⚡️ 20APR2026: Secret Recordings
A quirky flashlight, peak desk accessory, film-like iPhone photos, a cult-favorite pencil, and more...
Happy Sunday everyone!
This week, I've been playing with this beautifully designed unicode explorer, reading this great write-up on the unintended side effects of wearing wearables, daydreaming about building my own modulated phased array radar for backyard drone defense, thinking about backing up all my iCloud photos to an encrypted S3 bucket with Attic, wishing I had a good excuse to use this beautiful ePub self-publishing app, and listening to this incredible collection of 10,000 secretly recorded concerts from the Chicago music scene that features otherwise lost performances from Nirvana, REM, the Cure, the Pixies, Sonic Youth, Björk, and more.
Oh, last but not least, I also launched the waitlist for Capture, a fun app I'm building for Obsidian users who want to be able to quickly capture thoughts/ideas/links/quotes to their vault without context switching or battling Obsidian's sometimes clunky UI. I'll be asking for some beta testers from the waitlist sometime next week. Take a peek, if you're into that kind of thing.
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On to the good stuff!
Grovemade Desk Cart - Man, I really want one of these. Grovemade makes gorgeous desk organization accessories, and this new desk cart is no exception. It's a rolling cart with three tiered storage areas, beautiful customizable wood accents, and a unique two-sided sliding drawer mechanism for hiding storing your junk random things that would otherwise clutter your desk. Like all things from Grovemade, it's drool-worthy, and costs about 2-3x what you wish it did.
🎞 Film(ish) Photo Editing for iOS - I've been beta testing this iOS photo editor for a bit and have been really impressed with both its film-like presets and (perhaps even better) the stunning amount of control it gives you over your edits. For casual iPhone photographers, you can pick a great-looking film preset, adjust the strength, and export easily, but for folks who really want to nerd out, you can adjust over 80 parameters over an 11-stage processing pipeline with support for masking, frames, and more. Highly recommend checking it out.
✏️ Pentel Multi 8 Pencil - Remember the multi-pens that would let you choose from 3-6 different ink colors with the click of a switch at the top? Turns out there is a cult-favorite colored pencil variant that architects and illustrators have been using since the '80s. Not sure how I didn't know about these, but I want to grab one.
🌄 Alpenglow — Sunset & Sunrise Predictions for iOS - Alpenglow is a great tool for photographers who care about getting the absolute best natural light for their photos. It does some impressive atmospheric modeling to let you know exactly how (and where) the light will be at sunrise and sunset at any spot on the planet. It also lets you know exactly when sunrise, sunset, golden hour, and blue hour will be for any given location. I've been beta testing the 10th anniversary update that will be dropping tomorrow (21APR2026), and it's looking polished as ever.
🔦 Loop Gear SK05 - I'm a sucker for weird flashlights (ok, flashlights in general), and this one checks all the right boxes to pique my interest. It's a unique, flat-profile pocketable flashlight with two separate lenses (one for flooding an area with light, and one for shining a spotlight over great distance), can crank out over 4,000 lumens, and extend out 405m of light. Also, because it's quirky, it has a seven-mode RGB side light for fun, is water resistant, has a magnetic tail for quickly mounting it when you need to go hands-free, and it doubles as a USB-C power bank. Why do I love things like this?
That's it for this week. May you never find yourself on the Forbes 30 under 30 list.
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.