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!
I collect cool, interesting links spread all over the web and share them here in weekly posts. Hope you enjoy!
“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.