Theo on tech · July 5th

I stumbled on a fan‑made site that basically pulls together everything Microsoft has ever logged about your Xbox journey. It taps the same API that powers the Xbox app, so it can stitch together your gamer score, achievement history, and the titles you’ve owned—right back to the original console. The neat part is the timeline view: each month is a thin bar, and you can scroll through 25 years of play, seeing spikes when you hit a new release or finally cleared that long‑standing trophy.

What’s under the hood is a simple mash‑up of public profile data and the game catalog, but the creator added a custom visualizer that maps your activity onto a scrolling canvas. It’s all client‑side, so there’s no need for a server to store your history; the site just queries the Xbox Live endpoints and renders the results in the browser.

If you’ve been around since the early days, it’s a quiet reminder of how the ecosystem has stayed surprisingly persistent. Plug in your gamertag, and you get a personal, retro‑styled snapshot that feels more like a memory lane than a stats dump.

Valve has always designed hacker-friendly hardware, and in that spirit, [NaKyle Wright] released Inkterface, a design for an E-ink faceplate to fit the recently released Steam Machine. As far as projects go, this one is meticulously documented, so give it a peek. The system uses a selection of components that include a 5.83″ E-ink panel and driver board, a small lithium-polymer battery, and an ESP32-based controller board. A cleverly-designed 3D printed frame and bezel hold everything just so, creating a snug assembly with minimal wiring hassles. The faceplate is wireless and self-contained, attaching with the help of four magnets. On the software side, the host machine communicates over Bluetooth, and a service takes care of pushing updates. An app for configuring and talking to the display will be available on Steam eventually, but in the meantime one can install that part manually. [NaKyle]’s bill of materials calls for specific components, but the underlying design is very modular. Should one wish to make hardware or component changes, alterations to the 3D printed parts might be needed as well. Fortunately, [NaKyle] includes the .step files alongside the .stl models. We love to see that, because it makes tweaking or customizing so much more accessible. A homebrewed version of this E-ink panel might be just the thing to complement a homebrewed Steam machine. Be sure to also check out the repository of Steam hardware, which contains drawings and 3D models of the Steam Deck and Steam Controller, useful for designing holders or custom brackets or whatever else one may need.

An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch: Two hundred and fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a new commercial from Google asks: What if the Founding Fathers had access to Google Workspace? With the tagline "Group project, but make it 1776," the ad depicts a largely unseen Thomas Jefferson mid-draft when he gets a nagging text from Ben Franklin, leading to a very Google-centric collaboration process. Edits are suggested in Google Docs, a meeting gets scheduled in Google Calendar and conducted remotely via Google Meet (with every single attendee apparently turning their camera off?), then the whole thing is finalized with e-signatures; cue the fireworks. Of course, since this is an ad from a tech company in the year 2026, AI has a role to play. The fictionalized founders use Google's "help me visualize" AI tool to try out different animals on the national seal, Gemini takes notes on the meeting, and the founders also ask the chatbot for advice before declining King George III's document access request. TechCrunch call it "very tongue-in-cheek," noting that at one point Samuel Adams even asks, "Can we settle this over beers?" And they argue that "the AI evangelism is relatively discreet when compared to many other recent ads."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

They slipped a brand‑new iPhone 17 Pro Max, Cosmic Orange, into the massive time capsule they’re burying for the nation’s 250th birthday. It’s not just the phone itself—Apple’s latest hardware, with its titanium frame and ultra‑fast chip, is being sealed alongside a handful of items from each state, meant to give future folks a snapshot of today’s tech.

What’s odd is the way they’ve packaged it: the phone sits in a custom‑molded foam cradle inside a stainless‑steel vault, then that vault is nested in a concrete slab. The whole thing will sit underground for 250 years, only to be opened in 2276 for the country’s 500th anniversary.

So when they finally crack it open, people in 2276 will be holding a piece of 2026—still glossy, still humming, still a reminder of how we thought a phone could fit the world in our palms.

We all know the e-ink persistent displays, as they’re cheap and plentiful enough to have become ubiquitous in applications such as supermarket price labels. But we don’t often see some of the other technologies that almost did the same thing. The BBC Archive has a report from 1986 showing one of them, a prototype display from STC. E-ink relies on flipping the arrangement of black and white particles in its pixels, while this one has a fluid in which the molecules are aligned to let light through, or dispersed randomly, at which point they block light. Frustratingly, we aren’t told what the liquid is, but we are given what might be the reason that we’ve never seen one. The activation voltage is rather high at 200 volts. It’s still a fascinating glimpse of something we might have had, with some tasty early-PC-era portables along the way. The BBC archive has served up quite a bit of retro goodness over time, and we’ve certainly featured one or two of them over time. A recent one was this demonstration of email via a flight to Amsterdam, from the same year as today’s display.

Subsea cables. Ukrainian power stations. Russian oil refineries. Even airports, water-desalination plants and Amazon data centers. They've all become targets in wartime, notes the Wall Street Journal, and around the world now arguments "are already brewing between companies and governments over new regulations and potential costs." In Germany, powerful associations representing private companies and municipal utilities have pushed back against new standards for physical protection, warning they could spell financial ruin. New Zealand's government has faced resistance from industry groups over a proposal to fine critical-infrastructure companies and their directors for cybersecurity breaches... A sign of how lines are blurring: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization's 32 countries last year agreed that as part of a pact to spend 5% of economic output on defense and security, 1.5% would go to military-adjacent needs including protecting critical infrastructure and networks. Spending targets range from cybersecurity and industrial capacity to railroads, bridges and ports needed for military logistics... "We need a wide concept of defense — defense is no longer just military," said Italian Adm. Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, NATO's top military adviser. Adding to the complexity, companies now need to protect the data networks that serve as gateways to critical infrastructure. Hackers increasingly target not just computer files to steal information but also systems managing vital functions like building access and factory control, remotely causing physical damage or enabling espionage. U.S. authorities in April warned that Iranian hackers were trying to disrupt American drinking-water systems by targeting computer equipment that connects hardware with software. A year earlier, suspected Russian hackers remotely manipulated valves on a Norwegian hydroelectric dam... Another challenge will be parsing jurisdictions and liability for assets that cross international waters or are damaged in combat — such as subsea data cables or energy pipelines. Turf battles between law enforcement and militaries are already complicating efforts... "The private owner can invest in redundancy, monitoring, and repair capacity, but only governments and militaries can really deter, patrol, attribute, or respond to hostile state activity," said Marc Glasser, who worked on cybersecurity and infrastructure security for three decades at the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Department of Homeland Security.... Companies say they need greater clarity from governments on what protections they will provide and subsidies to help them defend privately owned assets that provide a public good. Most governments don't provide incentives for companies to invest more than the minimum legal resilience requirements. The article notes that in May the chief executive of California's Port of Long Beach "launched a cyber-defense operations center to thwart tens of thousands of cyberattacks daily, which jeopardize computer systems and all equipment connected to them." The article also points out that the EU adopted new regulations requiring countries to reduce vulnerabilities, and new laws proposed in the U.K. now "seek to increase penalties for subsea sabotage, updating codes that date to when telegraph cables were first laid in the 19th century."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft slipped a toggle into Teams that lets you mute the AI assistant right in the middle of a call. It’s not a new feature, just a switch you can flip when you need a moment of silence from the note‑taking bot.

The change came after users raised concerns about what the AI does with the transcript it’s been gathering. By default the assistant keeps a running log, but now you can pause that logging without ending the meeting.

If you hit the button, the AI stops listening and the meeting proceeds as if the bot never existed. When you turn it back on, it picks up fresh notes, leaving the earlier segment untouched.

It’s a simple privacy safeguard, giving you control over when the AI is allowed to hear and when it isn’t.

You are not bad at taking notes. You take notes just fine. The problem shows up later. You need an old note back, and you cannot find it. Maybe it is a quote you saved months ago. Maybe it is the reason you made a big decision last winter. Maybe it is a half-finished idea that could fix the problem you have right now, today. It is all still in your vault. Somewhere. Buried under 400 files. Under 27 tags you do not remember making. Under six dashboards you built with excitement and never opened again. You even have a nice looking graph view. It looks great. It has never once helped you find anything. This guide is not about making your vault look pretty. It is about building a vault that does two simple things. It lets you save notes fast. And it lets you actually find them later, with help from Claude. Not a nice looking storage room. A tool that actually works for you. Here is what you will walk away with. One vault. Ten simple folders. Five templates you can use today. A list of 50 more templates for later. A CLAUDE.md file that lets Claude read and understand your vault. Three easy workflows you can run this week. And one weekly habit that keeps everything working. An Obsidian vault is just a folder on your computer. Your notes are plain text files inside it. That means you can open them in any app, not just Obsidian. It also means AI tools like Claude can read them easily. Obsidian adds some extra tools on top, called Templates, Properties, and Bases. These turn a plain folder into a real system. But here is the main point of this whole guide. Stop building your vault around where to put a note. Start building it around how you will find that note again. Think about how you actually remember old notes. You remember what kind of note it was. You remember roughly when you wrote it. You remember the topic. And you remember if it was finished or not. That is it. Just four things. Your folders, your file names, and your tags should all be built around those four things. Nothing more. Inside the full guide, you get the ten folders that make this whole system work, the five templates you can copy and use today, and the full library of 50 more for every part of your life and work. You get the exact CLAUDE.md file that turns Claude into a real assistant inside your vault. You get three ready-to-use Claude workflows that clean your inbox, find connections you missed, and write your weekly summary for you. And you get the one simple weekly habit that keeps this whole system alive, instead of turning into another dead vault six months from now.

Here are nine videos, plucked from YouTube, presenting the official marches of the U.S. government’s eight uniformed services, plus one uniformed civilian service that also deserves inclusion. While four of the songs enjoy near-universal recognition, the other five are more obscure. For that matter, a couple of the uniformed services aren’t that well-known, either. (At the bottom, I also include a tenth video—this one of a patriotic song that I composed and performed in 2020.) For those readers trying to count all nine services on their fingers, here’s the list: There are the six branches of the U.S. military—the Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Coast Guard. There’s also the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Commissioned Officer Corps and the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. And finally, the lone civilian entity included here is the U.S. Maritime Service. These nine marches have colorful histories. Below, you can listen to all nine songs and read some lore associated with each, plumbed from the archives of the distinguished Faculty of Music at the University of Wikipedia. On rare occasion, members of that esteemed professoriate make errors and omissions, and so do I. So, corrections and additions are welcome in the comments section below. Additional lore about these services and their songs are also especially welcome. Enjoy the music and stories, and, for those readers in the U.S., have a safe and happy 4th of July weekend. If you’re outside of the U.S., please enjoy this little musical celebration with us. Also known as “The Army Song,” this one has a history that surprised me. I assumed that this had been the Army’s official song forever, but it was only adopted in 1956. Edmund Gruber wrote “The Caissons Go Rolling Along” in 1908, and John Philip Sousa made it into a march in 1917, renaming it the “U.S. Field Artillery March.” But, it was not the Army’s first choice for an official song. In 1948, there was a contest to pick a march to represent the Army, but none of the entries hit home. In 1952, the Secretary of the Army asked the music industry for submissions, and they received around 800. Officials chose “The Army’s Always There,” and it was featured at Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential inauguration. Soon, however, people began to notice that the song sounded far too much like the then-recent novelty song, “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts,” popularized by Merv Griffin and Danny Kaye. In 1956, the Army dusted off Sousa’s march, edited the melody a bit, changed the title to “The Army Goes Rolling Along,” and added a new set of lyrics by Harold W. (“Bud”) Arberg, including, “First to fight / for the right / And to build the Nation’s might / And The Army Goes Rolling Along.” This is the only one of the service marches written by a world-famous composer—the Frenchman Jacques Offenbach (e.g., “Can Can”). The melody began as the “Gendarmes’ Duet,” added in 1867 to Offenbach’s 1859 comic opera, Geneviève de Brabant. (You’ll likely be shocked to hear the original version at this link—and it couldn’t remind one less of the Marines.) The lyricist who penned the almost universally recognized lyrics (“From the halls of Montezuma / To the shores of Tripoli; …”) is unknown. The Marines officially adopted the march as their official song in 1929. Surprisingly, the Navy has never officially designated “Anchors Aweigh” as its official song, though it’s usually thought of as such. It was originally a fight song for United State Naval Academy (USNA) sports. In 1906, midshipman Alfred Hart Miles asked the Academy’s bandmaster, Charles A. Zimmerman, to help him write a song for the football team. Miles’s original lyrics, still used at USNA football games, are not the words known world-over today. Another midshipman, George D. Lottman, penned new lyrics in 1926, including the more familiar, “Anchors Aweigh, my boys / Anchors Aweigh,” amended in 1997 by Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy John Hagan to continue, “Farewell to foreign shores / We sail at break of day, of day.” Known familiarly as “Wild Blue Yonder,” this march went through several names on the way to its present title. Originally, it was called “Army Air Corps,” as the Air Force wasn’t an independent service branch until 1947. Robert MacArthur Crawford, who wrote the melody and first verse in 1939, had attempted to enlist as a flyer in World War I, until it was discovered that he was underage. He later became a pilot and and did fly in World War II. In 1941, the Army Air Corps was renamed the Army Air Forces, and the song’s title changed accordingly. With the establishment of the Air Force as a separate branch of the military, the song was renamed “The U.S. Air Force Song” and was adopted that year as the new branch’s official song.

Hey folks, This is what my downloads folder looked like: Four years of stuff. Immigration PDFs sitting next to meme screenshots. Seven versions of the same HTML file (eoa.html, eoa(1).html, all the way to eoa(7).html, because past me kept hitting save). HEIC and JPEG copies of the exact same photo. Installers I downloaded once and never touched again. I’d been “meaning to clean it up” for about two years. You know the feeling. That folder is the junk drawer of your digital life. Nobody wants to open it, so it just grows. So I did something different. I didn’t sort a single file myself. I gave Claude the folder and one prompt, approved a plan, and walked away. By the time I came back, everything was in clean categories, duplicates were quarantined, my sensitive documents were flagged in their own folder, and there was a little summary.md waiting for me that said I could reclaim about 2GB. I genuinely didn’t touch it. Let me show you exactly how, because this is one of those AI wins you can pull off today. Manually organizing a few thousand files is the kind of task that’s too boring to do and too annoying to ignore. And it’s not just clutter. It’s real money and real risk. Duplicate photos eat storage you’re probably paying for. Old installers sit there as dead weight. And your ID scans, tax docs, and contracts are floating around loose in a folder you’ll eventually screen-share by accident. This is exactly the kind of dumb, repetitive, judgment-light work AI should be doing for you. Not writing your novel. Just taking the boring thing off your plate. Here’s what you need: The Claude desktop app (Mac or Windows), on a paid plan. Download it from claude.ai. CoWork mode. Open the app and find the CoWork tab. This is the mode that lets Claude actually work with files on your computer, not just chat. The folder you want fixed. Link it. Photos, Downloads, Desktop, whatever your messiest one is. Then you paste the prompt below and approve the plan when it shows you one. That’s the whole setup. No code. No plugins. No skill required. I started with a basic “sort my photos by year” prompt. It worked, but it left Claude guessing on the weird stuff and gave me zero proof of what it did. So I rebuilt it. This version discovers its own categories instead of you having to list them, checks with you before it moves anything, catches duplicates across different file formats, quarantines your sensitive documents, and writes you a report at the end. Here it is, clean and ready to paste: Organize every file in this folder. Follow these rules exactly: 1. Never delete, overwrite, or modify any original file. Copy-then-verify before any move. If anything is ambiguous, leave it in place and note it in the report. 2. First, scan everything and discover the categories yourself. Don't use a preset list. Read filenames, file types, and content where needed, and propose categories that actually fit what's here (e.g. personal photos, headshots, content assets, video drafts, screenshots, legal documents, invoices, guides and notes, installers, code/config files, but only if they actually exist in this folder). 3. Show me the proposed folder structure with file counts per category before moving anything, and wait for my approval. If a category has only 1-2 files, fold it into a broader one. No folder sprawl. 4. Detect versions and duplicates across formats: the same photo saved as both HEIC and JPEG, "(1)" copies of the same download, numbered iterations of the same file. Keep the most recent or highest-quality version in its category folder, move the rest to "Review - Duplicates," and log which kept file each one matches. 5. Create a "Sensitive - Handle Manually" folder for anything legal, financial, medical, or identity-related (IDs, certificates, government forms, contracts, anything with account numbers). Move these there and list each one explicitly in the report. 6. Flag installers and disk images (.dmg, .exe, .pkg) into an "Installers" folder with their sizes, and calculate the total space I could reclaim by deleting them. Don't delete anything, just show me the number. 7. When finished, create summary.md in the main folder: total files processed, breakdown by category, duplicates found, reclaimable space from installers and duplicates, and everything flagged as uncertain or sensitive. Paste that, approve the plan it shows you, and let it run. I want you to understand the prompt, not just copy it. Because the design choices are the whole point. 1. Discover categories, don’t dictate them. This is the big one. My folder had immigration documents living next to Substack header images. No preset list would’ve predicted that combo. Letting Claude read the actual contents and propose categories means the same prompt works on your folder too, whatever chaos is in it. 2. The dry-run approval. Rule 3 makes Claude show you the plan before it touches anything.