Author · 366 posts
I didn’t set a cookie 
kuber.studio
Despite the persistent nags to accept or decline tracking cookies on websites, the online surveillance industry already has more advanced techniques for monitoring your wanderings across the web. Collectively, this is called “fingerprinting”. This site shows everything a website can extract from you without needing cookies.
The one change that worked: I banned myself from social media — and my children have never been happier
theguardian.com
Reading yet another one of the countless articles and opinion pieces from people discovering that it’s good not to spend the whole day glued to their phone, I picked up an ~interesting technique. When Anna Mathur is with her kids and needs to do something on her phone, she “announces” the action:
One habit that helped was narrating my phone use out loud. When I pick it up in front of the kids, I say: “I’m just adding bananas to the shopping.” It keeps me accountable, because once I’ve said it, I do that one thing and put it down. And it tells my children that I’m not disappearing, as I used to.
I think it applies to adult-only situations too.
The definitive guide to Neubrutalist web design
neubrutalism.co
Neubrutalism is a digital aesthetic movement that rejects modern polished neutrality in favor of what they call “graphic bluntness”: high-contrast palettes, bold typography, strongly defined shapes, and conspicuous structure — especially outlines and hard shadows.
Elon Musk’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to Nitter’s maintainer, a legitimate service that displays X posts through a different interface. The person, who goes by zedeus, complied with the threat, took down their own Nitter instance, and stopped development.
These guys don’t even bother hiding the hypocrisy anymore. They scrape the entire internet to feed their AI parrots, but turn around and use financial muscle and legal harassment to go after individuals doing the same thing — for more honest reasons and on a garage-shop scale.
XCancel, the popular Nitter instance I’ve been using for several months now, is still up.
Update (19h33): XCancel is down, too.
I’ve mentioned the Pacific Block extension for Safari in passing a few times before. It’s a content blocker, but instead of ads and trackers, it blocks images, audio, and video. It’s great for saving data on a limited mobile plan (like a pay-as-you-go carrier plan) and for speeding up web browsing on unstable connections.
Back in November 2025, I suggested a feature to Jeremy, the developer of Pacific Block: integration with the Shortcuts app, to enable automations. It shipped in version 1.8, released on the 15th.
It works! Well, it actually started working four days later, once a fix for automation uses landed in version 1.9.
I built an automation in Shortcuts exactly the way I’d pictured it a year earlier: whenever I disconnect from any Wi-Fi network, turn on both blocks (images and audio/video) in Pacific Block. Connect to a Wi-Fi network and both turn off again.
I still need to tweak it a bit. I was on a flaky wireless network the other day and noticed the automations kept firing constantly, every time iOS dropped the connection and immediately picked it back up. I think adding a couple of minutes of delay between state changes, and/or some conditionals (if… then) should fix that.
Pacific Block is a universal purchase for USD 2.99 on the App Store.
There’s a small but significant crisis in the world of Apple blogs and independent iOS developers. The blog MacStories, after loudly announcing its departure from what was then Twitter in 2022, returned to Elon Musk’s platform this August.
DOS Zone
dos.zone
A collection of old computer games that run directly from the browser. (Get ready for some big downloads.) Saw this link in the Codecon newsletter [pt_BR].
State of the [WordPress] Community 2026
thewpocc.org
The results are out from the independent survey on the WordPress community, conducted by the WP Open Community collective.
It represents a scathing critique of WordPress’s direction and, especially, of Matt Mullenweg’s leadership. For example, 73.8% said they feel more negative about the project than 24 months ago. When asked about open source software in general, the negative outlook dropped to 23.9%. The biggest source of problems, with 73.3% saying they had experienced or witnessed incidents, relates to governance and leadership.
The use of generative AI in WordPress displeases most respondents, even among those who use AI at work.
In his closing remarks at WordCamp US on Wednesday (19th), Mullenweg brought up this survey finding and suggested that “We might just need to rebrand some of what we’re doing [with AI]” such as “automation,” according to the account from the blog The Repository. It strikes me that this reaction adds to the evidence of a leadership that doesn’t listen to the community.
The Rebrand Registry
msrebrandregistry.com
A detailed database of Microsoft brands for their cloud solutions: the names, dates and duration of each one, all backed by trusted sources. I don’t think there is another technology company with an identity crisis as acute as Microsoft. Marcos Daniel’s tip.
Cove
cove.run
“The calmest way to run local WordPress.” That’s how Cove presents itself. It’s a CLI app that spins up local websites with automatic HTTPS, one-click admin login, and integration with Cloudflare Tunnels. For Linux, macOS and Windows (WSL2).
Mastodon 5.0: Laying the foundation
blog.joinmastodon.org
The Mastodon team published some mock-ups of the upcoming version 5.0. The ideas all seem good to me, especially the greater distinction of private mentions (renamed “messages”) and the emphasis given to the lists (renamed “custom feeds”).
999 Penguins
999penguins.com
Your goal in this game is to eliminate 999 penguins by combining three or more of the same color. (I managed to reach 170 penguins left.)
MostlyHarmless
@MostlyHarmless@thecanadian.social
Block ads in Firefox for iOS
support.mozilla.org
Firefox for iOS has gotten a native ad blocker, with a fixed list based on EasyList. Better than nothing, but falling short of what a standalone solution offers: aside from the lack of customization, Firefox’s blocker doesn’t block ads in web search engines or the ones on the browser’s own homepage — Mozilla’s bread and butter. The rollout is gradual, meaning it may take a while to show up on your end.
BoredOS
boredos.dev
BoredOS is an x86_64, FOSS operating system, with extensive documentation and GPLv3 license. It was created from scratch and already has a graphical interface.