02JUN2024

Happy Sunday everyone! Lots of good stuff tee’d up this week, let’s get to it—

• ⌨️ The Lost Typeface That Was Thrown in the Thames River - This is a fascinating bit of history. In 1917, two type foundry founders had a falling out, leading one to dump their signature metal typefaces into the Thames. A century later, someone found all the metal type pieces, uncovered their history, and digitized them to create a usable digital typeface that you can buy and use today.
• 🌲 AllTrails - This app is a suburban hiker’s dream, akin to Google Maps for local hikes and trails. It lets you quickly see all the trails around you, their lengths, difficulty levels, reviews from other hikers, and pictures of the sights along the trail. It’s pretty handy for discovering new outdoor adventures nearby.
• ⏲️ Due - I use this app constantly. It’s a countdown timer app on steroids. Yes, iOS has a built-in one, but this is so much better. It lets you use natural language input to set a named reminder for a specific date/time, and then it will politely alert you at the appointed time. If you ignore it or dismiss the reminder without marking it “Done,” it will remind you every minute until you do the task or hit a time-specific snooze button (“Snooze for 1 hour,” “Snooze for 1 day,” etc.). It’s fantastic for things you absolutely cannot forget. I have automatic recurring weekly and monthly reminders to take the trash to the curb, do my timesheets, pay my credit card bills, and more. It just hounds me relentlessly until I do them—exactly what I need.
• 👺 Mike Mignola's Humble Bundle - The folks at Humble Bundle launched an amazing “pay what you want” charity bundle this week in partnership with one of my favorite comic book authors, Mike Mignola. If you’re interested in noir detective stories, occult mysteries, folk tales, and the like, I highly recommend checking it out. You can get more than a dozen B.P.R.D. (Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense) volumes for $1, or for $30, you can get around 60 books, including all the Hellboy comics.
• ☕️ Explorer Cold Brew - I’ve been trying to cut back my caffeine intake over the last year, which has been challenging because I love the ritual of making and drinking coffee. As summer heats up, I started looking for low-caffeine cold brew and nitro cold brew options that would let me get my fix without making me a jittery, anxious mess. After some research, I found Explorer’s half-caff cold brew concentrate. Just add an ounce or two to 6-8 oz of water and/or milk, and you’ve got a tasty, lightly caffeinated coffee drink without the panic attacks.

That’s it for this week! But if you’ll allow me “one more thing,” next week’s issue will mark the one-year anniversary of this little weekly report. I’ve got some ideas in store, but if you have any recommendations for fun ways to commemorate the occasion, I’d love to hear them.