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FBI warns of online file converter scam

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.

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The Geocities Time Machine transforms any modern website into a masterpiece…

Screenshot of Manual do Usuário as if it were a Geocities website from the 1990s.

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.

GNU nano’s two instances of naming by analogy

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…

Illustrated landscape, in black and white, with trees and a tram station, and a dressed kitten standing in the center of the screen.

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.

Fedora Linux 42

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.

Pinta 3.0

Pinta's logo: a brush inclined next to a tube of paint.

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.

In a quote attributed to Spotify founder Daniel Ek when speaking at a company all-hands, he says “Our only competitor is silence.” To which I say, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

— 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.