Three options to increase privacy on LinkedIn

LinkedIn changed its terms to share more data with Microsoft for advertising purposes. It’s routine — nothing dramatically new or alarming — but I liked that, in the explanatory document, LinkedIn included direct links to the three settings that, when turned off, stop that data sharing. Thanks…?

Just click the links while logged in and disable all of them:

While you’re at it, also disable sharing content to train generative AIs.

Apple forgot the “Compact” tab layout in macOS Safari

I’m not in a hurry to update my Apple devices to the 26 “crop” of OSs, but Safari on macOS… why not?

Every year Apple ships the big update to its browser for older macOS releases. It’s an exception to the rule of updating native apps only with the OS. The list of changes is always long and this year’s is no different.

Unfortunately, Safari 26 is broken for the five people who use the “compact” tab layout. And yes, I am (or was) one of them.

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Farewell to the fediverse

In December 2023, this blog joined the fediverse (pt_BR). Thanks to a WordPress plugin — the publishing platform used by Manual do Usuário — it became possible to follow updates here without leaving Mastodon, Pleroma, GoToSocial, or any other application compatible with the ActivityPub protocol.

Over nearly two years the plugin has improved a lot. And it’s set to improve further, judging by the developers’ roadmap, to the point that — if all goes well — it may one day be possible to turn blogs into full actors in the fediverse.

Despite that, I plan to remove ActivityPub support soon. Here’s why.

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Wireless earphones: a belated review

Since the early days of this Manual, my goal has been the “slow web,” which here translates to being the last to cover a topic. Even so, I didn’t expect I’d ever write about something eight years late.

Anyway — here we are. Let’s talk wireless earphones.

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What’s on your phone, Leonardo?

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’s your name and what do you do?

Leonardo, 40, southern Brazil, makes educational videos on the internet and has been a regular reader of the Manual do Usuário for years.

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I never took the dead internet theory that seriously but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts now.

White man, with dark and short hair, with dark circles.Sam Altman
Co-fundador e CEO da OpenAI

If only we knew who was the “genius” who started all this mess…

The family computer

For roughly 20 years, from the 1990s to the 2010s, the family computer (always a desktop) was the household symbol of modernity in Brazil, a prerequisite for promising futures and the only gateway to the internet. It competed for space with the TV or, in larger homes, earned its own room where residents did schoolwork, casual research, played games, and spent time on primitive sites from a web dominated by written text.

It was the “family computer.”

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The US ruled the “remedies” to be applied to Google in the case where the company was found guilty of monopolistic practices in the search market:

  • Prohibition from entering or maintaining exclusive contracts relating to the distribution of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, and the Gemini app
  • Requirement to make certain search index and user-interaction data available to rivals and potential rivals.
  • Requirement to offer search and search text ads syndication services to enable rivals and potential rivals to compete.

And that’s it.

It wasn’t much and everyone complained. Well, almost everyone: Apple and Mozilla — which receive huge payments from Google to keep its search engine as the default in iOS/Safari and Firefox, respectively — are relieved.

Substack subscriptions in the iOS app: inflated prices and a new “walled garden” for newsletters

If you host a paid newsletter on Substack, pay attention to the platform’s new in-app subscription offering for iOS. The company published a long FAQ about the change.

Apple requires all apps that sell digital content to use its in-app payment system — the one that charges a 15–30% fee. Substack relied on a loophole created by the recent Epic Games ruling in the US to make its iOS app compliant with App Store rules, giving iOS users the (default) option to subscribe via the web and avoid Apple’s fee.

The problem is that this exception applies only to the United States.

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