Victor Kropp Modify

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.

Welcome environments in 1Password CLI

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.

Other advantages

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.

Improving security and simplifying my workflow one step at a time

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.

DJI cameras

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.

So, there are two open source alternatives: Osmosis – a media downloader, and OpenPocketCine – a field monitor, which I tried. It is fast and slick.

Logitech keyboards and mice

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.

Welcome, OpenLogi, which does the same with a lightweight (and better, at least for me) UI.

Spotify

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.

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.

2026-05-26 02:29:09

Every year I’m looking forward to the KotlinConf, my favorite conference. And this one was very special for me, as it took place in Munich, my hometown.

The first surprise awaited on the highway approaching the convention center. The roadsigns shown the directions to the conference!

The conference started for me on Wednesday with the workshop. It was an updated version of the workshop we did with my colleague Martón last year. It went smooth this year as well, with a genuine interest of all attendees.

We were off for a good start! And when I was sitting at the reception after the workshop, decompressing from the whole day of talking, another colleague asked me if I can help with the Coding Challenge. I agreed and spent next two days commentating the blind coding competition.

But before that, we started with an hour long keynote, featuring days and months of work of hundreds people at JetBrains and other companies to make the Kotlin Ecosystem the best for development on all platforms.

The conference is, of course, a bubble of like-minded people. So nobody asked a question “why should I use Kotlin?”, they were rather asking “can I use it in scenario A on a platform B?”, which is exciting and terrifying at the same time. We absolutely realistically cannot support that many scenarios and platforms. But we’ll do our best!

At the end of the second day I was even happier than at the start of the conference, but absolutely exhausted. Most of my colleagues who worked at the conference felt the same, but we had a great afterparty nevertheless.

Thanks to the public holiday on Monday, I had a long weekend to recover. And now, I already can’t wait when and where the KotlinConf 2027 opens it doors.