Really Specific Stories Martin Feld

John shares his personal narrative as the writer of Daring Fireball and host of The Talk Show with John Gruber, which is now both a podcast and a live show with Apple executives, held during the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference. In the conversation, John explains what first captivated him about computers at an early age, expands on his passion for reading and writing and outlines how he has carved out a life of independent production and commentary, based on his technological interests. Last, he describes what he’s most proud of.


Podcast case study: The Talk Show with John Gruber (producer)


Find John at Daring Fireball.


Read a transcript of the episode as a styled PDF or in plain text.


Links and Show Notes

The Director’s Commentary 00:00:00


The Talk Show by John Gruber and Dan Benjamin was hosted on a different site, which can now be found in the Internet Archive.
Dan Benjamin


Hivelogic now redirects to the site above.

Internet radio
Daring Fireball
iPod
USB
FireWire
FM radio
Apple Inc.
iPhone
Mac (computer)
Substack
Blue Microphones
Amazon (company)


Amazon Web Services (AWS)

MP3


Audio data compression

YouTube
Blog (a truncation of ‘weblog’)
Ad tech = online advertising technology
Domain name


A Voracious Reader 00:10:12


Computer science
Apple IIGS
Drexel University
Stephen King
Isaac Asimov
Internet


I’ve Carved Out this Life 00:17:04


Atari 2600
Pong
Word processor (electronic device)
Typewriter
Liquid-crystal display (LCD)
World Wide Web
Dave Winer


scripting.com

Jorn Barger


Robot Wisdom was Jorn’s early blog, which can now be found in the Internet Archive.
Robot Wisdom and How Jorn Barger Invented Blogging

Usenet
TidBITS
HyperCard
Mailing list
Jason Kottke


kottke.org

Macworld
Browse an extensive library of MacUser PDF magazines at vintageapple.org.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Pulitzer Prize
The New York Times
The Washington Post
Center City, Philadelphia
The Talk Show with John Gruber


Freely Honest 00:38:04


Zoom (software)
Skype
COVID-19 pandemic
iOS
Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC)
Daring Fireball on YouTube, featuring videos of John’s annual The Talk Show Live events with Apple executives
Mimi Sheraton


Remembering Mimi Sheraton, Innovative New York Times Food Critic (John’s mentioned article on Daring Fireball)

Android (operating system)
Walled garden (technology)


A Loose, Unofficial Community 00:52:29


RSS
Twitter (rebranding to X at the time of this podcast episode’s publication)


@gruber
@daringfireball

Content management system (CMS)
Reddit
John’s three mentioned Twitter/X alternatives and his accounts on each one


Mastodon (social network)


@gruber@mastodon.social

Bluesky Social


@gruber.foo

Threads (social network)


@gruber


TikTok
Facebook
Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)


A Vision for the Whole Internet 01:00:52


Spotify
Joe Rogan
Bill Simmons


The Ringer

Ghost (blogging platform)
Marco Arment


Overcast

Castro
Application programming interface (API)
News aggregator


NetNewsWire
Reeder

XML
Paywall
Dithering
Ben Thompson


Stratechery

Bob Dylan


It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) (the song with the lyrics that John quoted)

Banner ad
YouTuber
Patreon
Google


Pretty Proud of That 01:18:00


John’s full searchable archive at Daring Fireball
Markdown
A few articles about Apple’s Brushed Metal user interface


Aqua (user interface) on Wikipedia, with mentions of Brushed Metal throughout the article
Brushed Metal and the HIG on Daring Fireball
The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface Theme on Daring Fireball
The Brushed Metal Diaries: An Introduction, a Trojan Horse and a History of Abuse on 512 Pixels



Credits

Recorded and edited by Martin Feld, using Audio Hijack and Ferrite Recording Studio





Original podcast theme music by Alex Canion


Contact


Website: rsspod.net
Email: martin@loungeruminator.net
Mastodon: social.lol/@martinfeld
M

Baldur reflects on his family’s history in radio broadcasting, his path to interactive media and writing books and how he moved away from listening to tech podcasts.


Content warning: some coarse language


Podcast case study: Accidental Tech Podcast (listener)


Find Baldur at baldurbjarnason.com.


Read a transcript of the episode as a styled PDF or in plain text.


Links and Show Notes

Fourth Generation 00:00:00


RSS
Perl
Interactive media
RÚV is the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service.
World War II
British invasion of Iceland
Allied occupation of Iceland
Attack of Pearl Harbor
Telegraphy
Axis powers
Hotel Borg
Vox populi (or vox pop)
Web development


Interactive Media Environments 00:08:13


Software widget
Graphical widget
COVID-19 pandemic
HyperCard
Macintosh SE
Solitaire
Tetris
What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)
Comparative literature
Computer science (or ‘comp sci’)
University of the West of England (UWE)


Bower Ashton campus map

BBC Radio
Dot-com bubble (including reference to the dot-com crash)
Adobe Flash
Sandbox (software development)
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
ebook
Amazon Kindle
iPhone
iPad


Defamiliarisation 00:15:43


Artificial intelligence (AI)
Cryptocurrency (or ‘crypto’)
Popular culture (or ‘pop culture’)
The Real World of Technology by Ursula Franklin


Recordings of public lectures in the Internet Archive

Processor (computing)
Musical genre mash-up!


Pop-punk
Post-punk

Neosurrealism
Accidental Tech Podcast
Jason Snell
Defamiliarisation
Viktor Shklovsky
Bertolt Brecht
YouTube
Line Goes Up – The Problem with NFTs
Defunctland


Disney’s FastPass: A Complicated History

App Store (iOS/iPadOS)
Tom Abba
*This is not the future of the book
Out of the Software Crisis by Baldur Bjarnason
Open source


Pick and Choose 00:31:03


Round table
Narrative journalism
20 Macs for 2020 was released in multiple formats:


a podcast on Relay FM;
a series of written blog posts at Six Colors; and
a YouTube playlist hosted at 512 Pixels

Facebook
Twitter (rebranding to X)
Revenue sharing
Threads (social network)
Bluesky Social
Mastodon (social network)
Algorithm
Patreon
Whisper (software)
Descript
Substack
Email list
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
du jour = ‘of the day’, e.g. ’soup *du jour’ = soup of the day


My Computer Identity 00:44:05


Mac (computer)
Macintosh Performa
Microsoft Windows
macOS (previously referred to as Mac OS X and OS X)
Pro Tools
Apple Human Interface Guidelines
User interface design
Apple simplified System Settings for macOS Ventura, moved many items from AppleInsider
System Settings (previously named System Preferences)
Disk Utility
Linux
GNOME
Safari (web browser)
ARM architecture family
Amy Hoy
User experience (UX)
ChromeOS
Software bug
Netscape
Jamie Zawinski (a.k.a. jwz)
HAL 9000


Plumbing of the Web 01:01:05


HTML
XML
Markup language
Static websites
Flat file
Client-side
iBook G3 ‘Clamshell’ (or what Baldur’s dad refers to as the ‘toilet-seat iBook’)
NetNewsWire
OPML
Domain name
Stacking the Bricks (podcast)


Credits

Recorded and edited by Martin Feld, using Audio Hijack and Ferrite Recording Studio





Original podcast theme music by Alex Canion


Contact


Website: rsspod.net
Email: martin@loungeruminator.net
Mastodon: social.lol/@martinfeld
Micro.blog: micro.blog/martinfeld

Marco tells the story of how he became a Mac enthusiast, indie app developer and tech podcaster, covering his work on Tumblr, Instapaper, Overcast and Accidental Tech Podcast, among other projects. He also explains why he thinks it's so important to maintain the open Web and podcasting through RSS, in the face of more exclusive publishing platforms and audio hosts.


Podcast case study: Accidental Tech Podcast (producer)


Find Marco at marco.org.


Read a transcript of the episode as a styled PDF or in plain text.


Links and Show Notes

The Stronghold of Podcasting 00:00:00


This Week in Tech (TWiT)


This Week in Tech (podcast)
MacBreak Weekly

The Word Nerds (Archive)
Tumblr
You Look Nice Today
Ricky Gervais


The Ricky Gervais Show

Stack Overflow


The Stack Overflow Podcast

Joel Spolsky
Jeff Atwood
Accidental Tech Podcast (ATP)
CD-R
MP3
CD player
iPod
The iPod Video was the fifth generation of a product line that is now collectively referred to as the iPod Classic.
iPhone
This American Life
COVID-19 pandemic
Audiobook
Cable television
Leo Laporte
AM broadcasting
Talk radio


Self-taught 00:09:11


Videocassette recorder (VCR)
Microsoft Paint
BASIC
3-2-1 Contact Magazine was an American educational television show about science that aired on PBS from 1980 to 1988, with an adjoining children's magazine, and which can now be found in the Internet Archive.
Windows 3.1
Disk operating system (DOS)


MS-DOS

QBasic
Visual Basic (classic)
C (programming language)
Unix
Solution stack
Sun Microsystems


Scalable Processor Architecture (SPARC)
SPARCstation
Solaris

Segmentation fault
Mac (computer)
IBM PC compatible (now more of a historical term that relates to our current usage of the term ‘Windows PC’)
Vivísimo


Yippy (originally developed and released as ‘Clusty’)

Computer memory
Version control
Software bug


Tumblr 00:20:24


Craigslist
Tumblr
Software development
Indie (disambiguation)
West Coast of the United States
Amazon (company)
Bloomberg L.P.


Bloomberg Technology

Davidville
David Karp
PHP
Shard (database architecture)
Twitter
Content management system (CMS)
Microblogging (The first micro-blogs were known as ‘tumblelogs’.)
Myspace (formerly known as MySpace)
Facebook
LiveJournal
WordPress (content management system)


A Great Time to Be a Mac User 00:33:02


Apple, Inc.
Desktop computer
Windows Update
Digital Visual Interface (DVI)
Vim (text editor)
Terminal emulator
Linux
Server (computing)
Ruby on Rails
TextMate
MacBook (2006–2012)
PowerBook G4


A Better Audience 00:38:13


Web development
5by5
Weblogs, Inc.
Engadget
Gizmodo
Lifehacker
RSS


News aggregator (or in certain cases or implementations, RSS reader)

Digg
Reddit
Hacker News
Dan Benjamin
Instapaper
iPad
Build and Analyze was a weekly news and discussion show about technology by Marco Arment and Dan Benjamin, which can now be found in the Internet Archive.
YouTube
Overcast (app)
Merlin Mann
John Siracusa


Accidental Tech Podcast 00:49:43


Neutral
Casey Liss
Accidental Tech Podcast (ATP)


Membership program

Relay FM
John Roderick (musician)


Overcast 00:58:16


Overcast


Overcast (app) (further information)

Music (software) (The app to which Marco refers was originally known as the iPod app on iPhones.)
Downcast (app)
Android (operating system)
Pocket Casts
Apple Podcasts
Stitcher
App store


App Store (iOS/iPadOS)

TikTok
Instagram
Proxy server


How the Internet Is Supposed to Work 01:05:06


World Wide Web


Web standards
(redirecting from ‘open Web’)
Decentralisation

Comcast
Verizon Communications, Inc.
UUNET
Internet Protocol (IP)
Walmart
Monopsony
Google
Amazon Kindle
Spotify
Trade magazine
Eddy Cue


Credits

Recorded and edited by Martin Feld, using Audio Hijack and Ferrite Recording Studio





Original podcast theme music by Alex Canion


Contact


Website: rsspod.net
Email: martin@loungeruminator.net
Mastodon: social.lol/@martinfeld
Micro.blog: micro.blog/martinfeld


A Special Note

Martin is a paid subscriber

Grace is a developer and podcast fan, who shares her experience of following various independent shows over the years and in producing her own chatcast, titled Monkey Mind. During the conversation, she also covers her passion for video games and considers the key differences between aural and visual media, drawing on her own study of film and background in video production.


Content warning: discussion of clinical depression


Podcast case study: Connected at Relay FM (listener)


Find Grace at graceteng.me.


Read the transcript of the episode as a styled PDF or in plain text.


Links and Show Notes

How the Habit Started 00:00:00


Major depressive disorder (or clinical depression)
The Pen Addict (blog)
Relay FM


The Pen Addict (podcast)

Accidental Tech Podcast (ATP)
99% Invisible
Planet Money
Myke Hurley
John Siracusa
Merlin Mann
43 Folders
Cortex
Mac Power Users
Ungeniused
Playing for Fun
Celeste (video game)
Analog(ue)
Connected


The Dynamic 00:09:18


Mac (computer)
Casey Liss
Parasocial interaction
Google
Amazon (company)
Blog
iPhone
Early adopter


Monkey Mind 00:18:49


Monkey Mind
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet
COVID-19 pandemic


What Sound Can Do 00:26:17


Software engineering
Start-up company
Multimedia
Apple File System (APFS)
NPR
This American Life
Montage (filmmaking)
Juxtaposition
YouTube


Not a Purist 00:36:46


Chatcast = a podcast with a conversational format, rather than a narrative one
RSS
Adam Savage
Adam Savage’s Tested
Speedrunning
Dear PB
Games Done Quick


Think Fast! Sly Another Day (video example)



Credits

Recorded and edited by Martin Feld, using Audio Hijack and Ferrite Recording Studio





Original podcast theme music by Alex Canion


Contact


Website: rsspod.net
Email: martin@loungeruminator.net
Mastodon: social.lol/@martinfeld
Micro.blog: micro.blog/martinfeld

Shelly is a writer, editor and podcaster who tirelessly advocates for greater accessibility in digital technology. Joining Really Specific Stories, she shares her journalistic and storytelling experience, explains her audio projects, such as Parallel with Relay FM, and illustrates how far we’ve come (and still have to go) in making hardware, software and media accessible.


Podcast case study: Parallel at Relay FM (producer)


Find Shelly at brisbin.net.


Read the transcript of this episode as a styled PDF or in plain text.


Links and Show Notes

Mindful of Ethics 00:00:00


RSS
Macworld/iWorld


Watch the Macworld 2005 keynote in the Internet Archive.

Adobe Pagemaker
Mac (computer)
Desktop publishing
Laser printing
Linotype machine
Macintosh Plus
Page layout (with further information about galleys)
Rubylith
Light table
See a scan of the top portion of Supercomputing News (Vol. 1 No. 3) from 1988, which was kindly provided by Shelly because the publication preceded the Web. This was her first editing job!
Hydra (operating system)
Cray-1
MacUser
Apple Inc.
Microsoft Windows


Go My Own Way 00:07:44


Trade journalism
Tech Podcast Network
History of podcasting (with references to couplecasting)
Accessibility and more specifically, computer accessibility and Web accessibility
Diversity (politics)


Accessibility in the Mainstream 00:16:36


Disability
Assistive technology
Google
Microsoft
Software bug
Pro Tools
iRiver
MP3
iPhone
Artificial intelligence (AI)
Transcription software
Content management system (CMS)
iOS Access for All: Your Comprehensive Guide to Accessibility for iPhone and iPad by Shelly Brisbin
Jason Snell
Use Switch Control on Mac
Use Switch Control to navigate your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch
iOS Switch Control Demo (YouTube video excerpt of Todd Stabelfeldt's keynote from Apple's WWDC 2017)


Parallel and Relay FM 00:35:31


Parallel
Relay FM
Stephen Hackett
Myke Hurley
iOS
macOS
Android (operating system)
Twitter
Slack (software)
Discord


Feedback and Engagement 00:45:24


Mastodon (social network)
Mention (blogging)
Wallflower (people)


Aural Inclusivity, Niches and Narratives 00:49:49


Fortune 500
36 Seconds that Changed Everything: How the iPhone Learned to Talk
Narrative journalism
Radio documentary


Credits

Recorded and edited by Martin Feld, using Audio Hijack and Ferrite Recording Studio





Original podcast theme music by Alex Canion


Contact


Website: rsspod.net
Email: martin@loungeruminator.net
Mastodon: social.lol/@martinfeld
Micro.blog: micro.blog/martinfeld

Jason recounts his personal history as a tech enthusiast and how he built a new life on the Web as an independent writer and podcaster. Along the way, he considers his identity, interaction with fan communities and development of various solo and collaborative projects.


Podcast case study: 20 Macs for 2020 at Relay FM (producer)


Find Jason at sixcolors.com.


Read a transcript of the episode as a styled PDF or in plain text.


Links and Show Notes

A Highly-focused Beam 00:00:00


Steve Jobs
iTunes
Apple announced support for podcasts in iTunes 4.9.


Apple Takes Podcasting Mainstream (Apple Newsroom press release from 28 June 2005)
Steve Jobs announces switch to Intel & Podcasting WWDC 2005 (Steve Jobs Archive on YouTube, jumps straight to podcast announcement at 00:06:46)
For those who enjoy digital spelunking, here’s the full history of iTunes.

Macworld
Macworld Podcast
Mac (computer)
Apple Inc.
iPod
Hypercritical (podcast)
Build and Analyze was a weekly news and discussion show about technology by Marco Arment and Dan Benjamin, which can now be found in the Internet Archive.
Marco Arment
Dan Benjamin
Downstream
Julia Alexander
Parrot Analytics
Tim Goodman


Articles at The Hollywood Reporter

San Francisco Chronicle
Twitter
The Incomparable
InterText


Building an Audience 00:10:17


RSS
Ricky Gervais
The Ricky Gervais Show
tv.org (Snapshots are in the Internet Archive.)
Usenet
FTP server
Offset printing
GarageBand
Substack
Accessibility
Byline
Leo Laporte
This Week in Tech (TWiT)


MacBreak Weekly

Relay FM
Myke Hurley
Stephen Hackett
John Siracusa


John’s archive of articles at Ars Technica



Community and Persona 00:22:05


Mastodon (social network)
New tool ‘Movetodon’ makes it easier to find your Twitter friends on Mastodon (This is one example of the tools that were available to switch networks.)
Upgrade
MacUser
The Rebound
Dan Moren
Lex Friedman
John Moltz


Honesty and Care 00:30:51


Anti-fan
Star Trek
Star Wars
Marvel Entertainment
Google Pixel
Android (operating system)
Harry McCracken
Andy Ihnatko
E-reader
AppleScript


A Massive Media Transition 00:44:09


20 Macs for 2020
TikTok
YouTube
Rene Ritchie
Jason’s @bleedsixcolors YouTube channel


I Have Eight Jobs! 00:53:41


Jason mentions three of his membership programs for podcast fans:


Six Colors;
The Incomparable; and
Upgrade+ (displayed alongside other shows at Relay FM).

Accidental Tech Podcast (ATP)
Airbnb
David Sparks
John Gruber


Credits

Recorded and edited by Martin Feld, using Audio Hijack and Ferrite Recording Studio





As an insight into community influence and my own fandom, I use Ferrite Recording Studio with iPad Pro and Apple Pencil because of Jason's early reviews of the app (such as this one) and his comprehensive demo video on YouTube. Just to emphasise the 'iPadness' of this academic/community audio project, you may notice that I left the iPadOS pointer visible in the screenshot above, which Jason also wrote about optimistically back in 2020.


Original podcast theme music by Alex Canion


Contact


Website: rsspod.net
Email: martin@loungeruminator.net
Mastodon: social.lol/@martinfeld
Micro.blog: micro.blog/martinfeld


A Special Note

Martin is a paying subscriber of Jason’s Six Colors and Upgrade+ membership programs; this did not influence any of the questions that were asked and did not place any expectations on Jason as a participant of this academic podcasting project.