But on a different point, Wire is inferior to Signal. Signal has a painfully slow data transfer when switching devices. But given some time, the data transfer does work completely.

On Wire, my experience has been that all media in chats are stored on the Wire servers and the backups don’t contain the media. They contain links to the media, while the media may be erased on the servers after sometime. I’ve lost a lot of media from chats on Wire when switching devices and restoring the backup from the original device. Only the text of the messages remain. At that time, Wire’s backups were also device/platform specific.

Since I place a very high level of importance on retaining and transferring data, I wouldn’t recommend Wire to anyone who wants to retain chats for longer durations.

The number of copies sold seems quite low for this book. It’s difficult to believe that across paperback, hardcover, ebooks and audiobooks, it hasn’t sold several million copies. This report is from February 2026 (just a month and a half ago).

Anecdotal, but I’ve used HTML entities on a public static website for a long time using an href tag with mailto, and yet I’ve not seen any spam.

I guess any spammer who uses some level of GenAI to process and extract email addresses would have a lot more success against all the methods listed in this article.

It’s a nice app and service, but I wouldn’t trust all those reviews that are like “I knew before the aircraft pilot knew”. It has its own limitations.

How can anyone trust such an application that declares in the App Store listing as “Data Not Collected”?

I’ve heard that large computer monitors and TVs intended to be used as displays can be used without connecting them to a network.

> Or am I reduced to buying an Apple TV device and unplugging the TV from the internet entirely ?

An Apple TV is a good choice even otherwise. I’ve never seen a smoother and quicker interface on a native Smart TV (granted that I’ve only seen Android and webOS). I use my Apple TV as the only network connected device while my TV is not connected to any network ever. Once in a while, I update the TV’s firmware by downloading it to a thumb drive and plugging that into the USB port of the TV.

But I don’t really know what the Firefox team does with crash reports and in making Firefox almost crash proof.

I have been using it at work on Windows and for the last several years it always crashes on exit. I have religiously submitted every crash report. I even visit the “about:crashes” page to see if there are any unsubmitted ones and submit them. Occasionally I’ll click on the bugzilla link for a crash, only to see hardly any action or updates on those for months (or longer).

Granted that I have a small bunch of extensions (all WebExtensions), but this crash-on-exit happens due to many different causes, as seen in the crash reports. I’m too loathe to troubleshoot with disabling all extensions and then trying it one by one. Why should an extension even cause a crash, especially when its a WebExtension (unlike the older XUL extensions that had a deeper integration into the browser)? It seems like there are fundamental issues within Firefox that make it crash prone.

I can make Firefox not crash if I have a single window with a few tabs. That use case is anyway served by Edge and Chrome. The main reasons I use Firefox, apart from some ideological ones, are that it’s always been much better at handling multiple windows and tons of tabs and its extensibility (Manifest V2 FTW).

I would sincerely appreciate Firefox not crashing as often for me.

I don’t know, but it seems like it’s overselling its capabilities. I tried with Firefox Focus and it said I’m using incognito (private mode) and assigned a unique visitor ID. Immediately tried with a private tab in Safari on iOS and it said I’m not using incognito (private mode) and assigned a new unique visitor ID. Then I switched networks and tried. One more unique visitor ID.

I’m not claiming that fingerprinting is not possible, but this website is not good at it. Seems like it uses plain cookies.

I use this with Keypirinha [1], which is a launcher (kinda like Quicksilver [2] on Mac) that integrates with Everything using the Everything package. [3]

This combo makes finding files as well as launching programs (or doing quick calculations or currency conversions) a breeze!

[1]: https://keypirinha.com/

[2]: https://qsapp.com/index

[3]: https://keypirinha.com/packages/everything.html

Just for anyone else who isn’t aware, the bang commands can be anywhere in the search string, and need not necessarily be at the beginning.

All these queries will take you to Wikipedia for the term:

"!w Gabriel Weinberg"

"Gabriel !w Weinberg"

"Gabriel Weinberg !w"

Many a times when I find the default DuckDuckGo search results inadequate and want to go to Google search, I just put a “!g” as a separate term anywhere within the search string and hit enter. This is especially useful on mobile where the search string may be a lot longer than the visible text box and I can’t be bothered to move the cursor.

I don’t like the duck.ai interface much (choosing a different LLM is not easy once you’re already in a conversation), but I use it a lot more than I use the DuckDuckGo search engine (the results from the latter aren’t great).

Just like with DuckDuckGo search, where I start a search and then use the !g bang command to go to Google for better results if needed, I try duck.ai and then move to ChatGPT (without any account) when even the best models in duck.ai aren’t good enough.

For most simpler queries though — where I’m just looking to learn a bit about something as opposed to finding a solution for a specific (more complex) question or problem — duck.ai with its GPT 5 models are more than adequate (even the 4o mini is fine).

With HTTPS used almost everywhere, using this QUERY method (when standardized) could prevent bookmarking specific “GET” URLs if the developers thoughtlessly replace GET everywhere with QUERY.

One of the advantages of GET is the direct visibility, which makes modifications simple and easy for almost anyone (end users, testers, etc.).

The larger question I have is who will choose to adopt it sooner, with web servers, web application frameworks and web browsers in the mix.

One thing I dislike about Signal on its privacy posture is that the moment you register, anyone who already has Signal and has your phone number in their contacts list will get a message saying you're on Signal. This is a good way for others with bad intentions to know about your presence on the platform. The options to hide your phone number are available only after registering on Signal (after this broadcast has already happened) and when the user figures out that this is possible somewhere deep in the settings.

On registration Signal could ask whether to inform all random people who happen to have your number. But since unused/discarded phone numbers are recycled by carriers to other customers within a matter of weeks or months or years (depending on where you are), your presence on Signal may be sent to someone you've never ever known or has known you. Signal ought to remove this broadcast on registration. Telegram (and I guess WhatsApp) also suffer from the same issue.

WhatsApp, which is infamous by association with Meta, backs up to Google Drive or wherever.

I’m going to be pedantic here, but this statement is not true. I host a website on a provider that allows WordPress (PHP) along with MySQL, but

> System requirements & installation

> Campfire is packed as a Docker container image

the web host provider does not allow Docker (it runs on BSD).

I’d suggest improving the system requirements section by actually stating the system requirements. To me the mention of Docker without other details is a black box that I cannot have any intuition for.