30MAR2025: This Person as a Whimsical Felt Puppet

Happy Sunday, everyone!

This week, I've been playing around with the new OpenAI image gen capabilities, which got me fascinated with this homemade AI-powered camera, thinking about backing up all my Audible books, ordered coffee via API in Raycast from terminal.shop, had a major nostalgia moment playing Glider for the Apple II in my browser, and learned how to make an 8 page comic or zine from Doc Popular.

• 📰 TRMNL - After pre-ordering a few months back, I finally got my grubby hands on this simple, beautiful e-ink display that can update itself with key information throughout the day. I am really enjoying the high resolution screen, the impossibly thin frame, and getting a constant stream of updates on my calendar, weather, daily Zen quotes, XKCD comics, and more via the large and growing number of plugins and APIs compatible with the display. If you've been on the fence about grabbing one, I recommend it.
• 🚪 Eufy Dual Camera Video Doorbell* - When my most recent smart doorbell went completely unresponsive this week, I took the plunge and decided to try out this new one from Anker's home electronics subsidiary, eufy. It's early days still, but I'm loving it— It has an internal battery so it can be installed anywhere OR hardwired in to your existing doorbell with the battery as fallback in the event of blackouts, it also records and AI processes all video locally without sending anything to the cloud (unless you specifically turn on cloud back-ups) but it's still accessible for remote viewing via an end-to-end encrypted connection between your smart phone and the device. I find the video quality to be excellent and I appreciate that it has two cameras— one for showing you visitors as they approach, and one pointed down to show you packages and pets at your door. Caveat: Three years back, it was discovered that eufy was not encrypting its web streaming video feeds (while claiming they were), leading to a major showdown with The Verge. They have since gone to great lengths to amend, have brought in auditors, started a bug bounty program, and have doubled down on making everything local by default. I’m comfortable giving them a try now, but everyone should make their own considerations. *This is not sponsored, but I am using an Amazon Affiliate Link to support the site at no additional cost to you.
• ⌘ Paletro for MacOS - Paletro lets you quickly search and execute commands from the menu bar of any app. I have found myself using it most in Lightroom when I cannot remember how to toggle a certain setting on or off. I just hit the global hotkey for Paletro, which opens a small search window where I type out the function I want to toggle and hit return— it immediately executes without me having to click and search through every item in the menu bar to find it. I really like the app, but to be fair, if you're an avid Raycast user like I am, you could just use the built-in "Search Menu Items" function.
• 🎙 MacWhisper for MacOS - I really enjoy the process of writing. However, sometimes I have a hard time getting myself into the headspace to sit down and really get the work done. To help with this, I have been experimenting with MacWhisper, which is a super powerful audio transcription app powered by local on-device LLMs that will transcribe your voice dictation and insert it in line wherever you are writing. It can also be used to record voice notes, meetings, or podcast episodes that you can then keep in your PKM of choice. It's free, but with a one-time payment, you can unlock lots of advanced functionality like the ability to run AI processes against your transcripts either by sending the transcript to services like Anthropic or OpenAI, or you can leverage local AI apps like LM Studio to parse and edit your transcript or answer questions about it if you want to keep everything local.
• 🧪 Easlo Experiments for iOS - If you've dabbled at all with Notion, you've probably come across content from minimalist designer, Easlo. This last week he launched a new app, completely unrelated to Notion, for tracking personal experiments. The concept is great— You set up something you want to try out for a fixed amount of time, and then track the results over time with daily reminders and a notes field for you to record your observations. If you've been curious what cutting caffeine for a week might do for you, or if meditating daily for a month might have some impact, this app is a great way to treat it as a proper experiment and give it a go.

That's it for this week– be healthy, safe, and kind everyone!