July 2026 Work Log (Patreon)

Hello again! Here's a roundup of everything I worked on during the month of July, exclusively for Patreon supporters.

Just the Browser

I rolled out a few more updates for the Just the Browser project in July. The big change was adding support for Brave Browser, with some initial work done by kalaklanar on GitHub. I personally advocate for not using Brave at all, but if you really need it, you can now limit some of its bad behavior in the same way as Chrome, Edge, and Firefox.

The current configuration for Brave turns off all wallet/rewards/crypto functionality, AI chat, news articles on the New Tab page, usage data reporting, prompts about changing the default browser, and the shortcut to the Brave Talk service. It also uses the same policies from Chrome for preventing a download of a local AI model and AI features in the Dev Tools, though I'm not sure if Brave actually uses that functionality from Chrome/Chromium at the moment. The built-in VPN, Tor network functionality, reader mode, Wayback Machine integration, and other features are left intact.

I also made some minor improvements to the documentation for Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, and Edge's Pin to Taskbar wizard is now disabled in the Edge configuration. There is a similar prompt that Edge is now showing if the browser is not pinned to your Windows taskbar, but that doesn't seem to have a group policy for controlling it yet.

Tech Tales

I published a new episode of the Tech Tales podcast in July. I was joined by Katie Janzen to discuss the Ouya game console, and how it went from the most successful project in Kickstarter history (at the time) to a discontinued product in about two years.

This month, I also merged the Tech Tales website that existed at techtalesshow.com into the podcast page on my personal website. The description information and podcast show links that were split across both pages are now in one place, and since I already set up other sections on my website that are dynamically generated from RSS feeds, it was easy to add a list of recent episodes right on the page.

You can subscribe to Tech Tales on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Pocket Casts, YouTube Music, and Amazon Music, and there's an RSS feed for other apps.

Link Cleaner

More updates for Link Cleaner! The settings page received a slight redesign, and now includes two more features. You can now optionally convert YouTube Music (music.youtube.com) links into regular youtube.com links—songs and podcast episodes are videos, albums are playlists, and so on. There's also an option to change YouTube Shorts links into regular YouTube video links, so they don't open in the vertical video player interface.

These features also work in combination with the existing YouTube link shortening feature. For example, a link to a song on YouTube Music might start like this:

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=21oks06J5Wk&si=trackingcodehere

The default link cleaning process removes the tracking code:

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=21oks06J5Wk

The YouTube Music link conversion, if enabled, turns it into this:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=21oks06J5Wk

Finally, if you have YouTube link shortening enabled, you get this final form:

https://youtu.be/21oks06J5Wk

This also involved cleaning and simplifying the code for processing YouTube links, so the base cleaning functionality and these optional features are easy to maintain in the future.

ImageShare

This month I replaced the VPS that powers theimageshare.com. I'm still using DigitalOcean, but it has a fresh Ubuntu 26.04 LTS installation instead of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. It also still costs just $6 per month, so if you have given me at least $6 over any period of time, you have paid for everyone to use ImageShare for an entire month!

I also moved the server region from Germany to New York, so the majority of ImageShare users should now have a marginally faster connection. In the last 90 days, 42% of visitors to the website came from the United States, Canada, or Mexico. Finally, I enabled IPv6 access and added AAAA DNS records, so the website is fully working over IPv6 now.