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!
2026-09-11 14:37:34
Meta forced music band Muse to free up the @muse handle
on Facebook and Instagram, because they chose the name for their AI agent.
We’ve seen this before, as Twitter after acquisition seized @music handle from the long time owner.
This doesn’t violate their ToS, of course. But it is a reminder, that you don’t own anything on the social networks.
2026-09-11 02:09:17
Gamer Nexus YouTube channel claims that LG Smart TVs are spying on their users even in standby mode. They record audio & video playing on TV, capture ambient sound (e.g. people talking near the TV), scanning Wi-Fi networks, etc. What’s even worse, the system that they have maybe abused by hackers.
Unsurprisingly, LG denies the claims. Who would have thought?
A possible mitigation would be to disable personalized ads and voice control. However, I don’t trust that they respect the setting, so I just disconnected my LG TV from the network completely.
But it’s not all, there was another research some months ago. It reports, that nearly half of the LG TVs are turned to residential proxies.
So I don’t use any TV apps either. Well, at least they can display whatever is plugged in via HDMI and don’t alter it with ads. Oops, I just offered them a business idea.
2026-09-09 14:37:34
I used to have many API keys available in environment variables in any terminal session. Obviously, it is a bad idea, as any script I run on my machine could potentially leak these secrets. To address this, I decided to store them in 1Password (my password manager of choice) instead.
1Password offers a handy way to organize secrets in environments. This can be especially useful when working with multiple projects that require different sets of secrets.
In the 1Password app, in the Developer section, you can create environments and add secrets to them. After that you just run
op run --environment <environment-id> -- <command>
and the secrets will be available in the environment variables of the command you run.
Yes, it is that easy.
You can also access individual secrets, but I really like using environments as it is much faster and more convenient.
Another advantage of using 1Password to store secrets is that I can easily share them between multiple machines. And, if needed, with other team members too.
And while migrating all secrets, I used the opportunity to also remove any unnecessary secrets and rotate others.
2026-09-09 00:53:19
I wrote about personal apps earlier this year, and I continue creating smaller utilities that I always wanted to have, but never had enough time or desire to actually write by hand.
But I’ve recently seen an influx of free open-source apps replacing first party vendor apps. Well, we’ve seen the same story before with alternative Twitter and Reddit clients, for example. I wonder how it turns out this time.
Handheld and action DJI cameras are very popular (the newest models are sold out everywhere!). But their official app offer a miserable experience. Bloated with ads, slow, and with minimal features.
OpenPocketCine
So, there are two open source alternatives: Osmosis – a media downloader, and OpenPocketCine – a field monitor, which I tried. It is fast and slick.
Another well-known example of overcomplicated and unnecessary heavy software is the Logitech companion app. It never worth it to me to install this app to remap one or two buttons on my mouse.
OpenLogi
Welcome, OpenLogi, which does the same with a lightweight (and better, at least for me) UI.
The original Spotify app is just a wrapper around a complex browser page. There have been many attempts to rebuild it with various UI frameworks, but they rarely were feature complete.
Faspotify
Now, there is Faspotify, that not only rebuilds UI in Rust, but also claims to use much less memory and work much faster. I haven’t used it because it is not yet notarized for macOS, but I’m going to give it a try as soon as it is available.
What these all apps have in common? I’d claim that they all are largely written with LLMs. And it is not an offense. 3 out of 4 don’t even hide Claude from co-authors.
If any tech helps users to get better apps for the services they use, or physical products they bought, we all win.
2026-09-08 01:05:53
This news caught me off-guard, when it popped up in my feed: .name termination.
As you may have noticed this very site is hosted on a third-level .name domain. So at first, I thought it was being suddenly discontinued. I’m happy, it’s not in the case.
The thing is that I registered (well, actually, bought) the second level name domain kropp.name. It is safe. And so are my other domains, e-mail addresses and accounts on various sites linked to them.
I feel sorry for Neil, who just lost his internet identity, which he maintained for quarter of a century. It’s unbelievable, that registrars may do such things without almost no warning and no migration path. Hacker News comments agree that it is insane.
