The Miscellaneum 002 - Signals, Tools, and Touchpoints

Interfaces are easy to overlook precisely because they are everywhere. They are the points where we touch glass, press keys, pull triggers, hear sound, read signals, and now even talk to machines as if they were listening. When they work, they disappear. Yet they are where humans and machines actually meet, and that meeting point is always revealing.

My earliest awareness of this came through a Quickshot II joystick on the Commodore 64. It was a chunky plastic flight stick with springs and microswitches that begged to be opened. I was forever pulling it apart, clicking the springs back into place, trying to understand what made it respond. At one point I drilled a hole in the stem and added a third fire button for my thumb. Electrically it changed nothing — it was the same signal — but theatrically it changed everything. It felt more real, more deliberate. That instinct to look inside, to modify the point of contact, hasn’t really left me.

Over time, interfaces have become quieter and more abstract. Some of them still resist me. The microphone, for example, is my great nemesis. Voice transcription is remarkably good now, yet I never feel natural issuing commands aloud. I hear myself sounding stiff, robotic, like something out of Lost in Space. The promise of frictionless interaction and the lived experience sit in parallel universes.

Others I trust deeply. Audio cassette players — and later MiniDisc — reward linear listening. You commit to time moving forward, to music unfolding as it was made, not skipped or skimmed. It’s an interface that shapes attention as much as sound.

That same idea is threaded through the new and updated pages in this issue. Smartwatch notifications are a modern interface designed to be almost invisible — a glance and a buzz — yet they can quietly reshape your day. Web MIDI routing is another kind of touchpoint: less about what you see, more about how signals flow between instruments, software, and intent. A microphone can be a doorway or a barrier depending on how comfortably you can inhabit it. Even an arcade classic like Zaxxon, and the manuals and diagrams that orbit it, reminds me that interfaces weren’t always smooth — they were learned, mastered, and proudly physical.

This is what The Miscellaneum is really about: noticing these touchpoints before they fade into routine. Drawing connections between old and new, physical and digital, practical and emotional. Each article here is an interface in its own right — written by hand, shaped by curiosity, and offered in the hope of creating a moment of connection where insight quietly lives, right at the surface.

1. Web MIDI Router – A browser-based tool that uses the Web MIDI API to connect and route MIDI device messages, letting you filter, log and redirect MIDI signals between connected instruments and software directly in the browser.
2. Arcade Game Manuals – A large Internet Archive collection of downloadable PDFs with installation, operation, repair manuals, schematics and documentation for classic arcade games from the late 20th century — a rich resource for enthusiasts, historians and preservationists.

Accessibility Starts in the Template

Over the past month I’ve been thinking a lot about accessibility, and not just in the commonly assumed sense of accommodating readers. Accessibility is usually discussed in terms of impairment, but I’ve come to see it as something broader: how reliably a page can be understood by both humans and machines.

In this sense, accessibility becomes a technological advantage — an invisible quality that makes a site easier for systems to parse, interpret, and trust. Humans may never consciously notice it, but they feel it experientially through clarity, consistency, and ease of use.

I initially believed much of this could be solved with clever CSS. I was wrong. Structure, semantics, and metadata don’t belong in presentation layers — they belong in templates. By shifting my focus to template-driven publishing, I’ve been able to apply consistent structure and metadata at the point of creation rather than retrofitting it later. Good publishing decisions are made before writing begins.

The original goal was speed and consistency. What I didn’t expect was the improvement in editorial quality. Pages are clearer, more coherent, and better formed — for both humans and machines — even if the raw speed of publishing hasn’t changed as dramatically as I once assumed.

Rethinking Images and Performance

Another quiet shift has been my move away from a long-standing reliance on JPEG images. My primary motivation here is performance. I increasingly equate file transfer size with reader experience — not as an abstract metric, but as a felt sense of responsiveness. While my initial focus was on large banner images, the gains with thumbnails have been just as striking.

AVIF has become my preferred format, but not as a drop-in replacement for JPEG. I’ve had to change how I think about images to get the best out of it — paying attention to flatter colour fields, gradients, and the way transparency can be used rather than avoided. JPEG was largely indifferent to content; AVIF rewards a more considered approach.

That shift has quietly solved long-standing problems around responsive layouts and light–dark modes, allowing images to focus on the subject rather than fighting the background. This isn’t dogma — I’ll use whatever format best suits the job — but AVIF feels like the next settled step, at least for now.