Links of the day

I collect cool, interesting links spread all over the web and share them here in daily posts. Hope you enjoy! More of them in the archive.

30 years of ReactOS (in English). The project aims (since 1996!) to create a FOSS alternative that is compatible with applications and drivers made for Windows. What perseverance!

Substack’ app for TVs, in beta (in English). Remember when Substack was a newsletter service? The app, available for Google TV and Apple TV, even has a “For You” tab with algorithmic recommendations.

Resurf. Schedule emails to your future self. “A time capsule for your thoughts.” Free during the beta period. Please don't write anything confidential in this thing.

Skyreader. RSS feed aggregator built on Bluesky's AT protocol. It promises to bring back the social aspect of the late Google Reader. Free.

The origin of the names MySQL and MariaDB. Today I learned that MySQL and MariaDB are named after the daughters of the guy who created these databases. (Yes, one of them is called My.) The family is Finnish.

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What’s on your phone, Julia?

Editor's note: Every week, I publish the phone's home screen from a blog reader. Want to participate? Fill out this form. Want more? Check out the archive. All app links go to the App Store, Play Store, or F-Droid.

What is your name and what do you do?

Hi, my name is Julia. I am 32 years old, I am a trans woman, and I work as a lead designer specializing in accessibility at [Brazilian telecom] Vivo. I also play guitar and bass, play card games (currently focused on Star Wars Unlimited and Gundam TCG), and collect board games.

I have been following Manual do Usuário since the beginning and Ghedin since the classic WinAjuda in mid-2005.

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For this [AI] not to be a bubble, by definition it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread. I think a telltale sign of if it’s a bubble would be if all we’re talking about are the tech firms. If all we talk about is what’s happening to the technology side that then that’s just purely supply side.

Bald man wearing glasses, smiling.Satya Nadella,
CEO of Microsoft

I have some bad news for you, Satya…

In another excerpt from the interview, picked up by Pivot to AI, Nadella says that companies need to reorganize around AI to learn, in practice, how to use it in business. Destroy what is working to learn an innovation that might help them… do what they were doing before?

Links of the day

I collect cool, interesting links spread all over the web and share them here in daily posts. Hope you enjoy! More of them in the archive.

MBCompass. Modern compass and navigation app for Android. FOSS and free, available on F-Droid and Obtainium.

PowerToys 0.97 brings a new utility for the mouse. Microsoft's (FOSS!) Swiss Army knife for Windows 11 has gained “Cursor Wrap,” a feature for those who use large screens that allows you to move the cursor from one side of the screen to the other by “teleporting” it around the edges. (Like Pac-Man, you know?)

WalletWallet. Convert physical barcodes and QR codes into cards compatible with the iPhone Wallet. Free and runs in your browser.

Gnome website. The official Gnome website expanded its translations and now is available in English, Bulgarian, Basque, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Chinese. (The announcement was made on January 9th.)

In his annual message to the public, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan says that “AI will be a boon to the creatives who are ready to lean in” and that more than a million channels used AI to create videos daily in December. At the same time, he promises measures “to reduce the spread of low quality AI content.” These seem like contradictory promises. Good luck to him.

Links of the day

I collect cool, interesting links spread all over the web and share them here in daily posts. Hope you enjoy! More of them in the archive.

Sony and TCL form a TV joint-venture. TCL, which owns 51% of the new business, will now manufacture TVs under the Sony and Bravia brands.

Asus confirms its smartphone business is on indefinite hiatus, Ars Technica. Asus has tried to differentiate itself in various ways throughout its history. Intel chips (may they rest in peace), gaming phones (which never made sense), "small" phones. It didn't work.

Hand Mirror 4, @rafa@mastodon.design. A small mirror in the macOS menu bar. The new version is full of cool details and has gained a “snaps” feature, which simulates instant photos. Available on the App Store for USD 6.99.

Win8DE. Miss Windows 8? This graphical interface reproduces the much-maligned interface of the worst Windows on Linux.

ReliCSS. Paste your CSS and this site points out hacks and obsolete practices, i.e., lines that can be removed from the file.

Imginn. Private front-end for Instagram, without relying on login/authentication. Can open stories.

The new version of Nova Launcher, a popular launcher for Android, brought an unwanted new feature: advertising trackers from Meta and Google. On Exodus, a non-profit app auditing platform, you can see the changes from the previous version (8.1.6) to the new one (8.2.4).

Nova Launcher was purchased by Sweden's Instabridge a few months after the launcher's creator left Branch, the company that bought the app in 2022 and promised to open its code — which never happened. Instabridge has confirmed that it is testing ads in Nova Launcher and that it will not display ads to those who have Nova Prime (paid version).

Firefox joins Chrome and Edge in the problem of dormant extensions that spy on users  malwarebytes.com

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The Malwarebytes blog warns of a new wave of compromised browser extensions. The technique used, called steganography, is ingenious:

The use of malicious code in images is a technique called steganography. Earlier GhostPoster extensions hid JavaScript loader code inside PNG icons such as logo.png for Firefox extensions like “Free VPN Forever,” using a marker (for example, three equals signs) in the raw bytes to separate image data from payload.

Newer variants moved to embedding payloads in arbitrary images inside the extension bundle, then decoding and decrypting them at runtime. This makes the malicious code much harder for researchers to detect.

A group of researchers found 17 new contaminated extensions in Firefox. They have attractive names, such as “Ads Block Ultimate” and “Youtube Download.”

The focus of malicious actors on browser extensions is understandable. They have privileged access to the most intimate app we use on a daily basis, update automatically, and, with few exceptions, aren’t household names — I believe that extensions are searched for more by purpose than by name. Another problem is the market for buying and selling popular extensions, which change owners with no transparency.

A good way to mitigate damage is to limit yourself to extensions endorsed by browser stores. In Firefox, they have a "Recommended" seal. In Chrome, extensions reviewed by Google get a green “Featured” seal, according to the store's help section. In search results, you can filter them to display only featured extensions.

Links of the day

I collect cool, interesting links spread all over the web and share them here in daily posts. Hope you enjoy! More of them in the archive.

Ads on ChatGPT. Testing will begin in the US, on the free and Go plans (USD 8/month) — which has been expanded worldwide. Who could have imagined this would happen…?

KDE for creators. KDE Project piggybacked Apple Creator Studio's announcement to promote its suite of professional apps. They are quite good. And free.

The January 11th update prevented Windows 11 from shutting down. I am increasingly convinced that Microsoft is forcing employees to outsource programming to Copilot. The bug only affected version 23H2 and was fixed on Saturday (17th).

iKKO: Mind One. I think I would enjoy using a square phone. On the other hand, the “AI phone” part, with a supposed separate operating system, sounds very suspicious. Still in pre-sale, for USD 429.

Zoneless. This website offers an easy-to-read view of time zones. Great help for deciding on meeting times between people from different countries.

Boing. Pull the spring and release it. The physics are really good! (Warning: it makes noise.)

Emoji design convergence review, 2018–2026  blog.emojipedia.org

If emojis are a new language, divergent representations can render meaning lost in translation between platforms. In 2018, Emojipedia hypothesized that different emoji vendors would converge their designs. The prediction came true with Apple as the benchmark. Why?

Apple is widely regarded as the “default” emoji design set in the West. This status dates back to 2008, when Apple introduced emoji support on the iPhone years before emoji were formally incorporated into Unicode in 2010.

[…]

Market realities for over a decade have also reinforced this influence. Apple continues to command a dominant share of the mobile phone market in the United States.

A reminder that big tech companies also shape much of our lives in the details.

The article is filled with examples of convergence, controversies (remember the bright green water pistol?), and a new wave of disruptions to the semantic unity of emojis (the culprit starts with “x” and ends with “x”), all richly illustrated.

Links of the day

I collect cool, interesting links spread all over the web and share them here in daily posts. Hope you enjoy! More of them in the archive.

25 years of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is one of the most inspiring projects of our generation. Imagine if we could take the dynamics from there to other areas of life? The world would be a better place.

Wikimedia Enterprise's new commercial partners. A new wave of leech AI companies has decided to pay for access to Wikipedia's treasure trove of data and information. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity join Google, Ecosia, Nomic, Pleias, ProRata, and Reef Media, which were already contributing.

ChatGPT Translate. The best application of AI is translation. OpenAI now has a Google Translate-style interface in ChatGPT. (You could already request translations in the standard interface.)

TranslateGemma: A new suite of open translation models. On the other side of the AI battlefield, Google has announced new translation-specific models that promise to be more efficient. You need to know how to run these models in the cloud or on a super PC at home.

Digg. The latest reincarnation of Digg, this time with founder Kevin Rose, opened its doors to everyone on Wednesday (14th). Access was by invitation only.

TickTick 8.0. Smart task suggestions for today, a new calendar view (annual), and several visual changes mark this update.

stegodon. A CMS for blogs accessible via SSH that communicates with ActivityPub. The published blog can be read on the web and generates an RSS feed.

Drone Photo Awards 2025. The winning photos of the Drone Photo Awards 2025 are, unsurprisingly, breathtaking. (I recommend viewing the photos on a large screen.)

WebTiles. Hundreds (thousands?) of personal websites arranged in squares. It has zoom and a space to exchange messages with those on the site. Caution: it's a bit heavy.

What’s on your phone, Alberto?

Editor's note: Every week, I publish the phone's home screen from a blog reader. Want to participate? Fill out this form. Want more? Check out the archive. All app links go to the App Store, Play Store, or F-Droid.

What is your name and what do you do?

Alberto Barbosa.

Many people see my phone and lifestyle as an aversion to technology, so it's worth mentioning that I'm a programmer. I like to play games, watch movies, and read. And for all these hobbies, I love learning about their history. Playing old games, watching old movies, and reading in depth about the history of strangely specific things, even if that knowledge is of no use to me.

Editor's note: The interview was conducted in July 2025.

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Oto Music, the best mp3 player for Android

If you plan to listen to music files like I do, but your phone is an Android, Oto Music is the best option I've found for this OS.

Oto Music's proposal is to adhere to Android conventions. Hence its look is well integrated with the Google OS, its support for Chromecast standard, and beautiful widgets. And, of course, all the features you would expect from a music player.

The attention to detail by Piyush Mamidwar, the app's creator, is noticeable. This is evident in the app's small size, only 5 MB. How can so much fit inside!?

Oto Music has some of the highlights of Doppi, my choice for iOS, such as an equalizer and synchronized lyrics search. And it goes further: it has a sleep timer and a powerful metadata editor.

It's free, available on the Play Store, with a one-time purchase that unlocks some extra features, such as support for multiple artists and genres in one song, various visual customizations, and a 10-band equalizer. (I just couldn’t fine the price. Can anyone see it?)

Links of the day

I collect cool, interesting links spread all over the web and share them here in daily posts. Hope you enjoy! More of them in the archive.

Meta is under investigation in Brazil for blocking ChatGPT and Copilot on WhatsApp (pt_BR), G1.

Holos. Join the fediverse (ActivityPub) using your own phone as a server. FOSS and free.

Regression of Apple icons, @heliographe_studio@mastodon. “If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design.”

WikiFlix. A "streaming" (more like an index) of free movies or those that have fallen into the public domain. There's a lot of good stuff!

Is it possible to live without WhatsApp?

Let's get straight to the point: living without Instagram, Facebook, and Threads (lol) is easy. The only setbacks I can think of are missing out on Facebook Marketplace listings and the lack of information about restaurants, cafes, and clinics that insist on limiting their digital presence to Instagram. It's inconvenient, but workable.

In many parts of the world outside the US, the “big boss” of those who decide to get rid of Meta is WhatsApp. And how could it not be? Some research on phone habits shows that up to 99.1% of Brazilians over the age of 16 use the messaging app. Here, it is ubiquitous; the standard means of communication for many people and companies.

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