Victor Kropp Modify

2026-09-22 02:34:44

Starting February next year, consumer electronics in the European Union must come with a replaceable battery, if they have any.

Some companies like Logitech don’t like this change, claiming that the change was not requested by any customers.

But I, for one, very much support the legislation. Especially with regard to Logitech devices.

I once had a Spotlight presenter, which unfortunately got into a deep discharge state during the pandemic. And since it had non-replaceable battery, it wasn’t even possible to open it without destroying. With this EU regulation, it wouldn’t have become electronic waste.

2026-09-20 05:29:59

I want (once again) to motivate myself to write more often, so I make a second attempt at #100DaysToOffload.

Previous attempt two years ago improved my writing consistency somewhat, but not enough to reach 100 posts in a year. This time, I started with two straight weeks posting five posts a week.

Wish me luck again!

2026-09-18 22:47:26

For years, there were just two image formats available on the Web: JPEG and GIF. One for lossy images (e.g. photos), one for lossless (e.g. icons).

Then came PNG. It was lossless, meant to replace GIF. It added transparency and better compression, which lead to smaller size, but dropped animation. (Yes, there was APNG, but it was never properly supported anywhere)

And those three were everywhere for decade or more.

There were multiple attempts to improve compression even further. For example, Google’s Guetzli for JPEG images. But all improvements were still limited by fundamental constraints of those formats, one needed to choose either lossless or lossy compression.

What if we don’t need to choose?

There are now not one, but two formats, that can efficiently handle both 12MP photos and 16×16 icons. WebP is slightly older and supported more widely, AVIF is even more compact, and has wide enough support in modern browsers.

They both support transparency, which previously was limited to lossless formats only.

So, from now on I only use AVIF images on this webpage. And if you, like me missed this silent revolution, you should consider these new formats as well.

2026-09-18 02:12:19

Today’s XKCD is spot-on.

I feel very much the same this days. The time flies fast.

2026-09-17 01:20:57

The internet is full of AI slop nowadays. I’m writing my blog for humans, so I write myself¹. I’d never randomly prompt an agent and copy-paste the output here without reading.

And so it is no surprise, that people want to see AI-generated text clearly marked. Well, it’s quite easy to tell apart written text from AI slop, but why should I spend my time on this? The problem is that most don’t mark their text in any way, either accidentally or deliberately.

That’s why Anthropic is introducing AI text watermarking. Claude will replace some words in generated text by synonyms to make the entire text have a specific checksum. I see a problem here though. Even without it AI texts are disgusting to read, what would be after it is enabled?

I’ve recently stumbled upon an example of such a technique (albeit for a different purpose) in an old game manual. Heavy use of synonyms was made there to justify monospaced text to fill a specific screen width. Although, it is impressive demonstration of writing skills, I doubt that it improves the quality of the text itself. And the same would happen with AI text watermarking as well.

2026-09-15 23:57:15

I updated all my devices to Apple OS 27 yesterday. No issues so far. Except Siri AI is not available in Europe, but that was expected.

There are three main reasons to update sooner, rather than later this time. First, there are numerous security issue fixes. Even if you don’t want to update to 27 just yet, make sure to install 26.7 with (likely) most of these fixes included as well.

Second, performance improvements. They already teased them on WWDC back in June, and so far everything just feels snappier everywhere.

And, last but not least, Liquid Glass improvements. I haven’t had any issues with the new design before, but all tweaks are very welcome anyway. Some macOS specific changes like reverting icons from all menu items are real usability improvements. Also, just look at those traffic lights!