16FEB2025: Koala space pirate at my table
Wild AI tech, measuring your heartbeat through your ears, and apps to help your relax or take action
Happy Sunday everyone!
This week, beyond prepping for the Photography Composition Challenge, I’ve been loving this fun story about an SR-71 showing off for a bunch of Cessnas, exploring the excellent Type Atlas blog of independent typefaces (courtesy of Kevin), and revisiting the SteamWorld Dig games on the Nintendo Switch.
However, the most delightful surprise this week was discovering the amazing Floor796 (thanks to Mako’s newsletter)—an incredible, hand-animated homage to nerd culture. You really just have to see it for yourself.
On to the good stuff!
• 📹 Pikadittions – It’s been a few months since I’ve checked in on the state of AI-generated images and video, and I was totally blown away when I discovered Pika’s Pikadditions tech. The concept is simple: upload a video, add a picture of something you want to insert, describe what you want it to do, and within about two minutes, Pika delivers a spectacularly impressive rendering of your request. You can try it out for free or subscribe for a few bucks a month if you want to go all in. Here is a koala space pirate at my dining room table, and his little friend jumping on my meditation pillow.
• 🎧 Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 Headphones – This week, Apple launched the latest update to their workout-centric headphones featuring built-in heart rate monitoring alongside the Apple H2 chip, enabling super-efficient playback, automatic switching between Apple devices, and more. My favorite workout app, Ladder*, has already integrated support so you can see health data during workouts without wearing an Apple Watch. I’ll probably stick with my Apple Watch and Oura Ring for now, but I do like the look of these, especially the new electric orange color way—my AirPods Pro 2 still fall out of my ears from time to time, especially when I’m getting a little too enthusiastic listening to RATM. *Not sponsored, but these are affiliate links to support the site.
• 🔍 Kagi Privacy Pass – I’ve written before about Kagi, my favorite search engine. I love that for a modest subscription, you get zero ads, superior search results, and strong privacy protections. This week, Kagi doubled down on privacy with Privacy Pass, allowing you to log in and perform searches using anonymized tokens. This means that even Kagi itself can’t see who you are or what you’re searching for, despite your paid membership. Clever stuff.
• 📱 Daily Wallpaper for iOS – I am a sucker for simple utility apps like this. Indie dev Leo Mehlig released Daily Wallpaper this week, letting you automate adding a fresh new iPhone wallpaper to your screen every day from sources like NASA’s APOD (Astronomy Photo of the Day) and Bing’s Nature Photo of the Day. I have mine set to pull down a NASA spaceflight photo every morning.
• ☎️ 5 Calls App for iOS – Not to get too political, but we’re living in an intensely political moment in the U.S. I have friends across the mainstream liberal-to-conservative spectrum who are deeply concerned about at least some of the things happening. It’s easy to get caught up in either doomscrolling oneself into oblivion or completely avoiding the news altogether for mental health. I get it. But when/if you’re ready to take action, the 5 Calls app is a great resource. It gives you five phone calls to make each day to your elected representatives based on the issues you care about, complete with starter scripts and one-tap dialing.
That’s it for this week! May you stay safe, warm, and happy.