Top Tools from Sep 7–13, 2026

The free software media server drops the leading 10 from its version scheme, so what would have been 10.12 ships as 12.0, a number the team says finally signals how big a release is. Books and comics are now handled by the server itself instead of the deprecated Bookshelf plugin - metadata is read straight from OPF, ComicInfo and ComicBookInfo files, EPUBs and every supported comic archive get generated covers, and series, volume and chapter numbers are picked up from filenames. Underneath, playlists and collections move to one database row per item, so counting, paging and editing a large playlist no longer loads the whole list. The upgrade rewrites the database on first boot, needs 10.10.7 or any 10.11 release first, makes usernames case-insensitive, requires a full library scan and breaks third-party plugins built for 10.11, which is why the release notes open with a backup warning. GPL-2.0, free, funded through Open Collective. 57.1k stars as of 14 September 2026

The macOS and Linux package manager gets its first official graphical app. BrewUI installs with brew install homebrew-app on macOS Tahoe 26 or later, puts package browsing, search and installed versions in one window, and shows the brew command behind every action it takes. The rest of the release leans on security - brew vulns is now built in and checks installed formulae against OSV.dev, backed by a new Homebrew advisory database that tracks the versions Homebrew actually ships including backported fixes, and Linux sandboxing moves from Bubblewrap to the kernel's own Landlock so it needs no extra dependencies. Downloads, preparation and installs now overlap for faster upgrades. Intel Macs move to Tier 3 with no new bottles, and macOS 10.15 is dropped. BSD-2-Clause, a non-profit project run by volunteers and funded by donations. 49.6k stars as of 14 September 2026

A matchbox-sized IP KVM, 42 by 42 by 23 mm in aluminium, that puts a computer's screen, keyboard and mouse in your browser, BIOS included, with the same web interface, cloud access and update system as the original JetKVM. Getting the price down meant starting over on an ESP32-P4X microcontroller with a hardware H.264 encoder instead of a Linux board, capturing 1080p at 30 fps or 720p at 60, with virtual media served from a TF card and a small status display on top. Two versions - JetKVM Mini with Ethernet at 39 US dollars or 99 for three, and JetKVM Mini W with Wi-Fi 6 at 42 or 36 each in a three-pack - available 26 October 2026 through authorised resellers. The rewritten firmware is to be open source from day one, like the GPL-2.0 JetKVM software, and remote access through JetKVM Cloud is optional and free. 5.1k stars on jetkvm/kvm as of 14 September 2026

A new European AI lab from Paul Veugen and the team behind the Detail app, launching with 18 small single-task models built to run on the device instead of behind an API - 12 stable and six in beta across audio, vision and text, all through one SDK for Swift, Kotlin and JavaScript. Voz transcribes ten minutes of audio in about two seconds on an iPhone with a timestamp on every word, Clear is a 9 MB speech-enhancement model, Redact masks names, addresses and card numbers in 27 languages before anything reaches a server, and Tongue identifies 84 languages from three words in 2 MB. The models are source-available under the company's own licence rather than open source - free below 100,000 monthly active devices per platform for each model, with a visible Powered by Desert Ant Labs credit, and a commercial licence by contacting the company above that, with no price published

GrapheneOS's own SMS and MMS app, descended from AOSP Messaging and now rebuilt screen by screen in Jetpack Compose and Material 3. Version 13 adds pinned conversations, notification snoozes of 1, 8 or 24 hours or indefinitely, swipe to archive and mark unread, attachment captions, a two-pane layout for tablets and foldables, and onboarding that says plainly that SMS is unencrypted and recommends end-to-end encryption for anything sensitive. The privacy changes are specific - YouTube link previews are now opt-in, shared content pointing at file URIs or private app files is rejected, and allocation limits guard the EXIF and MMS parsers. The repository has no top-level LICENSE file, while the AOSP-derived sources carry Apache-2.0 headers. Free, funded by donations to the non-profit GrapheneOS Foundation

The autolayout engine for the D2 diagram language, previously closed source, is now open under D2's own MPL-2.0 and bundled into D2 v0.9.0, so --layout=tala works on a plain install and in the client-side playground. It is primarily an orthogonal layout engine designed for software architecture diagrams, closer to what people draw on a whiteboard than the one-direction flow of Dagre or ELK, and it scores candidate layouts on symmetry, flow and the clustering of similar nodes. Node positions and sizes can be pinned for all nodes or just some, which the post pitches at AI agents that place boxes well but struggle to route the lines between them. The announcement is upfront about the trade-offs - the algorithm is randomised, so adding one node can reshuffle the whole diagram, it handles long DAGs less well, and it slows nonlinearly on large inputs. D2 is an independent project fiscally sponsored by Hack Club and takes donations. 25.4k stars as of 14 September 2026

PlanetScale's sharded Postgres, now in platform preview, built on the company's eight years of running sharded MySQL on Vitess. Applications connect to a Neki router over the standard Postgres wire protocol, so drivers, ORMs and connection strings stay the same, while each shard underneath is a full Postgres cluster with a primary and at least two replicas across three availability zones - there is no custom storage engine, so extensions and SQL behave the way Postgres does. You choose the shard key and describe how tables are grouped in a JSON data topology, and schema changes, version upgrades, failovers, imports and resharding all run as online workflows. A managed PlanetScale service, and the preview comes with a plain warning not to run production workloads yet because breaking changes are still coming. Billed per branch across shard clusters, routers, storage, backups and network transfer, at rates that vary by cloud and region and are quoted in the dashboard and pricing calculator rather than as a flat price

GNU Radio, the open-source software-defined radio toolkit, compiled to WebAssembly by Marc Lichtman, author of the PySDR textbook, so a GNU Radio Companion-style flowgraph editor and runtime runs entirely in a browser tab with no Python install and no server. Build a flowgraph from hundreds of DSP blocks, press Run and watch live spectrum, waterfall and constellation plots, then feed it the bundled example IQ recordings or a real RTL-SDR, PlutoSDR or HackRF over WebUSB. It reads and writes the same .grc files as native GNU Radio, includes popular out-of-tree modules, shares a flowgraph entirely through its URL, and can embed a live flowgraph in another web page. Python-only blocks still need a C++ implementation to run, since Pyodide is used only for Embedded Python Blocks. GPL-3.0, free. 62 stars as of 14 September 2026

Apache-2.0 AI agent for circuit-board design, pitched as Cursor for circuit boards, that works on your KiCad files inside your own git repo. You write a brief in plain words and it runs eight gated stages in order - spec, architecture, parts chosen against datasheets, schematic, layout, gerbers and drill files, firmware pin definitions and a bring-up plan - and no stage passes until its output is on disk and, for the schematic and board, until KiCad's own electrical and design rule checks come back clean, with one commit per stage. The team points to Open Telegraph, a pocket-size ESP32-S3 Morse key built end to end this way with every file public. Open core - the CLI is free with your own Claude or GPT-5 key and never metered, Cloud is 49 US dollars per user a month and free for open hardware repos, Team adds a 199 dollar monthly platform fee on top, and Enterprise is a custom annual self-hosted plan. 254 stars as of 14 September 2026

An open-source software factory from Kepler Software, the company behind the Mastra agent framework, that connects GitHub and Linear issues and pull requests to persistent coding agents and moves each piece of work through lifecycle stages you define - intake, triage, planning, building, review and done - with rules at each stage for each type of work, ending in a reviewed pull request. It installs with npm create factory, and because the agents, tools, workflows and UI are ordinary Mastra code it can be adapted to other multi-step processes too. A Factory project uses the Mastra platform for auth, database and sandboxes from the start, while the Mastra server, Factory UI and Studio run locally until you deploy. Apache-2.0 outside the repository's ee directories, which carry Mastra's proprietary enterprise licence. The hosted platform has a free Starter tier with 100K observability events and 24 CPU-hours a month, then 10 US dollars per 100K events and 35 cents per CPU-hour; Teams is 250 dollars a month with 1M events, 250 CPU-hours, six-month retention, SSO and SOC 2 documents; Enterprise is custom. 28k stars on mastra-ai/mastra as of 14 September 2026

A ground-up rebuild of the Mac launcher that replaces version 1 on install and imports an existing setup during onboarding, with Raycast saying a handful of v1 features are still to come. The interface is redesigned to sit at home on macOS Tahoe, file search moves into root search, hotkeys and aliases can be assigned straight from root, dictation is built in, and Quick AI and AI Chat are reworked around skills, agents and memory. It needs macOS Tahoe on Apple Silicon. The app is closed source, while community extensions are built in a public MIT-licensed repository. The individual plan is free and covers all built-in extensions such as clipboard history, calendar and window management plus every community extension; AI sits behind paid plans - Pro at 10 US dollars a month or 96 a year with 500 AI credits, Pro+ at 20 a month or 192 a year with 3,000 credits, and Max at 50 a month or 480 a year with 7,500 credits. Team plans start free, then run 15, 25 and 65 dollars per user a month, or 144, 240 and 624 a year

MIT-licensed self-hosted tool from Remy Jardinet that maps a homelab as an interactive diagram with live status, filled in from network, Zigbee, Z-Wave and Proxmox scans. The 3.4 line adds documentation inside the app - every device gets a Markdown page written once from what the scan found, covering identity, hardware, services and network, and then left for you to maintain, with a banner when the scanned data changes and the option to regenerate a single block, next to a library of your own runbooks and incident pages. Pages link to each other with double-bracket links and backlinks, keep up to 50 versions with line-by-line diffs and restore, and carry a review interval that feeds a needs-attention list, and 3.4.2 adds export to Markdown or a zip that mirrors the sidebar. The rack canvas now takes front panels from the device inventory, and an MCP server is optional. Free, funded through Ko-fi and Buy Me a Coffee. 3.6k stars as of 14 September 2026

Self-hosted library for 3D-printing files that organises STL, 3MF, STEP and G-code into collections, lets you inspect a model in the browser, launches it into Bambu Studio, PrusaSlicer, OrcaSlicer or Elegoo Slicer in one click, and uploads sliced G-code straight to Klipper printers through Moonraker. Version 2.0 overhauls the viewer - models that ship as six or eight separate STLs load onto the virtual build plate together with each part in its own colour, the true bounding box is shown in millimetres, and filament colour swatches, wireframe and X-ray modes help judge a print before committing to it. A background scanner handles large NAS libraries, which the maker says were tested on folders over 2 TB. The README and LICENSE header say AGPL-3.0, though the licence text departs from the canonical AGPL wording in places, which is why GitHub does not detect it. Free, funded through Ko-fi. 121 stars as of 14 September 2026