Cool Links

I found out about this when looking at my website’s analytics: this is cool! It’s an aggregator of cool links from the indie web, where nobody posts anything: every link comes from RSS feeds of various sites, and users upvote the best to make them bubble up to the top. It’s a great way to find new blogs and people to follow.

Wow! This is a mistake I’d probably have done on my first semester in college. Not when working for FIFA.

Though I do wonder if real humans wrote that code before the fix. My guess is no.

I gotta say this person has a lot of self-control.

… and glass breaks (or scratches). Short and sweet video by MKBHD explaining how smartphone brands achieve their yearly “more scratch resistance” or “more shatter resistance” claims, while the end product always seems the exact same.

If you don’t feel like watching the video, here’s a spoiler: Glass cannot be both more resistant to scratches and to shattering, they gotta choose one. So they just alternate every year to be able to make one of those two claims.

I usually love these videos that deal with the scale of things, and getting one from MKBHD was a surprise for sure, but a welcome one.

It’s incredible how far technology has come, and it’s a testament of how humans can achieve incredible things when we want to.

This article walks through how the concept of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was born, how it inevitably became broken and how easy it is to “win” it, as long as your content is made up and not actual real information.

This Mastodon thread is an amazing tale about game development, physics and time-traveling bugs.

This is a really cool initiative! Kagi has been my search engine of choice for over a year and I’m really happy with how they’re aiming to stop AI slop from taking over their (still great) search results.

In my experience, their results are miles ahead of Google’s, Bing’s or whatever other search engine out there, partly because of their algorithm prioritizes good sites, partly because they allow you to prioritize/deprioritize/block the sites you want.

But a good algorithm only goes so far and with the amount of AI slop hitting the web every day, it’s gonna be harder and harder to avoid them. Now Kagi users can report certain articles as AI-generated so other users can know that beforehand and not click on them, or even block their domains.

Okay, this is pretty cool. This lil’ website allows you to do quick image edits right on your browser. Nothing new there - except for the fact that it actually works with no account, no ads, no popups, no upsell. Truly a marvel!

The same as Edit Photo, but for Videos!

Another cool little web utility. This one lets you squoosh your image files to greatly reduce their file size without any significant loss in quality. Especially useful if you have a website of your own and want to optimize your images.

A really fun web comic of an artist explaining his thoughts about AI art. I think I agree with all the points there.

This is beautiful. This Obsidian plugin completely overhauls the file navigation and makes it actually usable. It fixes one of the app’s biggest problems for me: navigation.

You can add custom icons to folders as well, which I used to need a separate plugin for.

Time and time again, we’ve been seeing companies that go all-in on AI in hopes of not falling behind or standing out while the bubble doesn’t burst. This article has some real life testimonies of employees that are being forced to use AI in their work - even if it makes things harder and makes the results worse.

Obsidian, my note-taking, second-brain, CMS app just got a huge feature: Notion-like databases, here simply called Bases. You can use them with any files in your vault and in my initial testing, it’s pretty powerful!

I’m already using it to manage Cool Links, and looking forward to use it for more of my stuff in the future.

Finally! I’ve been using uBlock Origin on my desktop browsers since it’s existed, and it makes the commercial web usable. Now it’s finally available for iOS Safari (maybe on the Mac too?)

Safari has had some ad blockers for a while, but none were as good as this one. This one blocks ads, trackers, and even allows hiding some page elements you select, just like the desktop version.

A must-have in all my web browsers.

This article (in Brazilian Portuguese) was a huge inspiration to me in reworking how I save my Cool Links, starting this month. I’m using the Obsidian Web Clipper instead of the custom solution the author had, but the principles are still the same.

Building up a weekly routine to organize things has also been a good change, as I don’t have a lot to do at the end of the month when I’m putting this post together.

Amazing video about the internet we’ve lost (or rather, was taken from us), and how we can rebuild it.

Absolute fan of Sarah’s storytelling here, the way she weaves through the topics and links (hah!) them to that Hypnospace game is amazing!

As a bilingual person that’s soon moving to another country I really struggle with websites and apps that keep trying to serve you content in a specific language instead of the one you choose. Google is one of the worst in this regard.

Even worse is when the content is translated automatically. It sucks! Google again sucks at this. It keeps reverting things to Portuguese and even re-enabling automatic dubbing (gross, I know) on videos, even though I explicitly have my device, browser, and Google account set to English.

Kagi has been my search engine of choice for over a year now, and I just found out about their public stats page. Pretty cool they have this info open out there!

The most interesting part is the Domain Insights, that ranks the domains that get most blocked/prioritized on Kagi (Kagi allows you to prioritize results from specific domains, or simply block some altogether). It seems people really hate getting Pinterest results 😅

I love Obsidian, and have been using it for over a year for taking notes about everything. The thing about his kind of app though is that you’re always looking for ways to tweak and improve your system. This article is great at explaining how Dave uses Obsidian for himself and as usual has a list of neat plugins.

One day, maybe, I’ll write my own post about how I use it. I’m just not confident enough on my system yet, probably…