05MAY2024

Happy Sunday everyone! We took a break from Disney classics for our family movie night this weekend and revisited another set of family faves-- The 1960's Toho Co's Godzilla movies. Specifically, we watched 1967's The Son of Godzilla. It was, like the other Godzilla movies of the era, a massive hit with both my kiddos and my own inner kiddo. Pro tip: if you're wanting to introduce young children to the fine art of guys in rubber monster suits smashing miniature replicas of Tokyo and various Pacific Islands, try watching on Amazon Prime-- it's the only online streamer I've found that has English-dubbed versions, everywhere else is subtitles only.

On to the good stuff!

• 🔍 Raycast “Search Menu” - Longtime readers will note that I've written several times about Raycast on the Hiro Report. It's increasingly become one of my essential MacOS apps, and just gets better every month. I'll spare everyone a repeat of all that this killer launcher/tool does, but I found a new feature this week that I'm loving-- "Search Menu." In short, when you are in an app that has a ton of buried features and capabilities deep in sub menus, you can pull up Raycast, type "Search Menu" and then type the function you're looking for. E.g. In Excel, you can type "Search Menu" and "Remove Duplicates" and it will just do it, rather than you spending 5 minutes searching through every tool bar until you find it under Menu Bar > Data > Table Tools > Remove Duplicates. A great time saver in pro apps like Lightroom, Final Cut Pro, Word, Excel, etc.
• 🎵 Suno.AI - This is a generative AI tool that lets you create music in response to a text prompt. You can opt to have it create just instrumental music or come up with lyrics that fit whatever topic you desire. My (and my kids') favorite feature, however, is describing a genre of music, writing our own lyrics, and then it creates a whole song with vocal melodies singing what we wrote. It's pretty darn fun, and you get up to free 5 song generations a day if you're curious to try it out.
• 🤖 Data Center by Ben Brown - Speaking of AI, Ben Brown wrote this awesome little Sci Fi short story this week. I don't want to say too much so I don't spoil anything, but it is awesome and worth a read. I want a collection of short stories set in this universe, ASAP!
• 🍾 Barrel Aged In A Bottle - I surprised myself this weekend with a small gift I made for myself a few months ago. While digging through a cabinet, I found a bottle of barrel aged Old Fashioned's that I'd batch made last Fall and completely forgotten about. It was a delicious mistake. You can make a gift for your future self too! The trick is to throw one of these little charred spirals of oak into your favorite bottle of mixing bourbon, along with an appropriate amount of simple syrup and bitters, and then let it sit for a few weeks (or months)-- You'll be time traveling in no time.
• ♟️ Best Board Games of 2024 - This is a pretty cool little list of the best new board games this year, I found several I'm eager to try (Star Wars: Unlimited? Spark Riders 3000? AWESOME.)

That's it for this week, be well everyone!