benkaiser

Might be more for enterprise, but Microsoft has had Scout for a couple months now too:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2026/06/0...

(Disclaimer: work at Microsoft, but not in the Scout team)

I'm assuming real estate

Thanks! Very valid feedback about the generic branding. Most of my focus has been on getting the app to a dogfooding level where it clearly replaces the last personal CRM I self-hosted (Monica).

People are definitely more likely to roll their own solutions these days, and hey, Mob is actually open source and supports taking it and forking it how users want. The point of the hosted service is still about serving a large chunk of people that can't even be bothered using a proper agent, let alone hosting it somewhere, although given that is a small or non-existent segment of "uses MCP servers" and "can't host something themselves". Maybe when using remote MCP servers hits mainstream adoption.

I have loved using Monica CRM for several years, but often times when clicking around the UI it just felt overly laborious compared to just speaking what I wanted to record. So over the last few months I've been putting together an alternative to Monica but with MCP usage first-class. It's open source under FSL-1.1-MIT, relatively lightweight (Node.js + SQLite) and makes managing your contacts very easy via natural language in your agents.

Happy to answer any questions!

Source: https://github.com/benkaiser/mob-mcp-crm

Often there are "abliterated" or "uncensored" tuned models that suppress the rejections. From my high level understanding it is performed by finding which weights activate for the rejection and lowering those so the model is less likely to reject. It doesn't fix if the model doesn't know what you're asking it though (i.e. if the model never actually learned about meth production in the first place).

For those looking for mobile support connecting to remote MCP servers, I maintain a source-available chat app that does exactly that (uses OpenRouter for inference): https://benkaiser.github.io/joey-mcp-client/

Would be nice if the MCP implemented the Streamable HTTP MCP spec instead of the CLI one. I know this is already a HTTP API, but making it available as an MCP server that clients like Joey[1] can consume easily over network would be nice.

[1] https://github.com/benkaiser/joey-mcp-client

One key aspect that is missed here, is mobile users.

iOS don't have a CLI, Android phones... kinda have a CLI, but it's not really usable by all apps / universal like it is on desktop.

I've been putting together a MCP client for mobile recently [1] since to me it seems apparent that Remote MCP is a great utility but none of the major players offer it without a paid subscription.

As other commenters have mentioned, the use case here is really not for software developers, it's for everyone else. It's bringing that agentic loop to do all those "personal assistant" type things in a connected way with all of your services. We're not there yet, but maybe some day.

[1] https://github.com/benkaiser/joey-mcp-client

Am a software engineer at Microsoft using a M3 MBP, opinions are my own and all. Honestly one (of many) reasons I opted to go through the exception process to request a macbook was the screen brightness. The fact you can run software to boost the screen to HDR brightness levels for SDR content is insanely useful for working outside.

I think the parent may be referring to the fact that safari/webkit will evict all localstorage/indexeddb/caches etc after 7 days of not visiting a site. And apparently this now extends to PWAs making it a pretty big blog to building any infrequently accessed PWA that needs to persist user data locally.

Counter-example... some people have no idea that SLS is causing these issues and just chalk it up to how things are.

I recently switched to an SLS free toothpaste but it was really hard to track one down that still had flouride in it!

This is super nice as it's a native unencumbered linux environment.

I recently blogged about trying to do web development on the Quest 3, and although it kind of works, it's way more hacky (and performance is still lacking). The nice thing however about the Quest, is still being able to leverage virtual window placement in the space around you vs. the fixed 2d monitor approach here.

https://benkaiser.dev/web-development-in-vr/

I actually tried doing web dev on a Meta Quest 3 recently, but found the biggest limitation to actually be the lack of devtools in Android.

Here is the blog I did discussing the limitations: https://benkaiser.dev/web-development-in-vr/

I wonder if something like this running on the quest could technically work, but I suspect it would be too heavy running Linux chrome in a chroot. You also lose the cool "place and resize your windows anywhere" if it's all stuck inside one window for a desktop.

I'm quite curious how they go about licensing the content, maybe they just pay the creators a cut of the subscription fees. Or is it really just scraping youtube in some form?

As for the search you mentioned, that might come into it for an older range, for my little ones they still can't read or spell yet, they just want to click on the thumbnail that looks the most engaging at any random time.

On this same topic, I just launched an app that lets you use your offline videos in an interface that is easy to use for kids.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kaiserapps...

I stuck to a one-off payment, rather than the garbage subscription models all the other parenting apps use.

Thanks for sharing, I wasn't aware of that blog post. That said, their approach sounds kind of disheartening. I love being able to use extensions within my PWAs (primarily uBlock Origin, obviously), and some Android Chrome forks (Kiwi/Mises) let me do this, while still letting me feel like I'm in a dedicated app (i.e. no browser chrome at all). The firefox team really seem to stress here that they want to keep the chrome around the app (albeit different), which really feels like it goes against the grain of what I expect a PWA to be in the first place (a chromeless website).

As a developer, the one feature I really love in Chrome is PWAs. But Firefox abandoned PWA support years ago, and seems to have no appetite for adding PWAs back[1]. Maybe I'll just have to split my usage across PWAs in Chrome (since I trust those apps/websites anyway) and Firefox for general browsing.

[1] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/bring-back-pwa-progress...

Brightintosh is the same as Vivid (roughly) and is actually open source, but the author ships the binaries as a Mac app store purchase for $2:

https://github.com/niklasr22/BrightIntosh

Yeah there's a way to do this with Calibre + some plugins on windows. I tried on my Mac but it was unsuccessful.

Not the best reporting, but still interesting (although not surprising) that the Australian gov is cautious about usage of DeepSeek.