John Siracusa

Really Specific Stories

John covers his extensive history as a Mac enthusiast, web developer, writer, podcaster and lover of music and art. He also explains his transition to a fully independent career on the Internet and how he has juggled various personas, roles and fandoms over the years.

Podcast case study: Accidental Tech Podcast (producer)

Find John at hypercritical.co.

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

Links and Show Notes

I Was Primed 00:00:00

• Mur Lafferty
• Geek Fu Action Grip (now in the Internet Archive)
• I Should Be Writing
• iPod
• iTunes
• NPR
• Apple Inc.
• YouTuber
• Dan Benjamin
• RSS
• Hypercritical (podcast)
• Gabe Newell
• Valve Corporation
• Half-Life (series)
• Portal (series)
• Ars Technica
• Book review: Infinite Loop — John’s first article for Ars Technica
• Ivory tower
• Hypercritical (the mentioned article from John’s Ars Technica blog, now linked on his website)
• Steve Jobs

I Had the Cultural Context 00:08:22

• Home computer (redirected from ‘personal computer revolution’)
• Commodore VIC-20
• Macintosh 128K
• Graphical user interface (GUI)
• Pictionary
• Usenet
• U2
• Ken Fisher
• Mac (computer)
• Mac OS X
• NeXT
• Macintosh clone
• OS X Reviewed (a blog post that links to all of John’s reviews)
• Engadget
• ebook
• Amazon (company)
• Unix
• MacUser
• Macworld
• MacWEEK

Multiple ‘Me’s 00:20:13

• Accidental Tech Podcast (ATP)
• A text file online that preserves information from John’s U2 Lyrics Archive
• Perl
• CPAN
• 5by5
• Jason Snell
• The Incomparable
• Robot or Not?
• Merlin Mann
• Back to Work
• Marco Arment
• 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.
• Casey Liss
• Hypercritical (website)
• Independence Day (blog post about John’s career transition)
• Open source

A Childhood Dream 00:33:42

• BASIC
• HyperCard
• Computer programming
• Web developer
• Below are blog posts about John’s two Mac apps:
  • Front and Center; and
  • SwitchGlass, along with the more recent SwitchGlass 2.0.
• Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC)
• API
• iOS
• CodeWarrior
• App Store (iOS/iPadOS)
• Mac App Store

Apple Tech-nerd World 00:42:18

• AnandTech
• Tom’s Hardware
• Microsoft Windows
• Windows 95
• Celeron
• Context collapse
• Fandom
• Anti-fan
• Some references to terminals include:
  • computer terminal;
  • terminal emulator; and
  • Terminal (macOS).
• ‘Seeing the matrix’ means seeing the true nature of reality (or any particular situation) and is a phrase from The Matrix franchise.
• Marvel Comics
• DC Comics
• Ford Mustang
• Chevrolet Camaro
• Tom Cruise
• New York City
• The Incomparable Mothership
• Twitter
• Mastodon (social network)

Repotting Myself 00:59:13

• John’s use of the initialism ‘m.o.’ refers to the Latin term ‘modus operandi’, which is translated approximately as ‘mode (or manner) of operating’.
• ARM architecture family (John’s reference to ‘ARM Macs’, running Apple Silicon)
• John Gruber
• BMX bike
• Remote-control car

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: [e-mail]
• Mastodon: social.lol/@martinfeld
• Micro.blog: micro.blog/martinfeld

A Special Note

Martin is a paid subscriber of John Siracusa’s shared membership program for Accidental Tech Podcast; this did not influence any of the questions that were asked and did not place any expectations on John as a participant of this academic podcasting project.