A peculiar story of a buyer whose $4,429 order for an Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090 got canceled is going around. Nvidia refunded the money and pointed at Asus. A $500 increase had landed after the order went through. The community reaction was the usual one: gouging, dishonest sellers, somebody taking advantage. None of that is wrong. It is also just how this market has run for as long as I have been buying into it.
By Rian
Gray, a writer.
Meta’s LED Is the Camera Sound All Over Again
Meta’s smart glasses now have a square peg pushed through a round hole — the Guardian ran a piece this week asking whether anyone can tell the glasses are filming from its LED. Reasonable question. Wrong premise. While that argument runs, cameras with better coverage and no indicator at all are driving past you, and nobody has said a word.
AI Satellite Photo Editor Nobody Asked For
Google pulled the Nano Banana 2 image tool from Google Earth one day after shipping it, once a researcher demonstrated that a one-sentence prompt could drop a nuclear facility into Iran. The safety failure is the obvious story. The more interesting one is that nobody, before or since, has said what the feature was for.
Sony Counted Disc Buyers Right
Sony says the disc backlash isn’t making “any impact” on its business, and I believe it. Not because Sony is on a crusade. Because Sony is reading a number that says exactly that, and the number is correct.
App to Organize Coding Agent Output
As much as I rely on Claude Code while managing home lab and writing code for DIY projects, coding agents never meet the media’s perception of AI: “slaves to logic” as I, Robot has put it. Agents hallucinate, make mistakes and take them back, and more often than not, their output is a wall of text that is completely out of order. For Claude, the recent models print more than their predecessors.
Is HomePod Dead?
HomePod is truly a product of its time. Its core feature is to stream Apple Music with Siri. Some side hustles it can pull off: AirPlay smart speaker, or wireless home hub, but I tend to agree with the community consensus the wireless hub only works in principle. None of these features are unique to HomePod, let alone the most polished.
How to Get Weeks Left from Dates on Shortcuts
We are nearly done with July, so it’s at least a month late to say “we are halfway through 2026.” Now is still a good time to run biannual checks on week-based automation before July is actually over. And if you are trying to get how many weeks are left from date X in year Y, Shortcuts does have an answer.
How to Set Up Daily Time Machine Backup with Local Hourly
This piece is a continuation from an app-to I published a few days ago. Currently, Time Machine does not natively support hourly local snapshot creation when the backup schedule is set to daily. Although it sounds counterintuitive, the key here is “local snapshot”. Time Machine runs on snapshots, capturing what has changed at every interval. Creating a snapshot locally is a light task, whereas pushing the snapshot to a remote location isn’t. Hence why I searched for a solution.
The Stairway 7 Spiel
Different Exit 8-likes certainly have tried different methods of incorporating or developing the definition of “Exit 8.” I even wrote about the four pillars of Exit 8-likes. Unfortunately The Stairway 7 misses the mark in its own noise, enough that I wonder if the game was even meant to be an Exit 8-like.
App to Customize Time Machine Schedule
Of many things I have adopted over the course of years, Time Machine is one element that is both most helpful if hell breaks loose and least updated since. I have discussed the shortcomings of Time Machine and shared some of the possible remedies before. Apple’s own iOS backup system supersedes macOS Time Machine. It is remote, and nothing equivalent is offered on the Mac yet. But one feature was added rather recently: rudimentary scheduling.
App to Self-Host Location History Tracker
My last camera for the sake of pure photography, I believe I bought it around early 2010s. It was a click-and-shoot with GPS tagging. Smartphone cameras were still playing catch up, and while the GPS chip gave it more metadata, hardly any software could make use of it. The geolocation data lived by itself, not matched to a place. And it was not easy to export elsewhere, either. Scroll forward to 2026, I wish I hadn’t bought the camera at all. Smartphones genuinely provide impressive quality for a portable device, with much needed metadata (including accurate date and time), face…
App to Identify wp2shell Vulnerability on WordPress
If your WordPress has automatically installed an update, this is the retroactive PSA on why WordPress has urgently issued one. If it hasn’t, consider it an urgent PSA. There is a vulnerability in WordPress Core, disclosed July 17, affecting 6.9.0–6.9.4 and 7.0.0–7.0.1. The attack surface is Core itself: no compromised plugins, themes, or custom code. As far as I could find, with an estimated 500 million+ websites running the platform, WordPress has decided to push the update rather aggressively.
Gemini 3.6 Flash Released
Over the last few weeks, my main takeaway with the Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 releases was their respective costs and cost performances. Neither company particularly hides the fact that the real models they offer are paywalled. It creates a distinct entry barrier for those who simply are not the target audience of the marketing materials surrounding the AI hype: vibe coding, content creation, and so on.
Fable 5 Now Included in Max Subscription
Fable 5 saga is finally coming to an end with Anthropic deciding to include the flagship model in Max. Since I am on Max tier for this month temporarily, the announcement is disappointing in two ways: a. Fable won’t be available on a similar price tier as GPT 5.6 Sol, and b. Fable is simply too inefficient when it comes to token counts compared to Sol. Whichever way you cut it, you can get a better deal from Codex.
Fears to Fathom – Norwood Hitchhike Spiel
Fears to Fathom is now in the second season, and with it, the first season went on summer sale. If I were to compare the franchise to Chilla’s Art, I would argue Fears to Fathom relies more heavily on the urban legends of the 80s and 90s, revived as creepypasta. In my previous review of the first episode of Fears to Fathom, I remarked on the fact that the episode largely rests on anachronistic horror tropes. Norwood Hitchhike doesn’t escape the path.