⚡ 06SEP2026: Undue damage to my joints
Turning your record player into a pirate radio station, a $500 toothbrush, minidisc love, a tiny LLM for Macs, film nerd love, and more...
Happy Sunday everyone!
This week I've been playing around with Raptor 0.5, a tiny LLM made to run locally on most Macs, narrowly resisting the temptation to get this new Roswell-themed seasonal release pen from Tactile Turn, thinking about setting up this thermal printer project on my desk, loving this trailer for a black and white film noir fan edit of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, kinda digging these tamagotchi rings, and basking in the cyberpunk retrofuturism of these minidisc replicas.
Note that some of the links in this issue of the Hiro Report are affiliate links and may earn me a small commission at no additional cost to you.
ON TO THE GOOD STUFF:
📻 Blast Radio - Blast Radio is a cool combination of hardware and software that lets you create your own "pirate" radio stream from anywhere. They offer a box you can plug in to a record player / CD player / mixer, etc. and it will broadcast whatever signal it receives to an app that any of your friends/followers can use to listen to your jams. They also offer a mic that connects to wifi and offers the same functionality in case you want to do some field reporting, run a live podcast, etc. It all goes out in lossless audio and is archived as .wav files. Listeners can get notifications through the app when you're going live and can send tips during the broadcast.
🪥 Dyson CameraJet Toothbrush - The evil geniuses at Dyson are back with a ridiculously expensive, beautiful and (probably) highly effective if non-conventional product. The makers of $1000+ air purifiers and portable vacuum cleaners released the $499 toothbrush this week. It, uh, brushes your teeth. It also has a "100k pixel" (.1 megapixel) camera in it that analyzes your teeth as you brush, and when it spots a gap between teeth it "blasts" it with a conical jet of fluid like a water pick to simulate flossing. Look, this is an absurd amount of money for a toothbrush, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't curious to try it out…
📸 Screeny for iOS and macOS - Lazare, the developer of Screeny, very kindly sent over a license for me to try out the latest version and I'm really impressed. It's a super handy tool for folks like me who take a ton of iPhone screenshots, as it lets you frame your screenshots in one of 20+ iPhone bezels in various finishes, and animate it. The coolest thing, in my opinion, is the Mac version ships with an MCP server, so you can tell your AI agent of choice something like "frame every screenshot in this folder in an iPhone 17 Pro with my background preset" and it just gets to work and does it.
👟 SoleDust for iOS - This is a really lovely, simple app that helps you keep track of how much wear and tear you're putting on your favorite running shoes. You can track the history and mileage on every pair of running shoes, set goals for when you want to replace them, and get a cool visual of each shoe's running history pulling from Apple Health data. It's also got some cool, highly customizable filters and overlays for sharing your run data ala Strava. It's a small, one-time purchase, and totally worth it to help me make sure I'm not doing undue damage to my joints by running on worn out shoes.
🎞️ Dock by Lento — film scanner - Dock is a beautiful, simple film scanner from Lento in Spain. Unlike some of the archaic and frustrating film scanners I've used over the years, this one has no sensor inside — instead it advances frame by frame of the film, detecting each one as it goes, and triggers your attached digital camera in bulb mode to take super high resolution photos of the film frame. Because it controls the light source and the timing of the exposure, it can perfectly expose each scan, and typically can work through a 36-exposure roll in a little less than two minutes. For us film geeks, this is cool in its own right, but on the tech geek side: instead of using white LEDs that smear across all three dye layers, Dock uses narrowband RGB tuned to each layer individually, reading the film base first to calibrate to the stock's own neutral, and (by way of the included Dock Connect app) it lets you change a color value and physically rescan the frame under new light rather than messing with white balance or color grades in post. I want one.
That's it for this week! May your computer boot 5 seconds faster.