• # project about date
• 48 cut in ask it something out loud, then cut it off mid-sentence. barge-in is the thing every voice vendor writes about, and they all write about the same half of it: detection accuracy, racing to silence in under 300ms, not hearing yourself over your own tts. what nobody appears to have asked is whether going silent is the behaviour anybody actually wants. interrupted people don't stop dead. they finish the clause, or trail off, or talk over you and lose. so this ships all of them on one microphone and lets you feel the difference: dead stop, which is what everyone sells; trail off into a mumble for a few words; finish the clause and then yield, which is probably the one people want and nobody ships; and no yielding at all, which is what barge-in switched off actually sounds like 07/30/26
• 47 bedside manner one competence, nine manners. ask a question and nine assistants answer it under nine different rules about how they are allowed to talk. the answer is held still on purpose — same model, same settings, same ninety-word ceiling for every one of them — so the only thing varying is delivery. questions only may never answer, and asks what you'd do with the number instead. no hooks may not end on a question or an offer, so there is deliberately nothing to reply to. no first person drops i and we and every compliment, and stops reading as a person at all. forced paraphrase may not reuse a content word you used, with the borrowed ones underlined in red. apology budget gets three apologies ever, and you watch the counter decline to spend. tired drains as it goes: shorter, then typos, then asleep. whether first person makes a thing feel parasocial is an argument in prose and a five-second experiment with two panes side by side 07/29/26
• 46 lunch time lunch time a plate of places to eat, fed by a slack channel. somebody mentions a restaurant in the lounge and it lands on the plate; spin the fork and whatever it stops on goes into the fridge for a fortnight, so the rotation is forced to actually rotate instead of walking back to the same three doors. one board per channel, and it knows the time zone and the hour you break, so the plate for a wednesday is not the plate for a friday 07/28/26
• 45 search through every search engine there is, all 237 of them, sorted from the ones everybody uses down to a webring's own search box with a few thousand pages behind it. one query goes into all of them at once. the point is the long tail: marginalia ranks pages down for having javascript and ads and hands you the web as people actually wrote it, wiby only indexes pages that look handmade and a person checks every one, mwmbl is an index anyone can edit like wikipedia. ninety one of them will answer inside the page itself, either because they publish results a machine can read or because they permit their own page to be embedded, so bing and marginalia and a 1912 newspaper scan sit in columns you scroll sideways through and you can watch them disagree. no ai anywhere in it: nothing is summarised or reranked and every column is only what that index itself said. the dead are still listed with the year they stopped, and their epitaphs are the best part: altavista points at yahoo now, ask jeeves put up a goodbye page after thirty years, hotbot's name was sold and it is an ai chatbot, gigablast was one man crawling billions of pages by himself until he stopped in 2023 and the index went with him. drag anything you find into the bucket at the top and keep it as a page, or hand somebody a link 07/28/26
• 44 back-issue craigslist, but you pick the day instead of the city, and it hands you the classified ads that actually ran in american newspapers that morning. the listing photo is the ad itself, cut out of the page scan, so you are reading 1905 newsprint: a gold watch lost in cherokee park, a bay mare with black points branded, three rooms to let in omaha, a laundry that wants a girl. the papers filed these under almost the same headings craigslist uses, so the categories are the ones the printers chose, not ones i imposed. everything the museums hold that already existed by that date is for sale alongside them at period money, which means a side chair out of the art institute sits directly above a want ad for second hand furniture and at a glance you cannot tell which is which. the city rides along in the neighbourhood slot the way craigslist does it. reply to the poster and you get the street address they printed, and nobody at that address since about 1908 07/28/26
• 43 carbon dating guess when it was made. a photograph of one object out of the met turns up, a sphinx or a samurai sword guard or a bronze wine jar, and you drag a marker along a timeline running four thousand bc to nineteen thirty. everybody in the room is dating the same thing on the same twenty five second clock, and at the buzzer all the guesses land on the bar at once, in front of the faint crowd of everyone who has ever dated that object before. the bar is warped so that being a hundred and fifty years out on a five thousand year old amulet is a good guess and the same hundred and fifty years on an eighteen eighty print is a bad one, which means one tick means the same thing everywhere on it. drag away from the line to slow down and you can pick out a single year. ten rounds to a game, then a podium, then it starts again. it stops in nineteen thirty because that is where the public domain stops 07/28/26
• 42 write off a writing app with the camera on the whole time. your face on top, a plain page underneath, and every keystroke kept with its timing, so afterwards the thing writes itself again at exactly the speed you wrote it: the typos going in and coming out, the sentence you selected and killed, the pointer drifting over to click, the four minutes you spent looking out of the window. it plays back as a recording of the deciding rather than the words that survived, and comes out as one video sized for instagram. all of it stays on your machine unless you put a session up at a link 07/28/26
• 41 stand corrected every correction the guardian has printed since july 1999: 47,085 of them, out of 8,879 daily columns set in the smallest type the paper owns. where a correction turns on one thing, the version that ran is printed struck through with the true one beside it, and then the pivot is blanked out and you are asked which of the two was true. the ledger counts the whole archive. numbers fail more than any other kind of fact, 20,105 times, and millions for billions is the house speciality: the record is $9m for $9bn. page one is the wrongest page in the paper. the slowest confession took a full year, to concede it had printed the wrong kind of quince 07/28/26
• 40 ask around nobody has ever made a list of every advice column, so here is one, and the thing that makes it worth drawing is that a column is a role rather than a person: the name outlives whoever is writing it. dear abby has been two women, dear prudence four people, care and feeding seven. so every bar breaks where the name changed hands and you can watch a pen name get handed down like a job. it runs from the athenian mercury in 1691 to this morning, and somewhere in the middle the newspaper columns die off and the newsletters bloom. then upstairs there is a room where you can just ask, because people have been writing in to strangers about this stuff for three hundred and thirty five years and there was nowhere on the site to actually do it. strangers answer, you mark the one that helped, and whatever you asked about it will tell you which real column would have taken it 07/28/26
• 39 open now how much of the world is open at this exact second. four and a half million places tell openstreetmap when they are open, and shifting every one of them into its own timezone gives a single number that never stops moving: at the deadest hour on earth one and a quarter million places are open, at the busiest three and a half million. the map is drawn from nothing but opening hours, and the continents show up anyway. every hour a wave of opening rolls west around the planet with a wave of closing behind it, and you can watch it: right now things are unlocking in seoul while new york puts the chairs up 07/27/26
• 38 round the clock the 729,156 places on earth that never close. 24/7 is the single most common thing anyone has ever written in the opening hours field, about one in six of all of them, and this is the whole inventory: the laundromats, the vending machines, the temples, ten thousand little free libraries, an automat für rohmilch in tyrol. beside each one is the real local time where it is, ticking. scroll and you get a column of clocks all reading different hours, every one of them somewhere that is open at that hour 07/27/26
• 37 office hours 235,157 government offices, town halls, post offices and courthouses, ranked by how few hours a week they will let you in. the median is forty. french town halls run at seventeen. at the very bottom sit hong kong's mobile post offices, a van that pulls into a village and is open for fifteen minutes, once a week. a dot beside each one says whether it is open at this moment in its own timezone, and if you ask it what is near you the answer is usually no 07/27/26
• 36 by appointment opening hours is not a number, it is a little grammar, and a million people have written in it by hand. these are the ones where that shows: places open for exactly one minute a week, hours that move with the sunset, rules that fire only on the last thursday, and four thousand three hundred whose entire stated opening hours is the sentence "nach vereinbarung". some of it does not parse at all, including one that says öffnungszeiten vorhanden, aber unbekannt, opening hours exist, but unknown. each value is drawn as the week it describes 07/27/26
• 35 crash course people ask for topics and once a week one of them becomes the entire site. everybody piles in adding things to read, watch and listen to, experts turn up and mark what actually matters, and at the end it seals shut as a permanent reading list. the trick is that nothing here is guessed: articles get counted word by word, books and papers come off their real page counts, video off its running time, so a course arrives with an honest total on it. twenty seven items, fourteen hours and twenty minutes to get through. filter it down to just the essential ones and the clock retotals in front of you 07/27/26
• 34 on the nose paste any url and it comes back as a perfume. nine notes arranged top, middle and base, each one a real photograph, plus a line of fragrance copy written straight. the irs forms page is printer toner over fluorescent light and receipt paper, drying down to waiting room and old paper. two hundred and twelve notes to draw from and a lot of them are things like hot laptop, parking garage and wet concrete, so it can only describe a page with what a page actually smells of. everything scented goes on one wall, and each page tells you what else in there smells like it 07/27/26
• 33 lit crazy movie a parental-advisory site for how dark the movie is. not tonally. lighting wise. look up any film and your browser measures its actual brightness off twenty stills, then the people who tried to watch it overrule the measurement with a score, an advisory checklist, and the exact minute they lost the picture 07/27/26
• 32 pipe up send someone a note through a glass pneumatic tube. the pipe is rolled to a different length every time and nobody tells you which, so it might land in ninety seconds or on thursday, and you both stand at your own ends watching it come. drop a key or a boiled sweet in with it and they can see that but still not read the note. a heavy canister goes slower. pump to pull it in, twice as fast if you both do. pull back and you're floating in the whole plant, everyone's capsules running through the glass. only one canister fits in a tube, so until it lands neither of you can send anything 07/27/26
• 31 box office every post office box on the public record, in one list, sorted by box number. 372,704 of them, so you can read box 1 in a thousand towns at once, or go straight to box 7777. from irs, fec and sec filings. yours comes off the wall in one click 07/25/26
• 30 food fight race everyone at the table to eat one shared plate of food. your webcam reads your chewing: aim with your head, chomp to bite, and swallow fast because a fresh bite is still stealable 07/24/26
• 29 heads up cut out just the head: background and body gone, then refine by hand. optional hd hair-matting pass. the whole screen glows like a head. runs in your browser 07/24/26
• 28 word of mouth stumble the web, but each page only shows up inside your open mouth, cut to the shape of your lips. chomp to stumble somewhere new, move your head to look around, chew to scroll. runs in your browser 07/25/26
• 27 spin off a shared dj booth: everyone in a room drives the same two live radio channels together in real time. crossfade, eq, filter, loops, drum pads, plus rooms and chat 07/24/26
• 26 due process a photo editor where every effect is a physical process: riso, cyanotype, halftone, polaroid. watch each one develop, tweak the real knobs. runs in your browser 07/23/26
• 25 log on one public log of everyone who's here right now, and how long they stayed. you get a random name you can change, and a clock that only ticks while you're really there 07/23/26
• 24 public access flip through tv channels of public-domain video from the internet archive, complete with static between stations 07/23/26
• 23 unreal when i shop my face edit a picture with friends in real time — your webcam face is the cursor, and whatever tool you grab is hoisted over your head 07/22/26
• 22 keyword salad upload a photo and get bourglor-style hyper-literal, keyword-stuffed captions (part reaction-archive, part aliexpress product title), then post to a searchable archive 07/22/26
• 21 swear jar a jar that fills up off the live bluesky firehose, one swear at a time, each shown in context. slurs filtered out 07/22/26
• 20 linked out the day's real news, rewritten as insufferable linkedin humblebrags: "i'm thrilled to announce..." 07/22/26
• 19 stroke of genius type any drawing tool and it draws like the real thing: pencil, spray can, water bottle dipped in paint, dragon breath 07/22/26
• 18 much obliged patron of the farts: spend favor, not money, to dedicate someone's meal, a bench, or an unwritten page to whoever you like 07/22/26
• 17 crodie chow real toronto restaurants with names too absurd to be real — a gallery + map 07/22/26
• 16 well read paste any article and re-typeset it into a reading layout you fully control 07/21/26
• 15 forks given a fork economy: get a random handful of forks each day and give them to posts you appreciate 07/21/26
• 14 roll call a public wall of people's rss subscriptions: drop yours and read over everyone's shoulder 07/21/26
• 13 weather or not location-first weather channels: call the sky's next move, surf where people are guessing, chat with your area 07/21/26
• 12 cite seeing paste a paper, follow its citations and backlinks down the rabbithole 07/20/26
• 11 for you search your name: find the books secretly dedicated to a you 07/20/26
• 10 gloss over paste any link, get a glossary of its terms defined only by real dictionaries 07/20/26
• 09 paper-trail surf research papers by how they read: semantic river + a field map, inspired by jabbic 07/20/26
• 08 course load type a topic, pick real internet archive items, build a weekly syllabus 07/20/26
• 07 clock it time is a social construct.. and can therefore be crowdsourced.. 07/16/26
• 06 sound off upload sounds, auto-pitch-detected, curate your own soundboard 07/14/26
• 05 read the room a temporary holding space for friends to read and annotate pdfs together in real time 07/14/26
• 04 handshake two-player trade table for digital scraps. swap on mutual confirm 07/14/26
• 03 faces-places exploring pareidolia phenomena and how humans/machines might interpret them 07/14/26
• 02 hear, here an ephemeral group (text-to-speech) chat that tunes you into the present moment 07/13/26
• 01 jabbic judge a book by its cover.. inspired by max bittker's exploration engine 07/13/26

six more run on my machine and can't be a link — menu-bar apps, and one that clones your voice on its own gpu. those are at putty august.