shortformblog

I Hackintoshed a 2-in-1 with a touch screen way back in 2018. Wrote about it in a comically long how-to piece about how to put it together.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-to-make-a-hackintosh-lap...

(And yes, I know the code got mangled. I don’t run the Vice archives.)

It was fine then, it will be fine now. This is a non-issue.

Hi I'm the author and yes, this.

The point of the story was that I built a thing about Mechanical Turk to promote its money-making capabilities, and ironically made more money from it indirectly than I ever did directly. Considering that point was implied by my framing, you did in fact miss it.

I’m not saying that you have to like a story, but your framing felt unfair, which is why I responded that way.

I see you missed the point of the story. But whatever. I'm sorry my dire financial situation didn't tie up in a nice enough bow for you.

I explained the situation after the fact, and they were understanding. But certainly I admit that if I could do it again I probably would have clued them in sooner. The site had slowed down by the point this happened, so I’d describe it as a little more of a fire sale.

I learned a lot from that situation that I took to future sites.

So, I have a story to share about Mechanical Turk that you might find interesting. I’ve shared it a couple of times before on Twitter and Bluesky, but I’ll share it again.

Long story short: Mechanical Turk saved my bacon.

Back in 2005, I was working a job at a small-town newspaper in a town I’d never lived before. I didn’t know anyone beyond the staff (as I was working layout rather than as a reporter), and I had gotten interested in the idea of doing Mechanical Turk for a few extra bucks. I thought there might be a formative scene of interested people doing this, so I started working on a blog for it. I briefly collaborated on it with another guy who put it on forum software because he didn’t know how to use, like Drupal.

That blog was called Turking.com, and it seemed like it was going well for a bit. We even got a mention on the AWS website. But after about two or three months, it was clear the initial excitement around the idea (and the initial work) had died down. (The work picked up later, but in clearly different ways. I don’t think folks were really “excited” about it after that point.)

If you want to get an idea of it, there was one capture on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20051124231722/http://www.turkin...

The site had started to die out in part because my iBook suffered a catastrophic GPU failure and me, being a broke small-town newspaper employee, did not have the money to replace it. Plus, the community just hadn’t emerged like we had expected.

But then I got an email out of the blue: Someone wanted to buy my domain, which I owned outright, but they didn’t want to say who. I got contacted by a broker, and the exchange took place over escrow.

(The domain most assuredly was bought by Amazon and is managed by MarkMonitor.)

I didn’t get a ton of money from the deal, but I did get enough to pay for a new laptop. I had some regrets about selling it (in part because I originally built the site with someone else), but I was in a bit of a dire financial situation which that proved to be the starting point for getting myself out of.

That domain purchase was notably more than I ever made from clicking and classifying random pictures, that said.

I have one of these that was donated by a reader. I've never been able to get it to work because its battery (its infamous Achilles heel) would not charge.

If anyone has any ideas I'm all ears. I've never written about it in any depth.

I got the Gigabyte 5060ti AI Box, which is good but a real pain to set up on Linux. Not enough to run Deepseek but a lot of good options.

https://tedium.co/2026/06/10/gigabyte-aorus-5060-ti-ai-box-e...

FWIW, I have found Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.5-Pro to be a pretty cost-effective alternative. https://mimo.mi.com/models/en-US/mimo-v2.5-pro

While it won’t cover everything DeepSeek does, it handles sophisticated tasks quite well. I found it after spotting it on a chart of different models and it was listed as being near Deepseek v4 Flash’s price/performance levels.

I have noticed by the way that DeepSeek’s API has been pretty slow the past couple of days. This feels like a demand-driven move more than anything. Good thing I invested in an eGPU!

Honestly, I found managing a Bulma codebase significantly more of a pain in the ass than Tailwind. Tailwind offers the expressiveness of actual CSS with the ability to make quick changes on the fly. As someone who has spent a lot of time working in CSS frameworks over the years, it is one of the better abstractions of its kind.

I sort of feel like this argument is trying to put a train that is already halfway across the country back in the station on the East Coast.

It is so wild that this got shared, as I was working on a project that very specifically was hoping to integrate a feature like this. Psyched to try it, I’ll credit the author in the credits of the site I’m building.

The problem is less the color than the weight. If it was 500 rather than 300 it would be perfectly fine.

Curious to see how this worked, I tried this on Deepseek using Claude Code Router, following the author’s guide, with two small changes: Make it an emo song that uses acoustic guitar (or, obviously an equivalent), and it could install one text-to-speech tool using Python.

It double-tracked the vocals like freaking Elliott Smith, which cracked me up.

Quick add: I tested VivaDesigner on some old InDesign docs and I found it did not handle color blend modes very well, which is kind of an essential for a risograph project like 404’s. Nonetheless, the fact that it was able to open an InDesign doc more or less intact makes it a useful tool for a switcher.

Thanks for pointing out VivaDesigner—I’m surprised in the many obsessive searches to find something like this, it never came up! (I will note that there are a lot of pretty obscure layout programs out there. At my first newspaper, I was brought it to help with the transition to CCI, which was a full-stack publishing tool popular with newspapers of the era. As a result of this, I was introduced to their old system, by Harris, which relied on Windows NT 3.1. Fun times.)

This project is probably a no-go with it (for kicks, I did try importing a PDF of the final doc) but I will keep it in mind in the future from an analysis standpoint.

The other point I’d make is kind of a tipping-point argument. While VivaDesigner can export into IDML it looks like, Affinity has gone just mainstream enough that it won’t be turned away at print shops, which is a real risk. PDFs can get you most of the way, granted, but some print shops want to edit the file, which makes sense.

Claude can't properly count the number of characters in a sentence. It's asking a lot to assume it can get pixel perfect.

I followed the same steps the Verge reporter did: Downloaded GameHub, connected my Steam account. The initial boot was lengthy, but it worked.

I downloaded an unoptimized game and tested it (Stray, a few years old at this point) and got some graphical glitches, but between 10-20 FPS on a three-year-old phone. That it’s even possible is impressive, and I imagine it will only get better as more games get optimized.

Affinity I believe is C++ with C# used for the front end on Windows.

The code doesn’t have nearly the legacy of Adobe’s code, so the result is that Affinity already runs very well in WINE thanks to some passionate fans that really want to see this use case.

This poor man is in a losing battle with modern computing.

They mention Hollow Knight in their update, but I should note that Silksong also works on my M1 Air flawlessly. Games with more 3D graphics also work to some degree. I tried Bakeru on it and got decent results though the texture load time was significant.

Asahi has been fun to watch, and I’m happy it’s still moving along, even with the messiness of the past twelve months. I rarely boot into MacOS on the machine these days, and while I’m mostly using a PC these days, I am debating getting a used M1 Pro or Max for the battery life benefits (and access to Mac graphics programs on the rare occasions I need them).

The fact that M3 is technically possible, even if likely a while off, is promising.

Thanks for the reminder that what the Internet Archive did in its case would have been legal if it was in service of an LLM.

I use Craft CMS’ GraphQL capabilities with my Eleventy site. Works well and helps me keep my page loads static. I would also recommend Directus for this, as it has some nice quality-of-life benefits.

To manage deploys, I have used Cleavr, which does a good job at it without being too user-unfriendly. That’s a paid service, about $6/month.

I like the spirit of this, but I just think Mavericks is a bizarre break point for this type of approach. At least hit Yosemite so you can benefit from NVMe. For me, Mojave feels like the neatest break point, but if you’re rocking Nvidia, there’s also a case for High Sierra.