"[Australia’s approach to banning under-16s from using social media] centres the problem on children being children, rather than on social media business models."

"The result is limiting childrens’ digital rights with experimental technologies while doing little to address the source of perceived harm for all of us."

Yes! This! The ban does nothing to address the harms caused by social media companies affecting everyone while introducing new harms. Absolutely absurd. https://elvery.net/links/1045791942/

With Mozilla announcing they're shutting down Pocket I thought I'd mention that for a while I've been working on a little bookmarking web-app called Readlynx. It will be open-source and self-hosted, but I hope to look into providing hosted instances in the future.

It's a single binary to download and run, which I'm hoping will make it super easy to get started. If this interests you, follow me or the #readlynx hash tag for updates. 1/2

#Pocket

@tommythorn @wezm You don't enjoy repeatedly blasting the items into sparkles?

Seriously though, if I'm using a site often enough I'll add a CSS rule to permanently hide such elements. I like the Safari approach for one-off links I need to read.

@ash @rae @colingourlay @simon I suddenly feel compelled to mention I'm away from the 7th–16th! 😁

It's been ages since I wrote a post in my dev blog so I'm forcing myself to do them more often. Anyway here's a new one all about offloading SVG animations to the GPU using CSS (the right way) https://josh.is-cool.dev/offloading-svg-transitions-to-the-gpu-using-layers/

@ash @rae @colingourlay I love hearing about the process behind these things. All the tradeoffs and wrong turns and clever tricks. Any chance of a Hacks/Hackers talk coming up? On any of the election vis work?

I needed to combine 2 images together into 1 file. The images contained sensitive information so I did not want to use any of the typical image editing tools that train AI on that data. Decided ImageMagick would do:

magick img1.jpg img2.jpg -append combined-vertically.jpg

magick img1.jpg img2.jpg +append combined-horizontally.jpg

Convenient!

https://imagemagick.org/

Today I discovered Safari's "Distraction Control" feature, which lets you hide distracting items. This will be handy for removing elements that cover the content and elements with looping animations.

Most importantly, it's fun to dissolve them out of existence. Poof!

https://support.apple.com/en-la/120682

#reduceMotion #Safari

@wezm How embarrassing for Windows!

@az For something basic and small I might look at Vite + react template or React Router "declarative mode". For a bit more framework support or server rendering I might go with React Router "framework mode".

@stefan That sounds grand. I would vastly prefer this approach instead of mucking around with alternating double announcer regions or timing based updates to make sure live regions fully update when using React.

It went up! Just a smidge, but our world press freedom index score for 2025 is 75.15 and we're now ranked at 29 out of 180 countries and territories.

@phocks Ah yes, I have found myself using SVG attributes more than CSS styles just to make sure they survive the transition to Figma.

In this case the text layer seems to be empty (if I edit it then hit escape the text layer disappears from the layers panel just like Figma does with any new, empty, abandoned text element). I suspect that Figma doesn't support textPath at all so the element and its content disappear rather than just losing the styles.

@brad Oh, brilliant! Yes! That worked 🥳

Hmm, I have an SVG with a textPath to show some wiggly text and now I want to do some post-processing on it in Figma, but when I open it in Figma, the text layer contains no text?

Any suggestions? Can I convert a text/textPath to outline/path in the browser using JavaScript somehow? Could I calculate the x/y/rotation of each letter using JavaScript somehow and replace the textPath? Have I missed some obvious, easy alternative?

#svg

It still surprises (offends?) me that LinkedIn has games.

Which brings me to my latest Stylus style!

img[alt*="Preview GIF"] {
visibility: hidden;
}

#css #reducedMotion

Testing Vite PWAs on iOS:

- on the Mac, run the vite npm script with --host to expose (eg `npm run dev -- --host`)
- visit the network IP and chosen port in Safari on iPhone (vite will display the network URL or I can option-click the wifi symbol to find the IP address)
- in Settings app, Safari, turn off "Not Secure Connection Warning" to get past "Navigation failed because the request was for an HTTP URL with HTTPS-only enabled"
- tap share button and "Add to Home Screen"
- to uninstall, tap and hold then delete

Testing on macOS:

- open the same link in Safari
- click the share button and "Add to Dock"
- to uninstall, open `~/Applications` in the home directory (not `/Applications`) and remove it

I forget these details every time.

#WebDev #PWA #Safari

@simon Oh yay! I was hoping for an update on this after the election and that I wouldn't need to wait 3 years to see it. Thank you!

Going to give one of my projects a little plug: I just hit the Feedlynx button in my Firefox toolbar to bump a YouTube video I saw on here to my Watch Later RSS feed. It's very satisfying to have that powered by a reliable little project I built that just sits in the background and does its job.

https://github.com/wezm/feedlynx

#RSS #YouTube #Rust