2025-10-31 08:00:00
Hey there, Happy Halloween 🎃 ! As I enjoy my favorite season and prepare for my first winter in the northern hemisphere, I gathered just treats, no tricks, for you this month.
Edit Photo, by Pintura Labs
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!
Edit Video, by Pintura Labs
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.
Notebook Navigator - Modern File Explorer for Obsidian, by Johan Sandberg
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. I’ve been using it pretty much everyday since finding it and it just made Obsidian exponentially better to use.
You can add custom icons to folders as well, which I used to need a separate plugin for.
A cartoonist’s review of AI art, by The Oatmeal
A really fun web comic of an artist explaining his thoughts about AI art. I think I agree with all the points there.
CSS HDR Gradients, by Adam Argyle
A really cool CSS gradient generator that supports all the new CSS color stuff that’s been coming out in the past years (and that I honestly don’t know much about).
Aside from the cool UI and easy-to-understand code it generates, it can generate HDR and SDR gradients; which means that on supported browsers and devices, your gradient might pop out with higher dynamic range (and have the SDR as a fallback). Great if you really want the colors to pop.
Write Code That Runs in the Browser, or Write Code the Browser Runs, by Jim Nielsen
Really cool thoughts on the tradeoffs between control and performance in web development, and how whatever you build will never outperform the browser’s built-in APIs.
AI can code, but it can’t build software, by Matias Heikkilä
Yes! Any good developer will tell you that coding is the easiest part of the job. Making software actually go beyond a feature demo is what’s really hard. It’s something I’ve been taught ever since I began working on the field, actually. Learning to code is essential, but learning where to put the code and how to foresee all the hundreds of complexities is my actual job.
Expectations, feature scalability and security are very much human components of the job and can’t be properly done by something that’s not human.
Thanks for reading once again, and see you next month!
2025-10-26 20:00:00
Monster - The Ed Gein Story
2025, Ian Brennan
My rating: Didn't like it
I can totally see this being decent if they stripped away at least half of it and made 3 or 4 decent episodes, but in true Netflix fashion they opted for 8 bad ones instead.
A show that doesn’t really know what it wants to say, with a pacing so awful that often killed any sort of interest in what was going on.
2025-10-15 00:17:00
Last Sunday I went to a small town in the foot of the italian Alps called Civiasco, with my wife and my brother. Last week we saw a poster for an event that was going to happen there while going out for a walk, and it looked interesting. It was called “Colma D’Autunno”, which in my understanding means “Peak of Autumn”.
My wife and I always loved autumn, but the yellow and red leaves were not that common back in Brazil, so we never experienced the autumn aesthetic in real life. It was only an hour away from where we are so we figured it’d be cool.
As we arrived there, they were serving polenta with cheese and a sauce with donkey meat (!) called Tapelucco, which I’d never had before. The polenta and cheese were good as always, but I didn’t enjoy the meat that much. Sadly, I forgot to take a pic of the plate, but the portion was very generous.
After lunch, we went for a guided tour around the woods, going up the mountain a bit. Even though it took a while (the “guided” part was mostly a biology class on plants), it was fun to walk around in that environment. It’s the kind of woods we’ve always seen in movies but had never been to before.
One of the most common trees in these woods is the Castagno, or Chestnut tree. Which means the ground was full of chestnuts! We had a couple of them raw (which I only later learned you shouldn’t eat raw…), and after the walk they started serving Castagnata (roasted chestnuts) for free for everyone. We had it with some Vin Brulé.
After the walk, we stayed for around 40min for a concert by a guy named Nick Hart, from the UK. He sang old English folksongs and it was a pretty cool experience!
2025-10-12 20:00:00
No Mans Sky
2016, Hello Games
My rating: Loved it!
I’ve played this game on and off since 2021, and surprisingly never stopped to give it a review.
It’s a dream come true, honestly. Space exploration at its finest, exploring worlds is always fun, there’s so much to do and still the best thing to do is nothing. I love just walking around a pretty planet and taking screenshots of the amazing views. Whatever problems it has just fade away in the vastness of space.
I absolutely adore the dialogues, too. So many existential quotes that just hit the right spot.
2025-10-12 20:00:00
EA Sports FC 25
2024, Electronic Arts
My rating: I like it
I know, I know. It’s EA. But I love football and there’s enough good here to let me live the fantasy of a career mode.
The menus are a complete mess and half of them don’t work most of the time, but the gameplay is cool. I’ve founded Polenta FC and have had a blast managing the club.
2025-09-30 16:09:53
Hi there! As of today, Cool Links has been officially written from both sides of the Atlantic! Last month I mentioned how tired my wife and I were of packing and now we’re still tired, but we’re finally in Italy!
This move has been a huge undertaking and honestly we still haven’t gotten used to it. We’re staying at my brother’s and looking for a place of our own. Hopefully, we’ll find one soon!
This doesn’t mean I couldn’t grab some cool stuff from around the web, though. I even discovered Chris Ferdinandi’s blog which is amazing. There’s 3 links from him here and I had to try real hard to not put even more. Definitely worth a follow/subscription/whatever if you like what he writes!
🌟 Every Noise at Once, by Glenn McDonald
Grab your headphones and get ready to lose some hours. This website compiles every subgenre of music and algorithmically sorts them out in relation to one another. It’s great to learn about new genres you might like or to find something similar to what you already know!
Adrift is a quiet space where doubts become paper boats and drift together across a shared sea.
What a neat lil’ website. You can write your own doubts or self-care notes and let them float out in a virtual sea, alongside the notes of many others. There’s some background music too.
The meaning of life…, by Chris Ferdinandi
… is just to be alive.
Beautiful reminder of why chasing goals and meaning only leads us away from them. A bit related to my longterm goals post from last year.
Means of Production, by Chris Ferdinandi
One of capitalism’s greatest successes is that it’s robbed us of imagination. (…) We struggle to imagine what life could look like under a different system. How it would be better. How it would be worse. How it would be different. (…) Utopias don’t exist. They never will. But I refuse to accept this system we toil under—while better than monarchies and fiefdoms—is as good as it gets.
Wallet voting, by Cory Doctorow
Make individual choices that make your life better. Take collective action to make society better.
Cory has such a nice way with words — he can express complex thoughts so simply.
This one is a banger. It’s both encouragement to do more against evil and reassurance for when you feel like giving up.
Accented, by Pavel Pomerantsev
This tool looks pretty cool! It’s a two-liner solution for web apps that automatically highlights accessibility issues on whatever you’re working on.
I haven’t tested it myself yet (busy month), but will definitely look into it soon.
npm: How did we get here?, by Kevin Roleke
I think it’s widely known that the JS dev community relies too much on dependencies, especially through npm packages, and that it’s really hard to avoid this problem (I use as few packages as possible, but each dependency has its own hundreds of dependencies which also have hundreds more…).
But I think I never stopped to think of how easy it is to publish a package there. Which also means, it’s too easy to publish a malicious or compromised package, that gets downloaded and executed on our computers with no proper vetting. Scary.
Why I still prefer ems over rems, by Chris Ferdinandi
Neat short article that goes over a bit of the differences between ems and rems in CSS, with nice examples.
Thanks for reading it all the way here! Hope to see you next month as well! ;)
