I've been using Pair Domains (née pairNIC) as my default domain registrar for 20+ years. It dates back to my using Pair Networks for website hosting (since 1998, and mscape.com still lives there) - this is a spin-off service. The admin UI is not the fanciest, but it has the control that I need, and the (human) support has always been great.| persistent.info
I've been using Pair Domains (née pairNIC) as my default domain registrar for 20+ years. It dates back to my using Pair Networks for website hosting (since 1998, and mscape.com still lives there) - this is a spin-off service. The admin UI is not the fanciest, but it has the control that I need, and the (human) support has always been great.| persistent.info
tl;dr: You can now embed any OS from Infinite Mac into your website, from 1984’s System 1.0 through 2005’s Mac OS X 10.4. There’s documentation for customizing and controlling embedded instances programmatically. As a demo of what’s possible, Infinite Monkey hooks up an emulated Mac 128K to OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s computer-using models, letting the technologies of 1984 and 2025 to finally meet. The instigator behind all this was Marcin Wichary, whose recent Frame of preference ar...| persistent.info
tl;dr: You can now embed any OS from Infinite Mac into your website, from 1984’s System 1.0 through 2005’s Mac OS X 10.4. There’s documentation for customizing and controlling embedded instances programmatically. As a demo of what’s possible, Infinite Monkey hooks up an emulated Mac 128K to OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s computer-using models, letting the technologies of 1984 and 2025 to finally meet. The instigator behind all this was Marcin Wichary, whose recent Frame of preference ar...| persistent.info
New company, new corporate blog for me to post on. Gardening Week is a post about an engineering team ritual that we've developed at Sierra. Once again you can tell that it was not ghost-written because I got to cram in a lot of links to obscure articles.More seriously, it's been great to be at Sierra from the start and get to influence the engineering culture in such a fundamental way. I know tech company blog posts can paint overly rosy pictures, but Gardening Week is genuinely one of my fa...| persistent.info
The Macintosh Garden is a great resource in the retro Mac community. It has an archive of nearly every piece of software released in the 80s and 90s, complete with screenshots, manuals, and metadata like year of release and operating system requirements. From its debut Infinite Mac would let you use files from the Garden: download it to your computer, and then drag it in to have it appear in the “Downloads” folder. But while doable, it’s not the same as being discoverable or pleasa...| persistent.info
I was a happy user of the Dark Sky weather app for many years. Even more than the localized and timely notifications (I live in a place with predictable weather) I appreciated its Apple Watch complications. I specifically used the three-line textual summary shown in the middle of the Modular face.| persistent.info
tl;dr: No, not Windows¹, but I’ve decided to expand Infinite Mac to the the black hardware that Mac users secretly lusted after in the 80s and 90s: NeXT. There is now a runnable collection of all notable NeXTStep versions, going from the initial 0.8 preview in 1988 to the final OPENSTEP 4.2 release in 1997.| persistent.info
I had previously mentioned that I ended up fixing some DingusPPC CPU emulation bugs. This was my first time working at this (lower) level of the Infinite Mac emulators, and I thought it would be interesting to write up such an investigation.| persistent.info
One of my goals for Infinite Mac is to learn more about computer architecture and other fundamentals. While fiddling with actual old hardware is not as interesting to me (the one classic Mac I own is a PowerBook 550c that I turn on about once a year), I do enjoy operating at lower levels of the stack than I normally encounter. Interacting with the emulators that I’ve ported to Emscripten has definitely exposed me to more of this world, but it’s still been pretty superficial. Even the FPU ...| persistent.info
Infinite Mac has supported a limited form of persistence since its initial launch. This was done by exporting the contents of the “Saved” folder in “The Outside World” to IndexedDB when the emulator was shut down. While this worked, it had several limitations:| persistent.info
The first proper blog post on this site was 20 years ago today. It lived under a different URL, I didn’t register persistent.info until later (when .info was a new-and-shiny top-level domain). It also looked different (I don’t have a screenshot of the first version, but I switched themes a few months later) and was published by very different software (Movable Type 2.64), but there is continuity from then to today.| persistent.info
Here are a few highlights of what’s been happening with Infinite Mac since my last update.| persistent.info
I finally got access to the recently-launchedSlack canvas feature. This project was the last thing I worked on before I left Quip/Slack/Salesforce in April of 2022, and I was curious how it had evolved since then.| persistent.info
It doesn't feel like it's been 5 years since my last post about Reader, but I guess the past few years have suffered from time compression. For this anniversary I don't have any cool projects to unveil, but that's OK, because David Pierce wrote a great article – Who killed Google Reader? – that serves as a nice encapsulation of the entire saga.| persistent.info
I wrote a valedictory blog post about the instrumentation we're adding to the Tailscale client to get a handle on battery life issues. It's been an interesting "full-stack" project, involving thinking about cell phone internals, hacking on the Go standard library, and exploring visualization options.| persistent.info
Darwin was one of the first things Apple open-sourced (24 years ago). It's been mostly a "throw it over the wall" approach, but being able to peek under the hood has been very handy.| persistent.info
tl;dr: Infinite Mac has a new home at infinitemac.org. Using a new Emscripten port of Mini vMac, it is now able to run almost every notable version of Mac OS, from 1984’s System 1.0 to 2000’s Mac OS 9.0.4. The project is also now accepting donations (via GitHub Sponsors or PayPal).| persistent.info
One of the less visible changes in Tailscale v1.36 is that the macOS binary is 35MB smaller. I wrote a post on the Tailscale blog about the chance observation and investigations that led to this size win. If you're interested in this kind of low-level shennanigans, we are hiring iOS and macOS engineers.| persistent.info
tl;dr: I use Masto Feeder to generate a nicely-formatted RSS feed of my timeline, and then I can read it in my preferred feed reader.| persistent.info
I worked on adding iOS and macOS Shortcuts support for Tailscale's latest release. I wrote a blog post with examples of shortcuts and automations that the Tailscale actions could be combined with. One that didn't make the cut was using sound recognition, for things like “In case of an emergency, break glass to activate Tailscale”.| persistent.info
I've been running lolcommits for 10 years, and it's captured some interesting moments from my time at Quip and Tailscale.| persistent.info
I've come to think of Infinite Mac as my forever project. There's always something to work on, whether it's expanding the library, improving compatibility, adding more platforms, improvingperformance, debugging data structures, bridging APIs from 30 years ago with modern web platform features, or fighting with frontend tooling. With that in mind, here's where things stand at the end of the year — there have been quite a few changes since my last post on the project.| persistent.info
Account switching is one of the less fun parts of modern computing -- for a while I had registered giveupandusemultiplebrowsers.com. Even when software tries to accomodate these scenarios, the heuristics for when to switch can be tricky, and in some cases require the user to maintain a complex mental model of what state they're in and where they're trying to get to.| persistent.info
It was a lot of fun turning Brad's Taiscale-on-Wasmprototype into Tailscale SSH Console. I wrote a post for the Tailscale blog with more details (you can tell it wasn't ghost-written because it has my link-heavy style).| persistent.info
One of the things that attracted me to Tailscale was their in-depth technical blog posts, like Josh's hacking on Go internals to get iOS memory use down, or Dave's epic treatise on NAT traversal. It was therefore nice to be able to contribute a debugging story: The Case of the Spiky File Descriptors. There's nothing epic about it, but it was still a satisfying problem to troubleshoot.| persistent.info
tl;dr: Infinite Mac can now run early Mac OS X, with 10.1 and 10.3 being the best supported versions. It’s not particularly snappy, but as someone who lived through that period, I can tell you that it wasn’t much better on real hardware. Infinite HD has also been rebuilt to have some notable indie software from that era.| persistent.info
