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.
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.
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.
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.
Leonardo, 40, southern Brazil, makes educational videos on the internet and has been a regular reader of the Manual do Usuário for years.
Google
via Search Engine Roundtable
Sam Altman
Co-fundador e CEO da OpenAI
If only we knew who was the “genius” who started all this mess…
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:
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.
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.
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!
I collect cool, interesting links spread all over the web and share them here every Thursday. Hope you enjoy! More of them in the archive.
“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.