I never took the dead internet theory that seriously but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts now.
Sam Altman
Co-fundador e CEO da OpenAI
If only we knew who was the “genius” who started all this mess…
Blog (in English)
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.”
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.
Cool links of the week
Editor’s note: This week issue arrives a little later and after a mistake that triggered last week’s sent over the newsletter. My apologies for that!
“We will not use an LLM to add a chatbot, a summarization solution or a suggestion engine to fill up forms for you, until more rigorous ways to do those things are available.” In a moment of euphoria in which even Mozilla — which would have the most to gain from caution around reckless adoption of generative AI — at least one web browser embraces that stance.
The size of Adobe Reader installers over the years. I would never have guessed the Adobe Reader installer is nearly 700 MB. (SumatraPDF’s is ~8.2 MB.)
Mavericks Forever. This person loves macOS 10.9 “Mavericks” so much they decided to modernize Apple’s 2013 OS that was discontinued in 2016. (Don’t try this at home.)
doxx. A Word document (*.docx) viewer for the terminal.
Drawmote. I haven’t tried it, but this site promises you can draw by waving your phone. (I think it only works in Chromium-based browsers.)
MakeACopy. An Android app that scans and transcribes documents (OCR). Private, offline, and open source.
Karousel. A script that turns KDE Plasma into a “scrollable” interface.
dnsperftest. A simple script that tests the speed of popular public DNS servers from your connection.
Gamer Church. I’m not entirely sure whether this is a blog or a video-game directory. The layout is pretty cool. Tip from Juan.
Instapaper integration with Kobo goes live.
Typepad is shutting down. Everything will be deleted on September 30rd.
SuperTuxKart Evolution promises a “new experience”, Omg! Ubuntu. Backstage disagreements over the most iconic Linux game resulted in a split. (They could’ve settled it with a best-of-three match in STK, right?)
Microsoft Copilot launches on Samsung TVs and monitors. Is this what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification”?
Koko Analytics 2.0. A WordPress analytics plugin. The new version expands monitoring site-wide, not just for posts and pages.
Essayist. An academic writing editor. For iOS, iPadOS and macOS, about USD 5,99/month.
digitalsolitude. A site that only works when a single person is accessing it.
bookmarks.txt. A concept for keeping URLs (bookmarks) in plain text files.
TiledScreen. If for any reason you want KDE Plasma 6 to look like Windows 8, this theme is all you need.
A presentation app that works on your phone. As long as your phone is an iPhone.
SVG Crop. A web tool that “trims” whitespace around any *.svg file.
EPSON MX-80 Fonts. A font that simulates dot-matrix printers.
In ❤️ with PDA. A site that emulates an old PDA.
The Useless Web. A classic: press the button and go to a random “useless” site.
We will not use an LLM to add a chatbot, a summarization solution or a suggestion engine to fill up forms for you, until more rigorous ways to do those things are available.
Jon von Tetzchner
Vivaldi co-founder and CEO
In a moment of euphoria in which even Mozilla — which would have the most to gain from caution around reckless adoption of generative AI — at least one web browser embraces that stance.
Cool links of the week
Revisiting Facebook. If Zuckerberg himself admits that Facebook is much more than a site (or app) for connecting people, since “seeing friends’ status updates” became something from the “OG Facebook,” the question remains: what is Facebook today?
What’s on your phone, João? Every week, I publish the phone’s home screen from a blog reader.
How to remove “stuck” iCloud Tabs in Safari. Things at Apple work great until the day they don’t. A silly example that really bugs me is “stuck” iCloud tabs on Safari — a glitch in Apple’s tab syncing feature that lets me access tabs from one device on others.
Big list of free, non-AI generated stock images.
Flashword. An app to save and review unknown words. Free, for iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS.
Logoipsum. Fake logos you can drop into mockups.
Web materials map. A sort of “mind map” of the elements that make up web pages. Click the yellow items for interactive demos.
Email is easy. Think you know everything about email? Take this quiz. (I got 14 out of 21.)
DigiPaws. Android app with a bunch of tools to cut down on screen time. If the one that blocks only YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels actually works, it might be worth it. (Haven’t tested it.)
Which Year. The challenge: guess the year the photo shown was taken. The closer you are, the more points you get.
HappyCow. A search engine for vegan and vegetarian restaurants. Listings seem to be up to date (at least the ones in my city).
The State of CSS 2025. The annual survey results are out, highlighting trends in web development. (Still haven’t used :has().)
The mathematically optimal way to cut an onion, The Pudding. A neat example of how something ordinary can be looked at in an absurdly complex (and brilliant) way.
The lyrics to the Jaws theme song. Deep.
Helium. A new browser based on ungoogled-chromium. Still experimental and macOS-only, but it promises to be “usable” as a daily driver.
copyparty. A portable, feature-packed file server. “Inverted Linux philosophy: do all the things, and do an okay job.” 😁 (Looks pretty fun!)
Straw.Page. Yet another site builder, this one with a “web 1.0” vibe but adapted for mobile. Free with a premium plan at USD 49/year.
Quoted posts coming to Mastodon. It’s happening.
Mozilla testing web apps in Firefox. If you’re on Firefox 142 for Windows (not from the Microsoft Store), you can try it out. The feature has to be enabled in “Labs” inside browser settings.
corner-shape superellipse() generator. You can do some wild stuff with CSS these days.
domain-check. A command-line app that checks whether domains are available.
Croissant. A new feed reader by David Bushell.
Revisiting Facebook
In March, in a rare moment of sobriety from the artificial intelligence drug, a revamped Mark Zuckerberg — gold chain around his neck, wild hair — promised that Facebook, or at least part of it, would return to simpler times, when the social network was… well, a social network. An innocent era when he himself looked like a wax figure rather than a wannabe rapper.
What’s on your phone, João?
What’s your name and what do you do?
My name is João and I’ve been a designer and photographer for at least 20 years. I love technology.
How to remove “stuck” iCloud Tabs in Safari
Things at Apple work great until the day they don’t. A silly example that really bugs me is “stuck” iCloud tabs on Safari — a glitch in Apple’s tab syncing feature that lets me access tabs from one device on others.
Cool links of the week
My favorite mouse costs less than USD 10. Who needs a MX Master?
Ductts. A diary for crying and tears. For iOS.
Baseline. A nice theme for Obsidian.
Just Buy Nothing. A fake online store to scratch that shopping itch. According to the creator of the site, “this is either the dumbest idea of all time or something that will actually help people stop giving their money to these corporations that are actively trying to make their sites as addicting as possible while the quality goes down and prices go up…” Tip from Rafael.
Compare Small Form Factor PC Cases. Shows the size and volume of various computers.
“Break glass in case of emergency,” Liquid glass edition. If you enable some accessibility options, macOS 26 “Tahoe” looks like a 1990s OS.
Windows XP-themed Crocs, The Verge. The missing merch from Microsoft’s 50th anniversary celebrations. As expensive (USD 80) as it is ugly.
Term-Shdw. A small application that creates a “comet effect” for the mouse cursor inside the terminal.
Subtitle Edit. Video subtitle editor. Free, for Windows.
I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display. Through the kiloxp.com site you can interact with the display and there’s a live stream of it changing on YouTube.
Threadbare. “Story-driven, collaborative game where players don’t just explore a world—they co-create it.” Still in development, Linux only.
NextDNS gains feature to bypass age verification, r/nextdns.
“Meta AI, what app do you recommend for private messaging?”
A friendly introduction to SVG. Drawing on web pages with code. Who would have thought?
A partial comparison of window management interactions in iPadOS 18 and 26. Maybe it was harder to discover these gestures in iPadOS 18, but it seems like a better thought-out thing (and better overall) than the version 26 implementation.
F-Droid Search Metrics. Statistics from F-Droid, the Android app store from an ideal world.
Cheat Sheets. Repository of quick references for various technologies. Tip from Alexandre.
Known bug in NetBSD’s sleep command, via @ayke@hachyderm.io. The command can’t handle durations longer than 250 billion years. If necessary, put the command in a loop, with each command limited to about 200 billion years.
Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.
— UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
The absurd guidance is part of a list published by the UK government to mitigate the severe drought affecting England, alongside useless classics (“take shorter showers”) and other nonsense (“use water from the kitchen to water your plants”).
As David Gerard pointed out, the document makes no mention of the inefficiencies of (privatized) water companies nor the thirsty data centers focused on artificial intelligence. (The great irony is that the suggestion to delete emails to save water may have come from generative AI. Is this how AI will end humanity?)
My favorite mouse costs less than USD 10
Anyone looking for a new mouse usually stumble upon the Logitech MX Master at the top of recommendation lists (MSRP: USD 99). The one I use daily costs a fraction of that, or 1/10 to be exact. Are they worth what they cost?
Old people on the internet probably remember phpBB, a discussion board software that was very popular in the early 2000s. I discovered, by chance, that it still exists and has active development, albeit slow: the phpBB3 series was released in December 2007 and the last major update (3.3), in January 2020. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it…?
Cool links of the week
Web browsers with AI assistants built-in are coming. Are they the future of browsing the web?
Vibechart. Did OpenAI use ChatGPT to create the charts used on GPT-5 announcement?
Rumicat. A newsletter service “for small audiences.” The free plan supports up to 300 subscribers.
Letter Club. A kind of “email club,” where participants commit to writing about a theme and, on the scheduled day, everyone receives everyone’s writings. As far as I can tell, it’s free.
DSEG Font. A font that simulates those from monochromatic LCD screens, like calculators. Free and open source.
Inter Mental. Possible tech-induced cognitive-behavioral disorders. Don’t take it (too) seriously.
PixiEditor 2.0. New version of the “universal 2D graphics editor.” This video shows the new features and capabilities. For Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Openvibe gets RSS support. For Android and iOS.
Fonts for wireframing, Frontend Masters. I didn’t know fonts like these existed, that look like scribbles (or “doctor’s handwriting”).
If the Moon were only 1 pixel. Beautiful presentation of the Solar System’s scale. Try accessing from a computer/large screen.
Siará+. Free platform from the Ceará government, a Brazilian northeast state, that offers audiovisual pieces by local artists for free.
KittenTTS. An open source and tiny synthetic speech model (TTS, or text-to-speech): it’s less than 25 MB and “works on literally everything,” according to the developers. Demo of available voices. Still in “developer preview.”
Killed by Mozilla. A list of all Mozilla products and services that have been discontinued.
Tiny Awards 2025 opens voting. Runs until September 1st.
eightyeightthirty. A site that collects links from those 88×31 pixel badges and puts them in a web visualization. (Site is a bit heavy.)
permacomputing. “Permacomputing is both a concept and a community of practice oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in computer and network technology inspired by permaculture.”
High quality, low filesize GIFs, Christian Selig. A Bash script to resize and optimize *.gif files.
AirSync. Various “continuity” features between iPhone and Mac, but with Android instead. Still in beta.
Abode. An app for groups of friends that revolves around widgets. iOS only.
Apple: The First 50 Years. American journalist David Pogue tells Apple’s story in this new book. Coming out March 17th, 2026.
CloudGazing. Draw and see drawings in clouds.
“It must be AI”. Ewerton Assunção, from the hit “I’m going to delete you from my Orkut,” strikes again. (The video was made with AI, as expected.) Song lyrics in Portuguese.
Podcast Details. Enter a podcast feed and see detailed show statistics.
“linux” on DuckDuckGo. DDG’s mascot, a duck, becomes a penguin when you search for “linux.”
Time Flies. “A little adventure
about our limited time in this world.” For PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Windows and macOS.