The past, recompiled for browsers

  1. Apple Music's hidden iPod: Apple Music's 404 page hides a pixel-perfect, from-scratch recreation of a classic iPod, complete with click-wheel haptics and a working music library. (unsung.aresluna.org)
  2. Local Wikipedia: Search any spot and get a geocoded mini-encyclopedia of everything Wikipedia knows within a half-hour walk or six miles of it. (edjefferson.com)
  3. JPEG XL lands in Chrome and Firefox: The format now ships in both major browsers, offering better compression than JPEG or WebP, lossless JPEG transcoding, and a permissive open license. (cgicoffee.com)
  4. WebKit gets ready for dual screens: Safari 27.1's release notes cover support for the iPhone Duo's two-screen behavior, including automatic two-page PDF viewing and early Device Posture API flags. (webkit.org)
  5. A syntax highlighter that doesn't know grammar: Shu Ding explains gpu-lexer, a 28kB highlighter that classifies code tokens with a tiny WebGPU model instead of language-specific rules, treating code like a 1D image to segment. (shud.in)
  6. Curling noise the correct way: The latest entry in Catlike Coding's Godot GPU-pattern series warps UV coordinates with curl noise while correctly adjusting derivatives so lighting and normals stay accurate. (catlikecoding.com)
  7. Scrubbing video at 60Hz with zero lag: A cables.gl patch achieves frame-accurate, instant video scrubbing in WebGL by pairing all-intra encoding with full in-memory caching of the file. (cables.gl)
  8. A Shockwave relic, revived: CreativeApplications.Net spotlights atomless, a 2003 net art piece now running natively in browsers via the DirPlayer emulator, decades after Shockwave itself died. (creativeapplications.net)
  9. Sillage, a quiet game after Haeckel: A small contemplative browser game draws its visuals from Ernst Haeckel's illustrated plates and is best played with your phone turned sideways. (sillage.denzen.online)
  10. Quick Study turns photos into paintings: Simon Willison had Claude Opus build a browser tool that uses Sobel edge detection on canvas to simulate a quick paintbrush rendering of any uploaded photo. (simonwillison.net)
  11. An animator's take on AI and math: A 3Blue1Brown team member reflects on how AI's disruption of art now echoes through mathematics, weighing labor, originality, and inspiration along the way. (3blue1brown.substack.com)
  12. Malaria caught mid break-in: New imaging captures malaria parasites opening temporary molecular doorways in red blood cell membranes to invade undetected, then dissolving the evidence behind them. (quantamagazine.org)

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