The Spanish Ruben Retro has created a version of Windows for the Game Boy Color — the predecessor of the Nintendo Switch. You can play Minesweeper, listen to music, draw (and print your drawing on the quirky Game Boy printer)… even the infamous blue screen of death is there. Fascinating! I couldn’t find any technical details about this feat, and the cartridge is sold out.
Another chapter in the series “fascinated by the details of CSS,” this time featuring the attribute text-wrap: pretty and how browsers handle line breaks, “typographic river” (a concept I wasn’t familiar with), and the length of the final line.
Safari is the second-to-last major browser to implement text-wrap: pretty, a feature announced in a super detailed post, which is quite interesting. “Pretty” in English means “beautiful”; I find it lovely that the CSS specification delegates the decisions for presenting beautified text to each browser.
The undercut-f1 is a command-line application (TUI) that displays Formula 1 race data — in real-time or replay sessions. It shows sector times with colors for personal and overall bests, tire types, gaps between drivers and the leader, and race information.
Oh, Apple’s characteristic attention to detail! After updating macOS to 15.4.1, we are greeted with one more request to activate Apple Intelligence and this visibly misaligned arrow icon.
Not that I take pride in it, but the truth is that I’ve lost track of OpenAI’s releases. On Wednesday (16th), the company announced two new models, o3 and o4-mini, with intriguing developments.
The o3 is described by OpenAI as “our most powerful reasoning model”; the o4-mini is a “smaller model optimized for fast, cost-efficient reasoning.” Both are accessible through the ChatGPT UI and can handle various tools, such as “visual tasks” (analyzing uploaded image files).
One of the examples of visual task provided by OpenAI in the official announcement seems to have sparked a new craze: discovering the location of images based on the images themselves, a sort of reverse search or, as it’s been referred to on social media, “the end of Geoguesser.”
TechCrunch noted that the o3 isn’t much better than GPT-4o, an earlier and faster model, and that it’s not perfect, misidentifying the locations and sometimes failing to make a guess at all. Nonetheless, this capability of ChatGPT can be unsettling and already creates a new vector of paranoia regarding online privacy: it’s no longer enough to just clean the metadata from photos before uploading them.
By the very nature of LLMs, it’s challenging to distinguish genuine advancements from the enthusiasm of supporters. Techmeme, an aggregator of news and reactions from the tech industry, picked up this comment from someone on X:
I’m obsessed with o3. It’s way better than the previous models. It just helped me resolve a psychological/emotional problem I’ve been dealing with for years in like 3 back-and-forths (one that wasn’t socially acceptable to share, and those I shared it with didn’t/couldn’t help)
I find myself wondering what kind of “psychological/emotional problem I’ve been dealing with for years” a conversation with an AI released just hours ago could possibly resolve.
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OpenAI’s blitz of releases is having an impact. In March, driven by trends like those from Studio Ghibli and the action figure boxes, ChatGPT became the most downloaded app in the world, according to consulting firm Appfigures, surpassing Instagram and TikTok, the usual leaders in recent months.
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On Thursday (17th), Google released Gemini 2.5 Flash, which “delivers a major upgrade in reasoning capabilities, while still prioritizing speed and cost.” One of these days, a new model will be able to guess the color of our underwear and bring about world peace.
Antitrust trials in US courts may be the country’s greatest contribution to humanity after eggs benedict and the golden age of Hollywood.
On Monday (14th), one of the most anticipated trials in recent times began, in which the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accuses Meta of monopolizing the personal social networking market by blocking potential competitors through its billion-dollar acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. One possible remedy is the breakup of the company, restoring Instagram and WhatsApp as independent alternatives and rivals to Facebook.
In April 2024, WordPress 6.5 introduced, among other features, native support for the *.avif image format.
Most people only care about image file formats when faced with compatibility issues — Apple and its *.heic format for photos taken with the iPhone is, I think, the biggest awareness driver in this regard. I, unlike most people, spent months pondering whether the clear advantages of *.avif outweighed the universality of less efficient predecessors like *.jpg and *.png.
A few weeks ago, I decided to take the plunge and adopt *.avif for (almost) all the images in this Manual do Usuário.
Tacky animated GIFs (flames, “under construction,” blinking “new” signs), eye-catching colors, and scrolling text with the long-gone <marquee> HTML tag: it’s all there. The Geocities Time Machine transforms any modern website into a masterpiece from the 1990s — or any site from that era hosted on the beloved Geocities. The image to the side is of this Manual “Geocitified.” Hot tip by Antonio.
The folks in the free software community have a knack for coming up with clever names for their creations. Just look at GNU (GNU’s Not Unix) and Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) as prime examples.
On Mastodon, Simon Tatham shared the story of nano and its double-meaning naming.
The GNU nano text editor is named by analogy, after an earlier (non-Free) editor with a very similar UI, called pico. The name puns on SI prefixes: “like pico, but a bit bigger.”
pico was derived from the email client Pine: it’s the built-in editor Pine used for composing emails, pulled out and turned into a standalone tool. Short for PIne COmposer, as far as I know.
And Pine was also named by analogy, after an earlier email client called Elm.
So nano has two instances of “name a program by analogy to a previous one” in the history of how it got its name. (Not counting the step in between where pine gave rise to pico, because that wasn’t by analogy.)
Can anyone think of a longer chain than that, involving three or more generations of naming-by-analogy? Or is nano the record holder?
In the replies, they also mentioned Micro, another editor that aims to be a bit more feature-rich than GNU nano.
Short Trip is a tram ride through a universe of anthropomorphic cats that, as the name suggests, is quite short. However, that doesn’t mean it was quick to built: Alexander Perrin spent five years (!) completing this beautiful hand-animated illustration. (More details.) The sound effects are pleasant as well. If you prefer, there’s a version that “adds a new ‘scheduled’ mode that integrates with the computer’s clock to create an itinerary for the tram” available for purchase on Steam.
The stable version of Fedora Linux 42 is now available, featuring Gnome 48 in the Workstation edition and a new edition based on KDE Plasma (6.3.4), which has been promoted to the same status as Workstation in this cycle. Despite sharing the same status, the naming logic is different; the team is aware of the confusion and states that “we’ll get that figured out eventually.”
Anaconda, the Fedora installer, has received a significant update that makes the automatic disk partitioner smarter, adds the option to reinstall the system, and improves handling of dual boot. For now, it’s on by default only in Fedora Workstation (the edition with Gnome).
Oh, and a last-minute bug slipped through:
[…] just booting the Live media adds an unexpected entry to the UEFI boot loader even when Fedora Linux 42 is not installed to the local system.
The issue is purely cosmetic, but it’s good to be aware of it in advance. Here are the instructions on how to remove the entry.
If you think mechanical keyboards with blue switches are annoying, get ready because things can always get worse: the free app Kwack (macOS) plays a “quack!” with every keystroke.
Pinta 3.0 is out. The new version of the lightweight image editor is built on the GTK 4 and Libadwaita, a much-welcomed modernization of the app.
While this alone brings a host of given improvements to Pinta, it’s not the only new feature. There are visible changes (new icons, menu, color picker, and smart layers) as well as under-the-hood enhancements (dynamic adjustments for different screen sizes and orientations, better gesture support, increased speed, and hopefully fewer crashes).
Support for add-ins, which was temporarily removed in the 2.x series, is back. For now, only two have been ported, but the developers say that “more are likely to be ported to the new release and future releases.”
Pinta’s origins trace back to being a multiplatform Windows’ Paint.NET alternative, meaning it aims to be a simple yet capable image editor; the missing link between Paint and Photoshop. The code is open source and the app is available on Linux, macOS (now with support for Apple Silicon), OpenBSD, and Windows.
— Reuben Son.
In “Quiet Time”, Reuben delves into the genesis, reinterpretations, and paradigm shifts found in ambient music — a delightful coincidence in light of this post I recently published. Bonus points for starting with a quote from Clarice Lispector.
Radek poses the burning question: Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?