🥚 05APR2026: Shoegaze Dream Pop
A gorgeous clock, the track everything app, DJ magic, Artemis, UFO sightings, and surfing the socials...
Happy Sunday and happy Easter everyone!
This week I've been testing out the AirPods Max 2 with this Thomas Bangalter DJ Set and this Christina Hendricks Shoegaze / Dream Pop DJ set, building push notifications into my vibe-coded projects using brrr, trying to take up the art of microbouldering, obsessively refreshing this Artemis II Live Tracker, and contemplating 3D printing one of these functional film cameras.
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.
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On to the good stuff:
⏰ The Balmuda Clock - Tip of the hat to Cool Hunting for the find on this gorgeous Japanese bedside or desktop clock milled from a solid block of aluminum. Instead of hands, it features a gorgeous system of lit-up numerals and ticks to indicate the time. It also features a gentle gradual alarm, a timer, a calming sound mode, and pairs with your iPhone to play music and set various alarms among other customization options. Preorders go live for the US at the end of April for an absurd amount of money.
🛋️ Sofa 5.0 - Sofa is a really delightful, indie app for organizing everything you want to watch, read, play, and listen to — and version 5.0 adds a built-in podcast player, trip planning with maps and budgets, and a stats dashboard that turns your consumption history into charts and rankings. If you like tracking the shows / movies / books you watch AND like getting cool analytics about your habits, you should definitely be trying it out.
One Strange Thing - Ever since I was a kid, I've been fascinated by the paranormal and the unknown. I'd spend hours poring over pulp paperbacks about UFOs, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, secret societies, and haunted houses. I've been missing getting exposure to these little unexplained mysteries and (in some cases) completely fabricated conspiracies. So I built a tiny site that feeds out one little parcel of esoteric trivia each day. Expect details on various poltergeists and cryptids, famous UFO sightings that happened on this day in history, secrets of the Illuminati, explanations of occult symbols, and more. It's also got an RSS feed, and a Threads bot, and a couple of fun easter eggs hidden in the site.
🌊 Surf Social - I've been beta testing Surf off and on since LAST spring and really enjoying it. It's a unique all-in-one aggregator for combining RSS feeds, YouTube channels, Threads, Instagram, and Bluesky feeds to make your own custom, curated feeds of just the content you want when you want it. The unique thing is you can create filters for your feeds so you can filter out any mention of certain people/things/topics OR you can filter such that only posts from authors that pertain to a certain topic show up in the feed. For example, I've got a Retro Gaming Feed, an Indie Tech Feed, and a Camera Gear Feed that I've curated. Surf finally is live for everyone on the web, while the iOS app is still on a waitlist, but I'm told using invite code "HIROSURF" can help you jump a few places in line.
🔌 Anker Nano Desk Clamp Power - Another week, another well-designed charging solution from the folks at Anker. This is a clever power strip that clamps on to your desk so that you have USB-A, USB-C, and standard AC power outlets available to use on top of your desk and plenty of standard power outlets available under the desk as well, all with surge protection built in.
That's it for this week! May you be happy, healthy, and at peace.
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.