Cool links of the week

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.

handwritten.blog. A handwritten blog. Literally. The guy writes on an e-ink tablet, then does a whole adaptation process before publishing. The downside is that on mobile everything is tiny and barely readable.

Wiki Spy. Browse Wikipedia images. Click on one, and the site returns similar results. Another nice web thing from our friend Neal.

WordPress Museum. A three-dimensional environment with the entire history and a bunch of trivia about WordPress. Tip from Daniel.

Ransom Letter Generator. This site generates phrases with letters cut out from magazines. That’s what kidnappers used to do back when paper magazines existed. Tip from Gustavo.

Distro Fighter. An… uh… original way to choose a Linux distribution. Tip from Renan.

Dirty Little Zine. Want to create a zine? This site makes the whole thing quite a bit easier.

Moss Moss. A platform game for PICO-8 (which also runs in the browser) where your goal is to rub yourself against every surface in the level. Sounds obscene, but it’s actually pretty chill, fun, and beautiful.

A contradiction in my “I almost got hit by a car” story

Someone on Tildes pointed out a contradiction at the end of my “I almost got hit by a car” story, where I say that, since the incident, I started using the Loop Engage, which reduces 16 dB — far less than the noise cancellation on AirPods Pro 2, estimated at 27 dB.

“An 11 dB difference is far greater than it sounds on paper,” I wrote. In that case, the 16 dB reduced by the Loop Engage would also count as a significant reduction.

He’s right. If the point of changing my behavior is to stay as aware as possible of my surroundings, then any reduction in hearing works against that goal.

Since last Thursday 18th, when I read that comment, I’ve been testing walking on the streets at its normal volume. No Loop Engage, no headphones, nothing: bare ears.

As expected, after about two uninterrupted years of walking around with something in my ears dampening the noise, it felt strange. On the other hand, it was less uncomfortable than I expected. Maybe my tolerance has increased over that time?

Someone suggested I use the “Adaptive” mode on AirPods. Since 2023, some models have had this feature, a kind of blend of the original two modes. According to Apple,

Adaptive mode blends Active Noise Cancellation and Transparency mode together to control the level of noise you hear in your headphones based on the changing noise conditions in your environment. You can customize Adaptive Audio to allow more or less noise.

I’ve always used these headphones in an all-or-nothing way — either with noise cancellation or in transparency mode. Live and learn.

Either way, adaptive mode doesn’t solve the image problem. I’d still be the kind of person who looks distracted by their headphones.

That image problem intensified on Friday 19th. During halftime of the Brazil vs. Haiti match in the football World Cup, I was surprised to see Vinícius Jr. on TV, dancing confidently in a noisy city, yet sealed off from the sonic chaos thanks to his AirPods Pro™ 3 with “the world’s best in-ear active noise cancellation,” in an Apple ad. What can I say…?

These tacky men with ridiculous glasses want you to wear them too

Meta — the same company that declared in 2021 that by now you’d be living in the “metaverse” — sold a few million camera glasses for pervs and, all of a sudden, the next future envisioned by Mark Zuckerberg’s unhinged mind is one where we all walk around wearing camera glasses powered by “artificial intelligence.”

Yes, Silicon Valley CEOs believe the best way to curb screen addiction at 20 cm from your face is to strap screens 20 mm from your eyes.

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Cool links of the week

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.

Town Square. A script that creates a little town square in your website’s footer. (Scroll to the bottom of the page to see it in action.) Anyone online gets a stick figure and can chat with other people. Made by Brazilian developer Cauê.

Firewood Splitting Simulator. A firewood splitting simulator, just because. Tip from Rennan.

LinkedIn Badge Generator. An avatar generator with that “Open to Work” LinkedIn badge, but customizable. Made by Gabriel Nunes.

Society for the Advancement of Naked Skydiving. I don’t know what to say.

A Million Times. A clock made of many clocks. Inspired by the artwork “Humans since 1982” by Bjarke Ingels.

moments. It’s like Bear Blog — a simple service for publishing blogs —, but focused on photos. The result is beautiful and a pleasure to browse. Explanation from the creator. Indie and, for now, free.

KomoDo. A todo.txt-based task list app for Linux (KDE/Qt).

I almost got hit by a car

In early June, while visiting my parents in a small town in the interior of Brazil, I decided to skip the gym and make a quick run to the pharmacy — the first signs of a migraine had set in, and that’s the best time to take something before it gets worse.

The nearest pharmacy is about 1,5 km (a mile) away. I laced up my running shoes to make it worth the trip: a light walk to pick up the medicine.

On the way back, I decided to change my route and loop through a small square where, when I used to live there, I’d often go for walks.

Almost back at my parents’ house, I crossed a busy avenue without incident. On the other side, I had a momentary lapse and assumed the cross street was one-way. (It actually is — but only on the other side of the avenue.)

I looked one way, saw no cars or motorcycles, and stepped out.

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Apple Intelligence may become mandatory in iOS and macOS 27

Until now, Apple has kept Apple Intelligence — the suite of artificial intelligence tools baked into its operating systems — entirely optional. If you don’t want it, you can simply skip it during a new device setup or when updating the system.

That show of respect for its customers may change with iOS/macOS 27. Reports suggest that, at least in the first beta, Apple Intelligence is mandatory:

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Google will remove the last traces of Manifest v2, the feature that enabled robust ad-blocking extensions like uBlock Origin, in Chrome versions 150 and 151. Chromium forks — Edge and Opera — have signaled they will follow Google’s lead, though no firm deadlines have been set. Manifest v3-compliant ad blockers work, albeit with limitations.

Firefox (and its derivatives) and Safari will continue to support Manifest v2.

The excellent The social network (2010), which dramatized the founding of Facebook, is getting a “companion piece” this October: The social reckoning.

This time, it will depict the events surrounding the release of the “Facebook Papers” — internal documents leaked to the press in 2021 by Frances Haugen, a former Meta (then still Facebook) engineer.

The first trailer shows Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg, which I think is a strong casting choice: the voice is uncannily close, and Strong in character comes across as just as odd as the real person who inspired the role. (In the first film, Zuckerberg was played by Jesse Eisenberg.)

Aaron Sorkin wrote the screenplay solo and is also directing. It’s a shame David Fincher didn’t come back to helm the sequel — sorry, the “companion film.” The trailer didn’t give me enough confidence that we’re in for something on par with the original.

Cool links of the week

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.

Benny Powers. Benny’s site/portfolio is a desktop straight out of the beloved Gnome 2.

Paint.NET at paint.net. After 22 years, the developer of Windows image editor Paint.NET finally secured the matching domain — thanks to the greed of its previous owners.

Rejected Emoji Proposals. Emoji is serious business. For a new one to appear on your phone, it has to clear a committee. This page collects the ones that didn’t make the cut. There are plenty — and some of them are actually great.

Stream Spigot. Generate secret RSS/JSON feeds to read the people you follow on Mastodon and Bluesky, plus specific profiles on X, in your favorite RSS reader app.

eyeball. A line from 0 to 6,500. A number somewhere in that range appears on screen. Your challenge: guess where on the line it falls.

Protecting the Blue Corridors. A gorgeous site mapping the migration routes of different whale species and the main threats they face. The “Flat (Dynamic)” mode displays the data as an interactive timeline.

heerich.js. heerich.js is a minimalist JavaScript engine that constructs 3D voxel compositions and distills them into pristine SVG.

How AI chatbots manipulate you and undermine your privacy

At the risk of being among the first victims of artificial intelligence in a potential machine uprising, I keep my interactions with today’s generative AIs (or AI chatbots) strictly transactional.

I open the site, ask or request what I need, get the answer, close the site. No names, no pleases, no thank-yous, no small talk. I avoid anthropomorphizing them as much as possible. I treat them for what they are: statistical machines churning out words that make sense, not a new form of sentient life — at least, not yet.

Keeping a transactional relationship with AI chatbots is, for me, a way of keeping the line between us clearly drawn, to ward off an unlikely — but not impossible — “AI psychosis,” the kind of spiral where someone genuinely believes the AI is alive.

A newly published report by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), authored by researchers Ruchika Joshi, Adinawa Adjagbodjou and Michal Luria, gave me further reasons to stand by that approach.

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