u/Mastbubbles

I went down a YouTube rabbit hole this week rewatching old iPhone commercials. I'd forgotten how cinematic some of them are. The Romeo and Juliet Portrait Mode launch, scored to a 1968 Nino Rota cue.

The Hermitage one continuous take that ran 5 hours, 19 minutes, 28 seconds inside the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Frankie's Holiday at Christmas. The Bella Ramsey "Email Summary" bit last year for Apple Intelligence.

But the one that still gets me is "Thumb." 2012, iPhone 5. Context: Samsung had just released the Galaxy Note. Everyone was racing into 5.5-inch territory and everyone was selling "bigger" like it was a feature. Apple's answer was a 30-second ad of nothing but thumbs landing on the new screen. No specs, just pure condescendingword-play

It's the most condescending ad they ever shot (as far as I remember), and I love it for that. Apple was looking at the industry and going we don't need to do that to sell a phone. Thumb was the flex, and that size was apt (back then)

iPhone 6, and iPhone 6 Plus, did come right after but for those two years of iPhone 5, and 5s, I sent that ad to all my friends who got samsung, and tbh I got an iPhone 5 because of that ad.

Which one stuck with you? If anyone wants to go through the rabbit hole, I pulled everything together here. To go through as many iPhone ads, I could find.

Interactive Version

Eight Royal Pop models. Exact StockX prices. Sold counts. The full four-year decay curves of MoonSwatch and Blancpain × Swatch underneath so you can see where this lands by week one, month three, year one.

Hot model right now is the Lan Ba savonnette at $1,697 with 193 sold by sundown. Cold one is Otto Rosso at $1,045. A two-watch lottery inside one drop. I didn't know watch markets worked like that until today

The page I'll keep it updated as new transactions clear.

Every time I re-watch the show, I just start admiring this man more and more. The genuineness, the small things, everything he does with so much purity and passion. It's just amazing to watch.

When he told Jim not to give up, I felt it. I remembered the time I was dating my (now) wife and she lived 12 hours away. Every time we thought it might not work, I remembered what Michael told Jim. Never, ever, ever give up.

Michael remembers everyone's birthdays. He knows how Ryan feels about him, and he still gives him a second and third chance. I just wanted to make a post and thank Michael, for everything.

Made a whole page about it for you guys to see. The small moments, the relationships, the genius moments. There are a lot more I could have added.

This is gonna hurt like a motherf——

Thank You, Michael.

I have been seeing Google Doodles since I was kid, like it was a ritual to check the Google Doodle on all the holiday's like Diwali, Holi, Independence day, learning about new people, new places, and new events.

It's just amazing how a person from History is on the homepage of the internet, being read by millions of people.

Google Doodles celebrates everyone, every event, so I wanted to Celebrate Doodles.

Made an interactive version.

I have been talking to ChatGPT every day for three years and I can't remember which version did what. So I lined them up. Seven flagship releases, each of which unlocked something new: vision, voice, reasoning, agents. The minis, nanos, Turbos, and GPT-4.1 variants aren't on the list. They mostly compressed or cheapened what came before, and you can see their footprint on the price chart further down. Each release here gets one prompt and one reply, in order.

Interactive Version

I've always been fascinated by London pub culture. How deep it goes.

I moved here in 2019. One of my first weeks, I walked into Shakespeare's Head on Kingsway at 10am on a Sunday looking for food. There was an old man at the bar, two thirds through a pint, reading the paper. That's when it clicked. This wasn't just a drink. It was a ritual.

I ended up working at that same Shakespeare's Head as a student. Six years on, the first thing I do after work is still walk to a pub. It's the most London thing I do.

A few months ago I started reading into how old it all actually is. Where the names come from. How many we've lost. Turns out the city's lost about five thousand pubs since 1989, roughly two a week, and almost nobody is keeping count.

So I spent a week pulling it all together: every closed-pub photograph I could find, every active pub from OpenStreetMap, and the name-origin stories I could verify, into one piece.

It's here Genuinely curious what your local is, and whether it's still pouring.

I have been fascinated by macOS for years now, and I really love how everything works, sometimes at work when I use someone's PC, I realise how superior macOS is, not only in design - in simplicity, in doing everything so gracefully.

Switching windows with three fingers swipe (have no idea how will I ever live without it), and the spotlight? I mean, I don't think I can even go through an hour without using it, the colours, the fonts, tbh not a huge fan of Safari.

The other day I wanted to take a screenshot on a PC, and trust me, not to sound like a snob or anything, it took me a lot of time, because I am so hooked to Mac, I just can't.

This post is all about the journey, of how every macOS is named, and how it reached where it is today, because where it is today, is not just an OS, it's a work of art, helping millions and millions of people.

Made an interactive version for you guys to see the whole journey.

Sometimes I'll boot up an old Mac just to hear that chime. it's silly, I know, but that one second sound just does something to me. like a switch flipping in my head, a "yeah, today's gonna be a good one." tbh I think most of us have one like that, the PS1 swoosh, the Windows 95 chord, that AOL "you've got mail", etc, etc.

I started looking into who wrote these and got pulled in deep. Brian Eno wrote Windows 95 on a Mac (he hated PCs lol). Ryuichi Sakamoto, THE Sakamoto, wrote Dreamcast, and Sega didn't even put his name on the box. The PS1 chime was made by a Japanese composer named Takafumi Fujisawa who got two days in the studio and was told "make it feel like walking into a cinema." Two days. One second of audio. Defined a generation.

I get they're "just sounds", a few seconds of audio engineered for tinny speakers, but the thought, the constraint, the people behind them. I have just been in Awe.

I couldn't get this out of my head for a few weeks lol, so I made an interactive version of the whole thing, for anyone to play with. 39 chimes from 1977 to today, click any device to hear it, sidebar tells you who made it and why.

interactive version

Sometimes when I run, I try to go fast, and break my own records, and think to myself, if another human can do it, so can I, and no I am not that fast or anything, but I do keep myself motivated by saying this to myself everyday - "If they can do it, so can you"

It's simple, it's powerful, and tbh it does work in my head.

And then comes Races like the London Marathon, and the world record being broken, I have just been in Awe, that a human body can go for 21 KM/H for two hours straight, it's proven, it's out there, and it's all real.

I understand the shoes, the conditions, etc, etc - but if is Insane.

I couldn't stop myself from just been stuck on this story for sometime now lol, made an interactive version of the whole thing, for anyone to play with it.

By clicking on the traffic cones, we were teaching Waymo's AI, Those two squiggly words you typed in 2010? You were digitizing the New York Times archive, one word at a time. Google bought the company that ran it for the data pipeline.

For 29 years we've been clicking traffic lights to prove we're human, for the same company that already had our Gmail, our YouTube history, our Maps timeline, and our location at 3pm yesterday.

Just to learn about Captcha, and how all of them worked, Made an interactive version that embeds the actual reCAPTCHA v2, hCaptcha, and Cloudflare Turnstile widgets via their published test sitekeys, plus recreations of the dead generations

The CAPTCHA wasn't really stopping bots after about 2014. It was a free workforce. Hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of millions of clicks, all unpaid.

interactive version