfectionists, who set excessively high, unrealistic goals and then experience self-defeating thoughts and behaviour when they cannot reach those goals.
They are driven by the belief that they are not good enough, but that they could do better if only they worked harder.
For this reason, perfectionism often turns neurotic impostors into workaholics.
Fearing discovery of their "fraudulence", they burden themselves with too much work to compensate for their lack of self-esteem and identity. Work-life balance is a meaningless concept to them.
In extreme cases, neurotic impostors bring about the very failure that they fear.
This self-destructive behaviour can take many forms, including procrastination, abrasiveness and the inability to delegate.
One senior executive with whom I worked, a medical researcher with a brilliant career, exemplifies this propensity.
Like most neurotic impostors, he dramatised all setbacks and cast himself as the helpless victim.
The executive lived with the misconception that he was the only one prone to failure and self-doubt, and this made him feel even more insecure and isolated.
He also harmed his career by reaching exaggerated conclusions based on limited evidence.
When the executive was promoted to a research director position, he found it much harder to ask for advice.
As a result, he made a number of poor management decisions that contributed to his organisation's ineffectiveness.
Neurotic impostors can, and do, damage the organisations they try so hard to please.
Their work ethic can be contagious, but because they are so eager to succeed, they often become impatient and abrasive.
They drive their employees too hard and create a gulag-like atmosphere, which inevitably translates into high employee turnover, absenteeism, and other complications that can affect the bottom line.
Moreover, neurotic impostors can intimidate others with their intensity.
And because they do not have what it takes to be effective leadership coaches, they are not good at leadership development or succession planning.
More dangerous, however, is the neurotic impostor's effect on the quality of decision-making.
Executives who feel like impostors are afraid to trust their own judgment.
Their fearful, over-cautious leadership can easily spread across the company and bring dire consequences.
For example, a neurotic impostor chief executive is likely to suppress his colleagues' entrepreneurial capabilities.
If he does not trust his own instincts, why should he trust anyone else's?
Neurotic imposture is not an inevitable part of the human condition, and it is avoidable.
Early prevention, for instance, can completely ward it off.
Parental awareness of the downside of setting excessively high standards for children goes a long way toward preventing later misery.
But there is hope for late-diagnosed impostors as well.
Experience has shown that psychotherapeutic interventions can be very effective in changing distorted self-perceptions.
Yet the best way to manage feelings of imposture can be to evaluate yourself.
And though a leadership coach or psychotherapist can help you on this journey of self-discovery and change, a mentor or good friend can also put things in perspective.
If you are unable to take the initiative to deal with your feelings of imposture, however, your boss needs to intervene.
Such was the case with the chief executive of a large telecommunications company who came to talk to me on the recommendation of his chairman.
A feedback exercise showed that he was inclined toward micromanagement and perfectionism and that he possessed poor listening skills.
Some of the written comments of his colleagues also noted that his impatience put intense pressure on directors and that morale at the office was quite low.
As we discussed the problem, he realised the extent to which he had internalised the expectations of his extremely demanding parents, and started to change.
He began to experiment with new behaviour in the office and received a positive reception, which increased his sense of self-efficacy.
When I met him a year later, he mentioned how morale at the office had dramatically improved, how the company had become more profitable and how his ability to let go of his controlling tendencies had contributed to these successes.
Good bosses remain alert for symptoms of neurotic imposture in their employees: fear of failure, fear of success, perfectionism, procrastination, and workaholism.
In performance reviews, bosses should signal (uncritically) any danger signs to their staff.
They should also explain how anxiety about performance can take on a self-destructive quality, and they should emphasize the value of work-life balance, pointing out that extreme strength can easily become a weakness.
Above all, a boss needs to make sure that a subordinate suffering from neurotic imposture understands that criticism goes with responsibility.
This means teaching by word and example, that criticism is an opportunity for new learning and not a total, unrecoverable catastrophe.
They must point out that everyone in a responsible job feels smaller than the job at times.
At these moments, especially in a new position, the worst thing a neurotic imposter can do is compare their abilities with those of seasoned executives.
They need to be convinced that everyone needs time to adjust and learn the ropes.
At the same time, leaders must strengthen the perceived link between positive achievements and efforts.
They can do this not only by offering praise when it is due, but also by acknowledging that making mistakes (though not repeating them) is part of a successful corporate culture.
The wise organisation does not punish "smart" mistakes; indeed, to "fail forward" should be part of a company's cultural values.
Mistakes can offer great opportunities for learning and personal growth, and leaders need to help neurotic impostors understand that a fear of failure is normal and need not be debilitating.
**********
HOW TO DEAL WITH NEUROTIC IMPOSTURE
Business people who believe they are frauds exist in every organisation and at every level of responsibility. Their attitude can be harmful to a company.
■ Neurotic impostors set themselves unachievable goals and abandon any attempt to have a work-life balance.
■ The ensuing self-destructive behaviour can include procrastination, abrasiveness, and the inability to delegate.
■ Poor listening skills and a tendency to micromanage are symptoms too: these can dent staff morale.
■ Bosses should explain that anxiety over performance can be self-destructive.
■ Neurotic impostors need to learn that criticism comes with responsibility.
■ New starters should not compare their work unfavourably with long-serving senior executives. Such a comparison is unrealistic and unfair.
■ All workers need to understand that some mistakes are inevitable.
**********
Note: The movie pictured up top is based on a short story by Philip K. Dick and it is a sensational film, even though you've never heard of it.
A Visualization of the Evolution of Paris, 300 BCE to 2025
This animated 3D visualization of the growth of Paris was made with Blender (no AI) by Christian Ivan, who noted that's it's "a simplification" and so is not 100% accurate.
Saturday, January 24, 2026
Michelangelo's First Painting — Created When He Was 12 or 13 Years Old
From Open Culture:
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Think back, if you will, to the works of art you created at age twelve or thirteen. For many, perhaps most of us, our output at that stage of adolescence amounted to directionless doodles, chaotic comics, and a few unsteady-at-best school projects. But then, most of us didn’t grow up to be Michelangelo. In the late fourteen-eighties, when that towering Renaissance artist was still what we would now call a "tween," he painted The Torment of Saint Anthony, a depiction of the titular religious figure beset by demons in the desert. Though based on a widely known engraving, it nevertheless shows evidence of rapidly advancing technique, inspiration, and even creativity — especially when placed under the infrared scanner.
For about half a millennium, The Torment of Saint Anthony wasn't thought to have been painted by Michelangelo. As explained in the video from Inspiraggio above, when the painting sold at Sotheby’s in 2008, the buyer took it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for examination and cleaning.
"Beneath the layers of dirt accumulated over the centuries," says the narrator, "a very particular color palette appeared. "The tones, the blends, the way the human figure was treated: all of it began to resemble the style Michelangelo would use years later in none other than the Sistine Chapel." Infrared reflectography subsequently turned up pentimenti, or correction marks, a common indication that "a painting is not a copy, but an original work created with artistic freedom."
It was the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas that first bet big on the provenance of The Torment of Saint Anthony. Its newly hired director purchased the painting after turning up "not a single convincing argument against the attribution." Thus acquired, it became "the only painting by Michelangelo located anywhere in the Americas, and also just one of four easel paintings attributed to him throughout his entire career," during most of which he disparaged oil painting itself. About a decade later, and after further analysis, the art historian Giorgio Bonsanti put his considerable authority behind a definitive confirmation that it is indeed the work of the young Michelangelo. There remain doubters, of course, and even the notoriously uncompromising artist himself may have considered it an immature work unworthy of his name. But who else could have created an immature work like it?
WORDS.ZIP
From the website: "An infinite collaborative word search where anyone can find and submit words — no account required. Select letters and submit valid words to add them to the grid. Words can go in any direction (up, down, left, right) and snake around — BUT NO DIAGONALS!"
Fair warning....
Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?
Montreal's Ice Surfer
Wrote Kottke: "There's a guy named Orion who surfs the St. Lawrence River in the winter — sometimes dodging massive chunks of ice and sometimes riding them downstream — looking for waves."
Friday, January 23, 2026
Infinite Ball Drop
From the website:
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On New Year's Eve, the Times Square Ball drops 139 feet in 60 seconds. What if you extrapolated from that and covered the entire year?
Enter the Infinite Ball Drop. Now you can count down to New Year's 2027 from any moment in time and space.
.............................................
Ready?
The Invention of Nostalgia — Lawrence Raab
Before 1688 nostalgia didn't exist.
People felt sad and thought about home,
but in 1688 Johannes Hofer, a Swiss doctor,
made up the word. It wasn't what he himself
was feeling, but a malady he'd observed
in soldiers posted far from home.
Leeches and opium were the cures,
and if those failed, a return to the Alps.
Therefore: homesickness, nostalgia's symptom,
the way your stomach felt that first night
at summer camp, though if you cried
so hard you had to leave, later
you probably found yourself thinking,
They'd be swimming now, they'd be having lunch.
And you felt sad in a different way.
Imagine how many places you can't
go back to, how much it hurts
to want what's lost — all those days,
the ones that have left
their cloudy pictures in your mind,
and the smell of certain rooms, the light
through trees at certain hours, a time
before the first time you felt it,
like all the years before 1688
The Largest Known Intact Meteorite on Earth
Pictured above, it is still exactly where it landed 80,000 years ago in what is now Namibia.
The Hoba meteorite weighs about 60 metric tons, part of the reason it remains in situ.
A farmer discovered it in 1920 when his plow struck something hard.
The object turned out to be this flat-topped chunk of iron and nickel about 2.7 meters across and one meter thick — roughly the size and shape of a small car crushed into a pancake.
Scientists estimate it originally weighed around 66 tons before weathering and souvenir hunters chipped away at it.
Unusually for a meteorite of this size, there is no impact crater.
A leading theory is that its flat shape and the Earth's atmosphere combined to slow it significantly before impact.
It may have skipped across the atmosphere like a stone thrown on water before touching down.
The site is now a national monument and visitors can still walk right up to it and touch it.
[via Boing Boing]
Thursday, January 22, 2026
Interactive Turbulence Map
"Fasten your seat belt."
From the website:
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This map is generated using data from the GTG forecasts provided by NOAA/NWS and the Met Office. It's updated every 6 hours. The original resolution of the data is 0.25°, but we present it with 0.5° for speeding the page load. Users can choose to see the original 0.25° resolution by clicking the "Increase resolution" button.
MTV Rewind
"MTV Rewind is an interface through which you can watch music videos from the 70s to the 20s, organized by decade. There are also 'channels' for 120 Minutes, MTV Unplugged, Yo! MTV Raps, Headbangers Ball, and the first full day of MTV programming."
"All of the music videos, more than 33,000 of them, are hosted on YouTube and the lists of videos come from the Internet Music Video Database."
"This is as close as you'll get to watching MTV back in the 80s."
[via Kottke]
A Room With a View
Wrote David Honigmann:
- In his foundational 1977 book "A Pattern Language," Christopher Alexander tells of the house of a Buddhist monk that overlooked the ocean.
- But this view could be seen only fleetingly through a diagonal slit in the wall, as a visitor walked through the courtyard.
- "If there is a beautiful view," counseled Alexander to anyone designing a house, "don't spoil it by building huge windows that gape incessantly at it. Instead, put the windows which look on to the view at places of transition."
Wednesday, January 21, 2026
Sedona Chapel
Its full name is
the Chapel
of the Holy Cross.
It was built
in the mid–1950s but
it took me until 2005
to become aware of its
existence. A nice
place to sit quietly for a while
when in Sedona.
12 Rectangles — Andreas Wacker
Andreas Wacker, the creator of 12 Rectangles, here shares a deep dive into his thinking about space, time, color, and much else, all of which played a role in the creation of this website.
Tuesday, January 20, 2026
My Husband's Back — Susan Minot
Sunday evening.
Breakdown hour. Weeping into
a pot of burnt rice. Sun dimmed
like a light bulb gone out
behind a gray lawn of snow.
The baby flushed with the flu
asleep on a pillow.
The fire won't catch.
The wet wood's caked
with ice. Sitting
on the couch my spine
collides with all its bones
and I watch my husband
peer past the glass grate
and blow.
His back in a snug plaid shirt
gray and white
leaning into the woodstove
is firm and compact
like a young man's back.
And the giant world which swirls
in my head
stopping most thought
suddenly ceases
to spin. It sits
right there, the back I love,
animal and gamine, leaning
on one arm.
I could crawl on it forever
the one point in the world
turns out
I have travelled everywhere
to get to.
When things disappear, where do they go?
Everyone knows that when something in your home is nowhere to be found, the only sure way to find it is to buy another one.
But while you're waiting for the replacement, what exactly is going on with the original?
I've long believed stuff enters a parallel universe once it vanishes, where it does exactly what it did in mine until being "rediscovered."
I've never told anyone about my belief because at best they'll think I'm joking and at worst, well, I don't wanna go there.
Too bad my theory won't be confirmed until around 2525.
Wait a sec... what's that song I'm hearing?
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