Ben Fry
@benfry
Running since 2010 / spent 22 years building and supporting its community / sometimes seen teaching at
Finally had a chance to actually listen to this today; it's fantastic. Even better than the last. And I still think you look great as a Scooby Doo villain.
brb, I've just split in two because the part of me that cares about foreign policy is devastated at what our State Department has become, while my information designer self cannot stop laughing at this map slop www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
Just look at this beauty… The first laptop ever, the Grid Compass 1101… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_Co... I don't feel like Bill Moggridge gets enough credit for what an incredible merger of form and function this was.
“MIT mechanical engineers designed a robot that can swim underwater, break through the surface, and continue flying in air. Diving birds manage this feat. ‘So we knew it was possible. Just no one had tried this in a mobile robotic system’” news.mit.edu/2026/new-fla...
A 12yo watches JAWS for the first time… (We've started having our daughter write down what she thinks will happen, to keep her from spending the movie blurting things out and ruining the surprise—or simply frustrating—the rest of the room.)
Had to dust off an ancient piece of code from 2004 that used an early version of Processing. Amused to see the supported platforms list in the source:
From February 2020, before “sarscov2” and “covid” were even named, this piece from @edyong209.bsky.social holds up remarkably well: www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...
“Porting Mac OS X to the Nintento Wii” This made my day—first, that there are people out there who do things like this, but second (and more to the point), that he also took the time to document the process in detail. So much to be learned here: bryankeller.github.io/2026/04/08/p...
Fall is the best, but spring in Boston is a close second. Animals re-emerging, plants are blooming, and massive flakes of heavy, wet snow are falling on this fine morn, the seventh of April.
Happy Easter! 🐣 Shotton's site is also worth a visit if you're needing more elegant and clever in your morning (or afternoon, or evening, or…) dshott.co.uk/collections/...
Unintentionally celebrating Apple's 50th anniversary today having just started “Apple in China” which so far is the best retelling of their history I've read in years.
The machine would later make the trip with me to San Francisco after school to start my new job (with Netscape!) An aspiring Duchamp from the moving company converted the machine's original shipping box into this wonderful post-Dadaist creation.
RIP Mac Pro (2006–2026) My first Mac Pro was a Power Computing Power Tower Pro, purchased my senior year in college with every dollar I made during an internship the previous summer. The “world's fastest Mac” in 1996 (by quite a bit), coming in at 200 and 225 MHz…
Still working to get the right marketing message for Rowboat, but in the meantime, lots of updates this month: improved cell editing, map improvements, plus a fresh desktop release: rowboat.net And for the superfans, all the gory details on the release page: docs.rowboat.net/releases/ 💪
Someone asked Christoph Niemann to paint a garage… 💛 www.christophniemann.com/detail/garag...
This piece was published exactly a year ago, and at the time I /hoped/ it was at least a bit alarmist, but it has proven to be overwhelmingly correct, and perhaps even understated. Well worth reading to understand where we are, where we're headed in the US: www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...
“my dream of combining my loves of math, art, and teaching into a book is finally a reality” —@gwenbeads.bsky.social www.worldscientific.com/worldscibook...
Beautiful perspective from this map of the world re-oriented using the “Spilhaus” projection, which depicts Earth as a single, connected ocean. From Woods Hole's “Why the Ocean” campaign: www.whoi.edu/campaign/why...
21,689 rows of film data (100 MB file!) and filtering by Director instantaneously on hover. All in the browser, no roundtrip to a server. Just insane what we can do here: rowboat.net/f/7vb8dx84 (I'm actually moving slower in the first half to make it less confusing—second half is actual speed.)
While trying to sort out and assemble my own thoughts about generative AI, it's been helpful to take in the work of others who are more articulate about it. www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...
I miss this being the most annoying thing a piece of software might do… It sounded so desperate and lame, but was just an eye roll. Now you fire up one of the Adobe apps and it goes completely nuts phoning home. This is my laptop's firewall saying wtf after double-clicking Photoshop.