Do something cool on the web and offer it to the world

Just a QR Code is a simple, straightforward QR code generator without ads or invasive trackers.

Just a QR Code was born from Gabe Schuyler’s dissatisfaction with online generators of this type. “Isn’t it possible to just make a one-page website that uses Javascript to generate QR codes? Something I could save to disk and run locally”, he pondered.

And from that, Just a QR Code was born. Gabe himself was committed to cover the operating costs. In exchange, he asks:

If you find it valuable, you can pay it back by creating your own useful thing for the world and releasing it for free. Let’s take back the friendly web, one vexingly-monetized utility at a time!

It’s this spirit that drives PC do Manual, a host of FOSS apps from Manual do Usuário. Which, by the way, has two QR code generation tools, a general one and another for joining Wi-Fi networks.

Mozilla will shut down Pocket

Mozilla has announced the shutdown of Pocket, one of the pioneering “read later” services.

Starting July 8th, Pocket will no longer allow saving content, essentially going into read-only mode. Data can be exported until October 8th, 2025. After that date, it will be deleted.

According to the company, “the way people use the web has evolved,” which justifies redirecting resources into “projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs.”

The genius boy

Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder, philanthropist, and one of the world’s richest people, has released an autobiography. It’s another step in his long-running campaign to distance himself from the image of the ruthless businessman of the 1990s, the one who was seen as a symbol of capitalism and, therefore, deserving of pies in the face.

Source code: My beginnings is the first of a trilogy that Gates promises to release in the coming years. It covers his childhood in Seattle, through his school and university period, to the early years of Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico, before Windows, when the company made its living selling versions of a Basic language interpreter for the handful of computer architectures that were popping up at the time.

Bill Gates’ story, at least as he tells it in this book, would make for a pleasant TV series, a coming of age set in a typical middle-class American suburb in the 1980s. Like a Stranger Things, but without the supernatural part…? Or, in a less popular but more accurate comparison (even in name), a Freaks and Geeks with more emphasis on the “geeks.”

Don’t be mistaken, this is a compliment to the narrative. It’s a really nice book!

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Signal uses DRM to block Recall, the Windows 11’s built-in spyware

Signal has found a brilliant solution to shield its app from Recall, Microsoft’s official spyware for Windows 11: setting the app as protected by copyright (DRM), just like Netflix’s, which prevents it from appearing in screenshots — including those taken by Recall.

Recall, in case you’ve forgotten, is an “AI” feature that Microsoft announced in May 2024 for Copilot+ computers, which takes screenshots every few seconds and creates a searchable archive. Basically spyware. The launch was delayed due to public backlash, but testing resumed in April and it’s expected to arrive on eligible computers soon.

Command Palette is better than the Start menu

Microsoft PowerToys logo.

I understand that tradition and the power of branding carry a lot of weight, which explains the uproar surrounding any change involving the Start menu in Windows.

What I don’t understand is why Microsoft is sidelining a tool that seems so cool, like the Command Palette, the newest addition to PowerToys, a set of (open source!) utilities from Microsoft for Windows. It was released in version 0.90 at the end of March.

The Command Palette is a “launcher,” similar to Spotlight on macOS. Press Win + Alt + Space to invoke it and type what you want. (You can change the keyboard shortcut in the app settings.)

At first glance, it’s not much different from pressing the Win key and typing the name of an app or file. The Command Palette does that too. But it does so much more:

  • Execute commands (using the > command).
  • Switch between open windows.
  • Perform calculations.
  • Access websites or conduct web searches.
  • Run system commands.

Another cool feature is that it is extensible. The Command Palette itself has an “extension creator” based on a form. Those familiar with coding can create with more precision. Not tech-savvy? You can search for and install extensions.

Here on the other side, in macOS, I never use the closest thing Apple offers to the Start menu, the Launchpad. (Or is it the Dock?) I always use Spotlight instead, and unless when I occasionally forget the name of a rarely used app, it’s the fastest way to open any app.

Is my behavior weird, or uncommon? Do people really open the Start menu (or the Launchpad), find the app icon they want, and click it with the mouse?

Anyway, if you’re using Windows: Command Palette. That’s the way to go. Oh, and the app is free.

I don’t care whether you use ChatGPT to write

I couldn’t care less whether you use ChatGPT or any other generative AI to write. In the end, it doesn’t make a difference. The preciousness with which many treat the subject (including myself, until recently) — as if there were some intrinsic quality worthy of preservation in purely human text — is unfounded.

I know it’s a controversial opinion. I ask for your patience and that you approach it in a strict sense, meaning to set aside other issues regarding the subject, such as ethics and environmental concerns. With that said, I will now try to make my case.

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Airbnb announced its new app. The app, know for its short-term housing…

Airbnb announced its new app this Tuesday (13th). The app, know for its short-term housing rental service, expanded its scope to include experiences and services. I was struck by the absence of any mention of artificial intelligence in the press release. Is this the beginning of a new trend?

Apple’s Safari no longer displays the lock icon on its address bar

Partial screenshot of the Safari address bar, showing the URL of Manual do Usuário without the security lock.
Goodbye, HTTPS lock! Image: Manual do Usuário.

Did you notice something different in the image above? Since Safari 18.4, released on March, Apple’s web browser no longer displays the lock icon.

Only the gods know how many times I clicked on that icon — each time accidentally, which opened an annoying popup in the middle of the screen. UI details that enhance quality of life 🙏

WebKit’s justification unfolds in two parts: 87% of all connections are now made over HTTPS, meaning secure connections are the norm; and “the presence of the lock could be creating a false sense of trustworthiness, if users instead believe it’s there to signal the website is trustworthy.”

Firefox, at least up to version 138, still displays the lock icon. Chromium, the base of Google Chrome, hid the lock icon in May 2023.

The (not so) futuristic technology of “Lazarus”

I’m currently watching an anime that the streaming service Max kind of threw in my face, Lazarus. The animation is stunning, and the soundtrack is awesome. It really reminds me of Cowboy Bebop, and not by coincidence: both series, separated by nearly 30 years, are directed by Shinichirō Watanabe.

The story of Lazarus takes place in 2052. There are several curious nitpicks, such as the nationality of the protagonist, our Brazilian Axel Gilberto. (A risky bet by the writers, suggesting that by ~2030 “Axel” will took over Enzo and Gael as popular foreigner boy names for newborns in Brazil.)

Right at the beginning of the fifth episode, “Pretty Vacant,” two technological details caught my attention.

The first was that Delta Medical, the company responsible for manufacturing the drug that drives the story, published the test results of the medication encoded in audio files on SoundCloud. Did you remember that SoundCloud still exists? I could bet that by 2052, SoundCloud will just be a footnote in some Wikipedia entry.

(By the way, someone noticed that in February 2024, SoundCloud changed its terms of use to give itself the right to use user content to train AIs. The future is now, and it’s dystopian.)

The other detail, which is kinda bad news, is that we will still be using phones, and the ones in the future will also have glass screens prone to breaking. Early in the fifth episode, the CEO of Delta Medical, Dr. Ahmed Rahman, throws his phone against the wall and *crack*, another shattered screen.

A murky future for Corning and a bright one for the case and screen protector industry — which products, apparently, Dr. Rahman wasn’t using. (My pet conspiracy theory involves manufacturers of phone cases and screen protectors, but that’s another story.)

What’s on your desk, Danilo?

In this section, readers showcase their desks (and what's on them), explain what they use and how, and in the process, everyone learns something new. Check out other desks, and if you can, send in yours!

Hello everyone! My name is Danilo, I’m 37 years old, and I live in Jaboticabal (SP). I work as a systems analyst for a consulting firm that partners with Totvs, focusing on the Protheus ERP. Currently, I work 100% from home, and as someone with Tourette syndrome, the home office setup has been incredibly beneficial for me.

(Ignore the model in the photo…)

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Maestral: An alternative app for syncing files with Dropbox

Maestral logo: white outline of a wing against a dark green background.

Remember when Dropbox was a small, snap app only used to sync and store files in the cloud? Good times… Today, it’s a heavy monster packed with corporate features. Perhaps it was necessary, for business reasons, to transform it into this… thing, but that doesn’t comfort those who just want to sync files and keep them in the cloud.

Maestral is an alternative client for Dropbox, open-source, written in Python, and that promises to be lightweight. According to the official website, “it provides powerful command line tools, supports gitignore patterns to exclude local files from syncing and allows syncing multiple Dropbox accounts.” Sounds promising!

For those in the know, in addition to the command line, Maestral offers apps with native GUI (Cocoa on macOS, Qt on Linux). This allowed its developers to create an app that is about 90% smaller than the official one and demands, on average, 80% less device memory. (However, this last figure can vary significantly depending on the size of your Dropbox folder.)

Two important warnings for anyone considering giving Maestral a try:

  • Advanced Dropbox features — namely: Paper, team management, and shared folder/directory settings — are not supported.
  • Maestral uses the public Dropbox API, which does not support partial file transfers (“binary diff”). This results in a more intensive data usage.

And, of course, keep in mind that it’s an unofficial app.

macOS users can download an app bundle that includes the Maestral graphical user interface (GUI). For Linux, there are two less user-friendly options: via PyPI (GUI optional) and Docker image (command line only). All the information can be found on this page.

In the lawsuit where the US Justice is deciding which “remedy” to give to Alphabet, following its conviction for monopolizing the search engine market, Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice-president of services, said that in April, the volume of searches made via Safari shrank for the first time in history — that is, in almost two decades.

Eddy attributes the decline to the rise of generative AI assistants that deliver pre-digested search results, such as Perplexity (with whom Apple is reportedly in talks), ChatGPT, and Claude.

Alphabet (Google) shares took a 7.5% dive following the Apple executive’s statement, as reported by Bloomberg. The company released a statement disputing the information, saying that “we continue to see overall query growth in Search. That includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platform”

Who to believe? I don’t know, but if there were doubts that a seismic shift is underway, data like this helps dispel them.

Eddy Cue also said that Apple is considering changing Safari so that the browser can incorporate AI assistants, and that he has lost sleep over the possibility of losing the annual USD 20 billion that Google pays as a “sweetener” to be Safari’s default search engine. I almost feel sorry for him.

Where are the small phones?

Bruno from Florianópolis (SC) asked:

Ghedin, do you think small phones that can be used comfortably with one hand have become a niche thing? Have major companies dropped making small phones, and will phones only continue to grow in size or stabilize at current sizes?

Great question! It’s almost a meme that, week in and week out, someone asks in our (Portuguese-written) discussion board if there are any small phones being sold. On my end, a recent and unpleasant experience with a gigantic phone brought my attention back to this gap in the market.

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The creator of cURL, Daniel Stenberg, has raised barriers against the avalanche of security…

The creator of cURL, Daniel Stenberg, has raised barriers against the avalanche of security reports produced by or with the help of generative artificial intelligence. In addition to the volume, he points out that they are often useless: “We have yet to see a single valid security report made with the help of AI.”

Most of the inappropriate uses of AI were already possible before. What changes with AI is the scale.

As soon as you open the site allow.webcam, it requests permission from your…

As soon as you open the site allow.webcam, it requests permission from your browser to access your webcam. If you grant it, the site takes a picture of you and displays the pictures of all the other people who have also allowed themselves to be photographed. If you decline, you’ll be left with a black screen.