Learn about changes to third-party email account support in Gmail 
support.google.com
If you use Gmail to manage other inboxes, pay attention. In January 2027, Google will remove the ability to send emails from an alternative address and will disable Gmailify and POP on the web. It’s a good opportunity to try agnostic email clients, like Apple Mail or Thunderbird.
After Meta, Google, and Samsung, it’s DuckDuckGo’s turn to launch its own glasses. Named Normal Sunglasses, they have no cameras, no AI, and infinite battery life. It’s a joke, but anyone who wants can buy them at Knockaround’s store, the eyewear brand partnering with DDG on this venture. I’d wear them.
More linked devices are on the table (and the Android tablet)
signal.org
The latest update for Signal Android [8.20] introduces comprehensive support for linked devices. Now you can easily link another Android phone or Android tablet to your Signal account. […]
We’re also expanding linked device support on iOS [in version 8.22] so you can link an iPhone to your Signal account in addition to our ongoing support for iPads.
A few weeks ago, I went the opposite direction — I stripped messaging apps down to just my phone. It’s part of a personal experiment to steer conversations toward channels I find better suited for urgent matters (phone calls) or more complex discussions (email). That said, it’s still great to see the Signal team cross another item off the never-ending wishlist of features people keep asking for in messaging apps.
Time has started serving ads to AI agents
digiday.com
Put another way, the ads give brands like Ally and the non-profit professional organization Project Management Institute another lever to pull on how they show up in generative search. LLMs can pick up a brand’s information from the ad and index it, which can then shape AI-generated responses, which in turn, can influence humans using those AI answer engines.
Maybe my idea of “poisoning” AIs with a text hidden by steganography is not that crazy.
Sam Altman
OpenAI CEO and co-founder
This one goes to the list of great ideas of the AI bros. As someone replied on X, “What if you just talked to your children?”
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.
Where’s Tamara?. A virtual logbook, with real-time tracking, of Tamara Klink’s current voyage. Tip from Digão on Órbita.
Dustin Mierau. Another one of those personal sites designed to look like a computer desktop. I never get tired of these!
The Closet. Criterion’s famous closet in an interactive virtual version, with 1,327 titles from the renowned American film distributor’s catalog. (The reference for those unfamiliar with it.)
The AI Compass. A quiz similar to a well-known one in psychology that places you on the “compass” of AI. There are 30 possible archetypes, from the Luddite to the Prophet.
Radio Senado’s music programming. You can dig up some good Brazilian music here. (The last update was on 7/22; have they stopped updating it?)
BBC sound effects archive. Thousands of categorized sound effects, free for personal, non-commercial use. Tip from Lucas on Órbita.
Jelly UI. A library for giving web page interface elements a jiggly consistency. The website has several interactive examples to see how it works in practice.
Two years ago, I wrote about one of those “human made” badges used to signal content free of AI. Since then, these badges have spread across corners of the internet hostile to generative AI.
In a somewhat viral post from the indie web, Case Duckworth lists a few reasons to reject them. His criticism isn’t aimed at the badges themselves, but at initiatives that centralize this kind of signaling. His view is condensed in this paragraph:
The person who opened the “issue” asking for better E-Ink screen support in the Readeck app for Android, whom I mentioned in my first impressions of the Boox Go, gave us a gift this Sunday: they submitted a pull request toward this goal, along with a ready-to-use binary. It still needs some polish, but it’s already a significant step forward.
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.
The Sites We Lost. An archive of sites that used to be part of The Useless Web and have since gone offline.
clipart.studio. Make collages with paper magazines, except digitally.
Anti-AI font. This font disguises content by overlaying different words on top of it. Cool, except for the small detail that the original text is also hard for humans to read (me, at least). Tip from arrthur.
Steganographr. Another way to hide messages, this one for humans. This system uses obscure Unicode characters to hide the original text using steganography.
Nokia 210 4G with an AI button. Straight out of an alternate timeline, a Nokia “Snake game” phone with an AI button. Nothing is sacred anymore.
Omniget. yt-dlp is a small marvel for downloading videos from YouTube and other platforms, but the command line scares a lot of people off. Omniget offers a graphical interface. FOSS, for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Tip from Antonio.
MOBU. An “action roguelite” (don’t ask me) developed by siblings Matheus and Alicia. (He’s a reader of this blog.) For Windows and Linux, for less than USD 5.
Remember when I mentioned I was using my Kindle as a personal newspaper? And that this solution was ideal because I didn’t need to buy another gadget?
I still stand by that, but I bought another gadget to be my “personal newspaper”: a Boox Go 10.3 (Gen II) Lumi tablet. (Phew! From here on, I’ll just call it the Boox Go.)
In this series, readers showcase what they carry in their backpacks on a daily basis. Check out the other backpacks that have been published and submit yours — the this series depends on you.
***
I’m Keli Vasconcelos (she/her), journalist, freelance writer, and postgraduate in Public History, 44 years old, living in São Paulo (SP), in the far reaches of the east side (S. Miguel Paulista). I write about Occupational Health and Safety and the Environment, I’ve published two books, and in 2024, I sent in my desk setup.
This time, I’m showing the crossbody bag that goes everywhere with me, affectionately known as my “beat-up bag,” from so much use!
The scrolly chair
newcartographies.com
I’ll say it right up front: I’ve written my share of pieces on this topic, which doesn’t invalidate the observation Nicholas Carr made in his newsletter:
I hate to be a cynic, but I’m guessing the main reason for the proliferation of these sorts of articles [about using your phone less] is that they’re algorithmic catnip. They’re symptoms of the illness they seek to cure. We’re addicted to reading about our addiction to phones. If the pieces have a therapeutic value, it probably lies less in helping people gain control over media than in renewing a reassuring fantasy of such control.
Which leads to funny situations, like two chronic phone addicts giving tips on how to use your phone less (podcast).
I get the feeling that content created as an offering to the algorithm god shows up around any popular topic, even niche ones. It hooks people who are idly browsing the internet, across their multiple algorithmically curated feeds that amplify the slightest flicker of interest in a given subject to the extreme.
Another topic, an underlying one, is “PKMs” — personal knowledge management — with their needlessly complex organizational methods and that cool connection graph generated by Obsidian. The promise is that by organizing your ideas in text and linking them all together, you’ll gain the superpower of never forgetting anything.
The outcome for those who manage to break out of these endless content cycles is the same: what was all that for, anyway?
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.
WikiCity. One more creative way to browse (or fly over) Wikipedia. Every entry is a building in a city made up of the encyclopedia’s 100,000 most-visited entries. For the war-minded among us, there’s an alternate mode where you pilot a plane and can destroy (?) the buildings/entries.
This page was intentionally left blank. A print-world convention carried over into the digital.
Website Spec. What does a site actually need to have? This repository, built for both humans and AI “agents,” does that work of compiling and justifying. The list is long!
Jim’s TrueType QR Code Font. An actual font (TrueType/OpenType) that renders any word in square brackets as a QR code. I didn’t fully understand it, but it works (point your camera at the example on the page itself) and you can even download the font from the links in the footer.
Pac-Hunt. The classic Pac-Man, but you’re the ghost instead of the “muncher.”
Olle Watch. This company built a circuit board and software platform to turn the classic Casio A158W into a smartwatch. Working around the screen’s limitations is a huge challenge, one they’ve managed to pull off. A third-party video showing the watch with Olle Watch’s “heart” inside.
TinyRetroPad. Miss the good old days of a bare-bones text editor for Windows — one that opens instantly and shows nothing but plain text? This app brings that experience back in an executable of just 2.73 KB.
According to the website Hyperallergic, the London-based activist group Everyone Hates Elon pulled off this intervention on a bus-stop ad for Meta’s new pervert smart glasses created in partnership with celebrity Kylie Jenner.
Depending on the angle from which someone views the ad, Kylie’s photo transforms into an X-ray of her skull, and the message changes to read “We’re always watching.” Kind of like those “3D images” for kids.
Everything about this story is wonderful, from the activist group’s name to the surgical vandalism to the not-so-subtle nod to the classic They live, John Carpenter’s 1988 film in which a pair of special glasses reveals subliminal messages hidden behind advertisements.
Everyone Hates Elon has a track record of this kind of intervention.