Google is right to change Gulf of Mexico’s name in its Maps app in the US

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Google will change the names of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and revert Denali to Mount McKinley in its Maps app, aligning it with one of President Donald Trump’s weird ideas.

Someone dug up a 2008 post from Google’s public policy blog where the then-global director of the sector talks about this very issue — “How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth.”

Google has a uniform policy they call “Primary Local Usage:”

Under this policy, the English Google Earth client displays the primary, common, local name(s) given to a body of water by the sovereign nations that border it. If all bordering countries agree on the name, then the common single name is displayed (e.g. “Caribbean Sea” in English, “Mar Caribe” in Spanish, etc.). But if different countries dispute the proper name for a body of water, our policy is to display both names, with each label placed closer to the country or countries that use it.

In other languages, Google uses the common name in the language that Google Maps/Earth is being displayed in, along with an expandable button that lets you know the name isn’t universally agreed upon and lists other names that are also used.

That’s where people are giving Google a hard time, as they have (or used to have?) a policy that adopted the criteria of “primary, common, local” names for bodies of water:

[…] By saying “common”, we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming. In other words, if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage.

On X, the company responded to the criticism by saying they have “a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.”

In the case of the US, that would be the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS). Note that the two changes — the Gulf of Mexico and Denali — haven’t been published by the GNIS yet, so Google Maps is still showing the “old” names there.

I get the frustration with the arbitrary decisions of an erratic president, but this seems like a… non-issue? If the government changes the names of bodies of water, as the US government plans to do (the executive order was published by Trump on January 20th and is pending a GNIS update), Google is right to reflect that in Maps.

MOS brings macOS’ smooth scrolling to any mouse

The biggest (only?) issue with using a non-Apple mouse on macOS is losing that smooth scrolling, also known as kinetic scrolling.

It might seem like a silly detail, but it’s such a nice feature that I really miss when it’s not there.

A few years back, when I swapped out my MacBook’s trackpad for a cheap mouse, I found a solution in this quirky, free, open-source app called MOS.

MOS does one thing, and it does it well. It has a few options to add exceptions to its effect, which is sometimes necessary, and it lets you hide the menu bar icon. Awesome!

All this time, though, I’ve learned to live with (and accept) one major annoying flaw: it would “freeze” the scrolling when it got interrupted in some apps made with Catalyst (Apple’s tool for converting iPadOS apps to macOS) and Electron (web apps turned “native”). It’s hard to explain, but trust me, it’s super annoying.

There aren’t too many of them, but I use a few of those apps, like WhatsApp and Signal. Apple itself uses Catalyst in standard macOS apps like Maps, Messages, and Weather.

After almost two years of complete silence, MOS 3.5 just dropped the other day, bringing just one fix:

In Catalyst apps, scrolling is not properly responded to immediately after scrolling stops, including Maps/Messages/Weather, etc…

While it doesn’t mention it, the fix also applies to Electron apps.

After stumbling upon this update and sitting down to write this, that I realized there are alternatives to MOS, even if they come with their own issues (and I’m not sure if they’re immune to the glitch MOS had in Catalyst/Electron apps).

There’s magicScrollWheel (which hasn’t been updated since 2020) and SmoothScroll (proprietary and paid, a USD 10/year subscription). The latter even has a version for Windows. I’m not sure if Microsoft’s system offers smooth scrolling; if not, it’s worth a shot.

PS: SmoothScroll has a video that explains smooth/kinetic scrolling, which is tough to put into words, way easier to explain with moving images.

PSS: I’ve been using Latest to keep track of updates for apps that weren’t downloaded from the Mac App Store. That’s how I found out about MOS 3.5.

Screen time and face-to-face conversation

I spent almost 11 hours last Sunday staring at screens, not counting the TV. Between my phone, tablet, and computer, I ended the so-called day of rest with tired eyes, a fried brain, and a bit of frustration.

Not all those hours—an excess even for me, who works looking at screens—were wasted. I spent a good 40 minutes, for example, talking to my parents via video call. It’s hard to think of better uses for the screens that surround us than that.

The problem was the other 10 hours, or most of them.

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This Friday (17th), the Read.cv platform announced that it was acquired by Perplexity, an AI startup, and it will cease operations.

Read.cv had a social network focused on design called Posts. In June 2024, I wrote about it. I called it “the last good vibes social media.” By that logic, “good vibes social media” has come to an end.

Coincidence or bad omen, the announcement coincided with my opinion that the only way to shield a social platform (any venture, in reality) from eccentric billionaires and mega-corporations is to make its sale impossible.

In this context, Mastodon and other applications based on the ActivityPub protocol are the only viable solution we have today.

US$ 30 million to reinvent the wheel

I have been thinking and reading quite a bit about Free Our Feeds, a campaign to “save social media from billionaire capture”.

Free Our Feeds consists of a group of experts willing to raise USD 30 million via donations, over a three-year period, to create a foundation and “[…] turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app.”

It’s a noble goal, but not very original. On Bluesky’s website, one of the first sentences on the cover says:

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TCL’s bet on screens that look like paper

Since 2021, TCL has been investing in an intriguing screen technology called NXTPAPER: an LCD panel that attempts to simulate paper to be less harsh on human eyes. As someone who spends more time than recommended looking at screens, this greatly interests me.

The Chinese manufacturer announced a new version at CES 2025, called NXTPAPER 4.0. It brings a “significant advancement” in the weak point of previous versions, (low) brightness, thanks to a “sophisticated nano-matrix lithography technology”.

I don’t know what this means, but it seems to have yielded results. The screen of the Tablet 11 Plus, one of the devices with NXTPAPER 4.0 announced, reaches up to 550 nits. This value doesn’t compare to the best traditional screens, but it should be readable.

In addition to the tablet (still without price or release date), TCL also announced a phone, the TCL 60 XE NXTPAPER 5G. (Good name, marketing folks.) Both tablet and phone have an “NXTPAPER Key” that toggles between conventional mode and “Max Ink Mode,” which, according to TCL, “turns the display into an e-ink format designed to reduce eye strain and ensure maximum eye comfort.”

When activated, Max Ink Mode also disables notifications and adds a super nice side effect that I’ll only believe when I see it: a huge increase in battery life, up to 7 days of reading and 26 days (!) on standby. It will be released first in Canada, in May, for USD 199.

The rest of the 60 XE phone’s specifications seem decent, a level above those of its predecessor that Marques Brownlee tested, liked, but not enough to recommend it.

Some videos show the “NXTPAPER Key” and “Max Ink Mode” in action. TCL made a clip (13min) of the section where they discussed mobile devices in their CES presentation and made it available on YouTube.

While E-Ink (company) tries to make its screen technology (the one used in Kindle) faster, some manufacturers have been betting on the same approach as TCL and are trying to make conventional screens more eye-friendly. The startup Daylight launched an (expensive) tablet in 2024 with an even more aggressive proposal — black and white LCD panel, similar to those of calculators.

Meta’s moderation policy dismantling will hurt, but it can be good in the long run

Meta’s announcement on Tuesday (7th) that, among other actions, it will end partnerships with fact-checking agencies in the US, replacing them with “community notes,” and relax restrictions on certain types of content, has alarmed many people.

In a somewhat convoluted way and not without causing damage, this might lead to a good outcome (for us) in the long run.

If we take X (former Twitter) as an example, the relaxation of moderation there accelerated the discarding of Elon Musk’s platform as a habitable place, leading to losses in revenue, users, and relevance in public debate.

It would be great if this were repeated with Instagram, Facebook, and Threads. Even if so, we will have to deal with three inevitable and worrying consequences:

  1. Targeted campaigns of hate, harassment, and the occurrence of crimes (as considered outside of the US, such as racism and homophobia in Brazil) are likely to increase. It will be up to the police and the judiciary to increase their attention and be quicker in their actions to mitigate the damage.
  2. Fact-checking agencies will suffer a financial blow. Meta is the largest funder of many of them; some were created solely or primarily to act in the company’s program.
  3. Mark Zuckerberg’s boot-licking Trump, combined with an explicit threat to the sovereignty of Latin American justice and European legislation by Joel Kaplan, Meta’s vice-president of global affairs, could have serious systemic effects, such as on commercial and diplomatic relations and tariff policies between those countries and the US.

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It would be naive to expect a mass exodus of users from Meta’s platforms in response to the dismantling of moderation, although searches for deleting accounts increased sharply. Less naive would be to witness a more incisive reaction from governments and companies committed to values opposed to those made explicit by Meta’s leadership.

How about abandoning their presence on Instagram and Facebook or, at the very least, stopping injecting money into Meta’s advertising engine? If Meta’s business is to dominate our attention, nothing hurts the company more than ignoring it.

On an individual level, abandoning ship is a more difficult, less obvious decision. I should keep my Instagram account — it’s where loved ones post updates — and I won’t block Threads on the fediverse, although I don’t condemn or criticize those who do/will do so. That crowd of “preventive fediblock” to Threads had some reason.

The second act of Neeraj Arora, former WhatsApp CBO

In May, a post by Neeraj Arora went viral on Twitter. In that thread, he told how he was duped by Mark Zuckerberg in 2014, when the then Facebook bought WhatsApp for USD 22 billion. Neeraj was the chief business officer of the messaging startup and was directly involved in the sale to Facebook.

The unfolding of that story is known by now: Zuckerberg violated some of the commitments he made in 2014 to WhatsApp’s founders, such as not cross-referencing WhatsApp users’ data with that of other properties, and the founders eventually left the company while WhatsApp continued to grow into one of humanity’s leading communication engines.

Neeraj hasn’t given up on his dream of creating a better app, however. In that Twitter thread, he said that WhatsApp has become “a shadow of the product we poured our hearts into, and wanted to build for the world.” Today, he is focused on HalloApp, a sort of “second act” — this time, proofed against multibillion-dollar takeovers by companies of questionable reputation.

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WordPress’s uncertain future and the promise of ClassicPress

Almost a decade ago, I launched a tech blog in Brazil called Manual do Usuário (“User’s Guide” in Portuguese). Since its inception, it is published with WordPress, one of the oldest CMS — a content management system — and by far the most popular on the web today: it’s estimated that 40% of active websites use it nowadays. WordPress is open source, works well, there’s almost nothing to complain about.

In December 2018, Automattic, the company behind WordPress, released version 5.0 with big fanfare and a radical change: Gutenberg, a new, very visual post editor based on content blocks instead of text.

Gutenberg changes the writing process a lot. If before I was presented with a text area with some formatting buttons at the top when writing some post — a kind of simplified Word —, now it was possible to manipulate the whole appearance of the content using these blocks.

This was not a very well received change. To this day, the Classic Editor plugin, which restores the Word-style editor used until WordPress 4.9, is one of the most popular on the platform, with +5 million active installations and a five-star (top) rating.

Automattic doubled down on Gutenberg in early 2022 by bringing to WordPress 6.0 a thing called Full Site Editor: now, in addition to posts, someone could design the entire site with blocks/Gutenberg. WordPress moved even further away from being a mere blog or text-based publishing tool to become… I don’t know, anything other than that.

With Gutenberg, Automattic — which, it should be mentioned, runs a commercial operation based on WordPress, WordPress.com — decided to pick a fight with DIY and more modern rivals, notably Squarespace and Wix. Not by chance: these have achieved great recognition and a lot of users (and money) in recent years, because they are easier to handle for non-programmers.

And it is indeed easier to make a custom site with Gutenberg, but at what cost? For me (a person who can’t code, but can deal with simple HTML and CSS, by the way), the biggest hurdles are the added complexity when writing anything with blocks and the “dirty” code Gutenberg generates when displaying the site to visitors. (I care a lot about this “invisible” part of the site. I’m not the only one).

WordPress’ new direction alienates a significant portion of its user base. At the very least, those 5 million who use Classic Editor by this day. Maybe we aren’t the most profitable users, but we’re a crowd that, in many cases, has relied on this tool for a very long time to earn our living or just to maintain sites that are doing just fine without Gutenberg, thank you. This is my case: Manual do Usuário has been around for almost a decade.

At the moment, WordPress meets the needs of a site like mine because it is still possible to neutralize much of the excesses that Gutenberg brings to the system using a lot of workarounds in functions.php. Until when? I don’t know.

All WordPress development is dictated by Gutenberg, both within Automattic and in the ecosystem, by third-party developers of plugins, themes, and solutions. This creates apprehension in those who don’t get along with the blocks and would rather do without them. WordPress community support has always been stellar, but it started to fade into something sparse for those out of the blocks train.

The Classic Editor, for example, was supposed to be discontinued at the end of 2021. It got an extra year of support due to its popularity. At the end of 2022, will it be abandoned? I don’t know.

Even a simple site like Manual do Usuário has several dependencies with the chosen CMS. After all, it’s a huge archive that was published on the features, limitations and possibilities of WordPress. Migrating to another tool is always an option, not infrequently a traumatic one that leaves after-effects.

That’s why I’ve been looking fondly at ClassicPress. In 2019, shortly after WordPress 5.0 was released, a group of developers decided to stay in version 4.9, forking the main WordPress into something new. ClassicPress was born.

In three years, however, progress has been slow. Making matters worse, the bureaucratic part and the internal dramas of ClassicPress’ project continue to distract everyone from what matters, from writing code.

At the end of June, the two developers leading the ClassicPress Initiative, the non-profit company responsible for the project, left under heavy criticism. A new group took over with the mission to regain enthusiasm and move the project forward.

It’s not an easy job. Automattic’s structure (and money) are on another scale of magnitude. ClassicPress Initiative is still counting the pennies to pay operating expenses. On exit, the former directors said there was USD 352 left in the company’s bank account.

Even in this not-so-promising scenario, it would be great if ClassicPress thrived. The new management has opened a crowdfunding initiative to cover expenses. Manual do Usuário, in my capacity, has become an early supporter.

It is not yet time to migrate my site to ClassicPress, however. The project is too raw for my needs and current dependencies, and ClassicPress new board still has to figure out fundamental issues, such as deciding to maintain compatibility with WordPress plugins or going for a complete break.

One day, if things go well, I’ll migrate. My fear, however, is that that day will come before rough edges are polished, when WordPress becomes something incompatible with Manual do Usuário, with what it was at the beginning until the fateful version 5.0 at the end of 2018.

I went all in spreadsheets for personal finance

The obscure, weird app that I had been using for five years to record my financial transactions failed to import data from the old phone to the new one. I took this as sign: it was time to move onto a better solution.

Personal finance doesn’t need to be complex, yet it’s only useful with a pinch of automated calculations, consolidations, and charts. I started researching for a new app with low requirements: something simple, that allowed me to enter my transactions (expenses and income) and review them at the end of each month or specific period.

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