I’m pretty much always listening to music from the moment I wake up. Whether I’m working on my laptop, driving in my car, walking to the mailbox, taking out the trash, you name it. Some days I feel like my AirPods are a part of my body and I forget to take them out. 😅
One thing that has always annoyed me about macOS is that it has no OS-level equalizer. For example, I work a lot with my brother Brett on FaceTime during the day. When we aren’t talking, we’re usually still on video. And both of us have our own music playing in the background. With macOS, once a video call starts, FaceTime automatically lowers the volume of other media and background apps (like Apple Music, YouTube, etc.) when a call is active.
That’s where a native Mac app called SoundSource comes into play. It gives you per-app volume control. As Macworld put it, it’s the “audio control app Apple should have made.” Brett and I both use it. And it also does many other things, such as per-app output redirection and an equalizer (add a little more bass). If you ever need more control over how audio works on your Mac, I highly recommend the app!
Updates ✍️
We pushed out an update for our Perfmatters WordPress plugin. Here are a few of the changes:
Added a highly requested safe mode option to disable all Perfmatters performance optimizations sitewide (excluding security/code snippets). 🚧
Added new inline excluded stylesheets advanced option to automatically inline stylesheets excluded from remove unused CSS. ⚡
Added new load in block editor option for frontend CSS code snippets so those styles can also appear in the WordPress block editor canvas. 🎨
Added new perfmatters_inline_scripts filter which allows you to inline any local JS files.
Drastically improved remove unused CSS to detect local stylesheets from the URL path, which should resolve most third-party CDN rewrites without needing the CDN URL setting or local stylesheet filter. 👏
Improved stylesheet inlining via the new perfmatters_inline_stylesheets filter (perfmatters_rucss_inline_stylesheets still supported), which can now run independently of remove unused CSS while still deferring to it for non-excluded stylesheets.
Made some adjustments to code snippets UI visiblity script.
Moved preconnect and DNS prefetch into the main Perfmatters queue so they respect the same request-level disable checks as other front-end optimizations.
Removed redundant admin and ?perfmattersoff checks from FastClick output, which is already gated by the main Perfmatters queue. 🧹
Fixed a PHP warning in Minify class when parse_url() returned false for a malformed script or stylesheet URL.
Fixed a PHP fatal error that could stop buffer optimizations from running when one-per-line options were stored as a string instead of an array. 👨🔧
Fixed an issue where remove unused CSS could delay, async, or remove external stylesheets that were never included in used CSS.
Fixed get_file_path incorrectly stripping characters from asset paths on subdirectory installs in certain cases.
Fixed a compatibility issue with Infinite Uploads that prevented code snippets from loading correctly.
Fixed an issue where Perfmatters meta options were not available when creating a new post or page until after saving.
Fixed an issue where code snippet filenames with non-ASCII characters (such as Korean) were incorrectly encoded on disk. 🗃️
Added missing license notices for bundled third-party libraries.
I also enjoyed interviewing with Byztopia and sharing a little more behind our business and my personal life. 👨💼
Interesting things 🔎
Misc.
GitHub has a new and much cleaner dashboard experience that I just happened to stumble across. You can enable it if you aren’t already using it. 👍
Riley scraped 100 million pictures of kids’ drawings, and made them searchable so you can see the trends of the last 20 years. This is a lot of fun!
CleanShot released version 5.0, which features studio mode and a brand-new video editor.
Cloudflare launched Quick Tunnels. Basically, an incredibly easy way to get localhost to live in three steps. However, be careful; there were early reports of Google indexing them.
Galaxium is a 3D space explorer that lets you fly from Earth out to planets, stars, nebulae, black holes, and distant galaxies right in your web browser. Pretty cool. 🌠
macOS 27 Golden Gate is here! Honestly, my favorite improvement is that they fixed the silly corner radius system. It’s so much cleaner now.
WordPress
WordPress is eating itself alive. An interesting watch, to say the least. 🍽️
Kyle from The Admin Bar dives into the new Design Tokens coming soon in GenerateBlocks. Christopher Kurth also said it’s the design system he’s been waiting for.
There were multiple security updates released for WordPress core this month (7.1.1 and 7.1.2). If you have updates disabled, I highly recommend you update immediately. 🔒
WordPress.org can now automatically block high-risk plugin updates before they ship.
Çağdaş Dağ has launched WPAcquire, a marketplace to buy and sell WordPress businesses.
Easy Digital Downloads now has a great new feature that will handle partial refunds and automatic retries when the VAT system is down in a specific country. This was honestly always a pain in the past. Why? Because VAT systems go down constantly. For example, this is a screenshot from last Friday. VAT systems were down in three countries. Germany, from my experience, is one of the worst in terms of uptime. 🔻
Marketing
If you need a new website designed, I highly recommend chatting with Mike Oliver. I’ve personally seen many of the sites he’s worked on, and they are always beautiful. 🤌 No AI slop.
Google’s September 2026 spam update has been unleashed.
Dawn Shepard has designed a mega-chart showing all 103 Google ranking factors in one place.
Performance
There is a proposal to start requiring PHP 8.1 or higher when running WooCommerce. Hoping this happens for performance reasons. ⚡ We did this with Perfmatters in early 2026, and honestly didn’t see much pushback. Most clients that reached out simply hadn’t updated yet due to time, not a technical reason.
Firefox 155 speeds up page loads with Happy Eyeballs v3 and adds QUIC v2 support for HTTP/3 that skips an extra round trip. Speaking of Firefox, version 157 just got the biggest design overhaul in years.
Homebrew 7.0.0 was released with quite a few performance improvements, along with a native Mac app.
AI
Trello now has an MCP. I even used it for this newsletter; it’s great! I save articles throughout the month in a Trello card as comments. I now have Claude grab all my comments for a specific date range.
ChatGPT might be reading your conversations. I always recommend turning off access in all AI tools regarding options like “Improve the model for everyone.”
AMD acquired Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon. How much faster is this? Try chatting with it here. It’s almost too fast! 😮 The downfall is no access to live data. But I could see a hybrid approach happening.
World Labs introduced Atlas, a new world model that can turn a handful of photos or videos into consistent 3D scenes, and it’s insanely impressive!
Claude can now use your computer in the background in Claude Cowork and Claude Code.
Muse Spark 1.3 was released, and honestly, I was surprised by it. It’s very fast. Meta AI also launched apps.
Grok Build now carries conventions, decisions, and project facts from one session to the next with its new memory feature. Grok 4.7 was also released. 🧠
Cursor now lets you run cloud agents on machines you manage. They also reduced token costs by 7%, which is pretty significant.
Google launched Gemini 3.8 Flash, a faster, cheaper model that it says rivals larger frontier models at coding and agentic tasks.
OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, which it calls its smartest and most aligned model yet, along with GPT-6.1 Sol. They also released ChatGPT Images 2.5, an upgraded image model with much faster generation.
OpenAI introduced dots, always-on personal AI agents powered by GPT-6 Astra that run on their own cloud computer. Looks oddly familiar. SpaceXAI now owns dot.com. 🤪
Anthropic released Opus 5.5 (which is impressive!) along with Sonnet 5.5.
Behind Project Suncatcher, Google’s moonshot to put AI in space. 🛰️
If you're in the Scottsdale, AZ area, hit me up, and we can grab lunch! 🥗👋