Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection. “This page contains a collection of small computer programs which implement one-player puzzle games.”
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Entries for January 2026
Out of the 1000 most-discussed books on Hacker News, it looks like around 50 of them were written by women.
A Logistical Matter
Just wanted to drop a quick note to say that kottke.org moved servers over the weekend. You shouldn’t have noticed anything, except perhaps that the site is faster now. There was a small issue with the RSS feed after the migration, but that’s been resolved. If you notice anything amiss, drop me a line?
As always, big thanks to the crew at Arcustech for their rock-solid hosting and prompt tech support expertise.
I loved watching this quick video recap of how Penguin designer Elisha Zepeda made the book covers for 10 books that came out in 2025. Zepeda has a much longer look at his process on YT.
Using lidar, scientists discovered a 400-foot-long wall composed of “60 massive granite monoliths, set directly onto the bedrock in pairs at regular intervals”. The wall is 30 feet underwater and was built 7000+ years ago.
words.zip is “an infinite collaborative word search where anyone can find and submit words — no account required.”
There’s a shark called the cookiecutter shark because it leaves bite marks the shape of “neat, circular holes resembling the cut of a cookie cutter”.
Burn Harry Burn: Reckoning With My Harry Potter Fandom as a Trans Person. “I dug a fire pit in my backyard and burned my complete set of hardcover Harry Potters.”
A soaring US vs a stagnant EU? “Europeans benefit from more leisure time than Americans, higher life expectancy & lower inequality levels, all w/ comparable productivity rates. However one looks at it, this is a considerably better economic performance.”
Alexandra Petri: I Tried to Be the Government. It Did Not Go Well. “I have just driven six and a half hours to Ohio in order to forecast my own weather. From a hot-air balloon.” She also inspects milk & does lawn work on National Park land.
What You’re Watching Isn’t What You’re Really Watching. “You think you’re watching an innocent woman being shot and killed in cold blood by the federal government, but what you’re really watching is the death of the United States of America.”
Abolish ICE
Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE.
An ICE agent murdered a woman in Minneapolis today. Mayor Jacob Frey to ICE: “Get the fuck out of Minneapolis.”
How Did We Map the World Before Satellites?
In 1375, a Spanish mapmaker made a world map we now refer to as the Catalan Atlas. For its time, the atlas was remarkably accurate and comprehensive. This video explains how such a map was made in medieval times. From Open Culture:
The upshot is an answer to the very reasonable question, “how were (sometimes) accurate world maps created before air travel or satellites?” The explanation? A lot of history — meaning, a lot of time. Unlike innovations today, which we expect to solve problems near-immediately, the innovations in mapping technology took many centuries and required the work of thousands of travelers, geographers, cartographers, mathematicians, historians, and other scholars who built upon the work that came before. It started with speculation, myth, and pure fantasy, which is what we find in most geographies of the ancient world.
See also How Leonardo Constructed a Satellite-View Map in 1502 Without Ever Leaving the Ground and The Oldest World Map in the World.
WikiFlix is a streaming site for movies in the public domain, including Metropolis, It’s a Wonderful Life, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Charade.
“South Korea imports more kimchi than it exports, and the gap has widened as cheaper Chinese-made products take hold in the domestic market.”
A group of students at a New Mexico college (mostly) gave up their phones & computers for a week. What did they learn? “Most students said they had gotten to know themselves better without their phones butting in all day long.”
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. Great idea and execution…this is the closest you’ll get to watching MTV back in the 80s.
The proliferation of hummingbird feeders has become a “major evolutionary force” for the Anna’s hummingbird species in the western US. “Over just a few generations, their beaks have dramatically changed in size and shape.”
Lost episodes of Star Trek from the 70s. They were going to do a reboot of the TV series (without Spock!) but the project morphed into the first movie. There are 19 episode scripts & treatments from the project; a few were adapted for ST:TNG.
Robin Sloan asserts (provocatively) that AGI is already here (and has been for a few years). “We’ve got this ubiquitous term, Artificial General Intelligence, & it appears that the Artificial Intelligence has become Really Very General, so … ?”
The Story of Czech Graphic Design
Identity — The Story of Czech Graphic Design is a seven-part series available on YouTube.
In seven parts, the Identita series introduces viewers to the history of Czech graphic design. We will not only explore together the development of the visual face of the Czechoslovak Republic, we will also reveal what is hidden behind the symbols, signs and colors that represent it.
“Norman Rockwell was antifa”, says Daisy Rockwell, Norman’s granddaughter. “So you’ll understand her indignation when President Trump began hijacking her grandfather’s legacy to promote what she considers modern-day fascism.”
A Collection of Unreleased Boards of Canada Tracks
A couple of weeks ago, someone uploaded to YouTube and Google Drive eleven unreleased tracks from Boards of Canada (made from 1985-1996). This seems to be a legit, high-quality leak, judging from the excitement in the YT comments and on Reddit. I’ve heard a couple of these before, courtesy of some long-ago Kazaa/Limewire crate-digging, but most of these are new to me. (via the morning news)
This sucks: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is no more. “Its board of directors chose Monday to shutter CPB completely instead of keeping it in existence as a shell.” GOP ghouls finally killed it.
The Detectorists — A Short Film About Otters and Detection Dogs.
An ecologist in Wales uses tracking dogs to help track & protect the endangered wild otter population; meet The Detectorists.
Set against the serene backdrop of rural Wales, this short documentary follows wildlife ecologist Lee Jenkins and his two German Pointers — Neo and pup-in-training Cariad — as they search for elusive otters. Using scent detection to guide camera trap placement, the team gathers crucial evidence to protect these endangered animals. Shot from a dog’s-eye view with immersive cinematography, the film offers a poetic glimpse into conservation through the nose and eyes of a canine detective.
Tiled.art: “Discover great tessellation art, understand how it works, and create your own.”
Anna’s Archive (“the largest truly open library in human history”) is backing up the entirety of Spotify. “We have archived around 86 million songs from Spotify. While this only represents 37% of songs, it represents around 99.6% of listens.”
When Two Filmmakers Make the Same Movie — and One of Them Is Werner Herzog. A comparison of the two 2022 documentaries about volcanologists Maurice & Katia Krafft, Herzog’s The Fire Within, and Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love.
From Book Riot’s Zero to Well-Read podcast: How to Read More (and Better) in 2026. “They dig into when to push through, when to quit a book, how to choose books outside the algorithm, and how small shifts in attention can enrich your reading life.”
The Mystery Of The Samurai In Venice
Until the late 19th century, Japan’s relations with Europe were relatively limited. So when a pair of letters written by a Japanese man in the early 1600s were discovered in Venice, a mystery was born. Who was this man, why was he in Italy, and why was there little previous evidence that he’d been there? In part one of a new series, Evan Puschak sets the geopolitical stage and introduces us to the samurai who travelled to Rome to treat with the Pope.
A Year of Clean Energy Milestones. “Wind, solar, and electric vehicles made huge strides globally in 2025. For the first time, wind & solar supplied more power than coal worldwide, while plug-in vehicles accounted for more than 1/4 of new car sales.”
A number of studies show that various vaccines (shingles, RSV, flu) are associated with “off-target” benefits like reduced cardiovascular risk, lower rates of dementia, and lower Alzheimer’s risk for older people.
Why I Left Substack. A combination of “a good deal of gross misogyny, transphobia, and hard-right stuff” plus Substack “trying to deny this responsibility [as a publisher], to pretend that their decisions weren’t decisions at all”.
What We Will Use as Weapons: A List of School Supplies
In 2024, schoolteacher Ginny Robinson won the Best in Show award at a quilting convention for her quilt called What We Will Use as Weapons: A List of School Supplies.
This is a protest quilt. It was made by an artist whose day job puts her on the front lines of one of the most grotesque realities in America today. She is a teacher.
What We Will Use as Weapons: A List of School Supplies is the title for this provocative work of art that features school supplies hurling toward the center on the front and an assault rifle on the back. This long, narrow quilt is the actual size and shape of a door. An outline of a human is stitched through the layers. On the front, the person is meant to represent a shooter, and on the reverse side, a teacher.
Robinson’s quilt is now part of the collection at the International Quilt Museum.
M. Gessen on the new world order the Trump regime seems eager to bring about. “If Trump can take Venezuela and Putin can take Ukraine, surely President Xi Jinping of China can take Taiwan.”
The Media Refuses to Call Trump’s Venezuela Attack an Act of War. “Overwhelmingly, the US media and its purportedly straight reporters have adopted wholesale the White House’s pseudo-legalistic, limited framework of an ‘operation’ to ‘arrest’ Maduro.”
We Are the Bad Guys. “What do we call it when a stronger person decides to rob a weaker person because he can? It is just gangsterism. We are the most dangerous gangsters in the world today.”
Isaac Chotiner interviews Oona Hathaway, an expert in international law, about the “brazen illegality” of the Trump regime’s invasion of Venezuela to kidnap president Nicolás Maduro.
Variety has a list of 50 great movies from 2025 that are now streaming, incl. One Battle After Another (HBO), Bugonia (Peacock), Black Bag (Prime), Frankenstein (Netflix), Sinners (HBO & Prime), Weapons (HBO), and Train Dreams (Netflix).
Investigating a possible Daft Punk Easter egg: is the tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger an exact 123.45 BPM and if so, was that intentional on the part of “our helmet-clad robot friends”?
360-degree panoramas of the interiors of several Star Trek ships (Enterprise, TNG’s Enterprise D, Voyager, Defiant, etc.)
Core Memories With the Swiftie Dads
In 2023, Paul Scheer spent a few days talking to fathers who accompanied their daughters to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in LA, either as concert-goers or just chauffeurs. I love this video. One of the dads summed up the vibe of being there for your loved ones, even if it’s maybe not entirely your thing:
Life is moments. Life has nothing to do with money, nothing to do with things. Life is dancing, that is life! It’s when you feel happy. Their happiness is my happiness.
Elizabeth Spiers wrote about the Swiftie Dads on Bluesky:
This is a model for what actual masculinity should be. Men don’t need to spend more time in caves beating their chests with other men; they need to take their daughters to a meaningful thing and talk to them about it.
These guys taking their daughters to Taylor Swift concerts — and unabashedly enjoying it! — are the model. They are being themselves and not treating their daughters’ interests as stupid or aberrant or a thing they should be patted on the back for participating in.
See also The Joy of Fortnite. (thx, caroline)
Things I Learned While Looking Up Other Things! “Thermochauvinism is the (often unconscious) assumption that it’s reasonable to live in cold places but unreasonable to live in hot ones.”
It Will Continue to Grow Except at That Point
“What if you held a tree long enough for it to grow around your hand?” For a piece called It Will Continue to Grow Except at That Point, Giuseppe Penone fitted a cast of his hand to a growing tree and the tree grew around it for more than a decade.
Penone has been featured on KDO once before — for his sculptures of trees where he carves away tens or even hundreds of years from massive trees to reveal their inner saplings.
Stewart Cheifet died last weekend at age 87. Those of a certain age and nerdiness will remember Cheifet as the host of Computer Chronicles, a public television show about personal computing that aired in the 80s and 90s.
“America is no longer a democracy. That doesn’t mean authoritarianism has won. But merely restoring the pre-Trump status quo won’t work. The country needs a democratic transformation.”
NeatoCal is a tiny JavaScript app that outputs a printable calendar with a full year on a single page. I love the view where all the weekends line up.
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