⚡ 22MAR2026: Chasing Waterfalls
Happy Sunday Everyone! We're on spring break this week and I'm with the family tromping around the woods and beaches of the Pacific Northwest, so we're going to jump right into the good stuff. We'll be back to our regularly scheduled mayhem next week.
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🎵 Maxell Wireless Cassette Player - The folks at Maxell, makers of basically all the cassettes you made mix tapes on back in the day, are back with a really great looking modern portable tape player. It has 11 hours of battery life, offers both a headphone jack and Bluetooth connectivity, and :gasp: USB-C fast charging. I honestly don't think I have any cassettes left, but I kind of want to grab one of these when they come back in stock.
🎧 AirPods Pro Max 2 - In a surprise move, Apple announced a proper v2.0 update for the AirPods Pro Max line this week. This new version finally brings the H2 chip so it gets Live Translation, Adaptive Audio, and Conversation Awareness like the AirPods Pro 3, reportedly higher fidelity sound, and 1.5x improved Active Noise Cancellation. While this all sounds awesome, as someone who is still rocking the OG AirPods Pro Max with a Lightning charge port, I'm perhaps most excited that I finally have some good reasons to update beyond just desperately wanting to have all my devices on USB-C.
⚡ Anker Slim 5000mA Battery - I grabbed one of these for use on this trip this week and am really loving it. It's charging much faster than my old 7.5W Qi MagSafe chargers, but most importantly it's ridiculously slim. It's effortless to slip into my EDC bag, and keeps my iPhone nice and pocketable when it's in use. I do wish that it was available in Qi 2.2 for even faster 25W charging, but it doesn't seem like there's more than a handful of models out there offering those speeds and they're all pretty massive.
🎶 Plastic Vinyl Scanner - While I'm far from a pro crate digger, I love visiting vinyl record shops looking for gems. I've been keeping tabs on this app while it was in beta and am stoked that it's finally out in the wild. In short, you use the app to scan any vinyl record album art (or barcode) in your collection or in shops, and it will tell you how much it's worth, the BPM and key for every song, let you pull up the album in Spotify to give it a sample listen, and let you log it to your collection or bookmark where you found the record in case you want to come back and buy it later. Genius concept with a really pleasing UI implementation.
🥾 AllTrails - Seeing as we're out ignoring TLC's sage wisdom and chasing as many waterfalls as possible on this trip, it seems like a good time to highlight AllTrails, which is my favorite hiking companion app. In short, you can search for local trails to hike / bike / run on, sorted by terrain difficulty, popularity, and scores, and filter for things like "Dog Friendly," "Wildflowers," "Kid Friendly," etc. Once you've picked your trail, you can download an offline map of the entire trail to your phone AND Apple Watch, and use it to navigate and track your progress as you go. It's just such a delightful app, and has saved our butts numerous times.
That's it for this week. May you avoid the rivers and lakes that you're used to.
My thanks again to RealMac Software for sponsoring this week's issue to share about RapidWeaver Elements. Please go check it out if you're sick of trying to prompt your way into a great website and just want to be able to simply build it yourself effortlessly.