09MAR2025: You won me over with a puppet
Measuring a lifespan, building clocks, talking like a space captain, extremely pricey luggage, and more!
Happy Sunday everyone!
This week, I've was inspired to try out this amazing soda can camera project, enjoyed this archive of software folklore (even if some of it has been debunked), hopped on the waitlist for the reboot of Digg, downloaded all three of these designery space wallpapers, flipped a real coin in someone else's house using the internet, called to harass my senators, and practically meditated while doing these gorgeous puzzles made from vintage illustrations of real fauna.
On to the good stuff!
• 📆 Lifeweeks.app - I saw a few folks link to this tool this week, a very clever web app for visualizing one's entire life as divided up into weeks. There are neat customizations you can do to depict where you were during periods of your life, mark important dates, and so on. Whether for sharing publicly or just keeping your own life log, I love this concept.
• 🕦 Tinker Clock Widgets for iOS - This beautiful little app lets you design/build your own clock widget to keep on your iPhone homescreen. It comes with components you can choose from to build your own design, or you can upload your own images to turn into clock elements. It's such a clever, good-looking little app.
• 🗺 Things In - Thanks to Matthew over at Wimp for turning me on to this great site for quickly exploring the top-rated activities, restaurants, and places to stay in any given town. It doesn't have coverage EVERYWHERE yet, but it does have a good number of major cities for many countries around the world.
• ✈️ Peak Design Roller Pro - Speaking of travel, Peak Design launched the pre-orders for their long-awaited rolling travel bag this week. In typical PD fashion, they've meticulously designed every single piece of it—no off-the-shelf components. It has a super slim, entirely carbon fiber retractable handle. The insides are cavernous with thoughtful touches for securely organizing everything from your clothes to your cameras and laptop to your passport. I really dig it. That said, it costs $600 at retail when it releases later this year. Big gulp.
• ⌚ Stardate Voice Notes for WatchOS and iOS - Shout out to DocPop for the introduction to this excellent Apple Watch and iPhone voice notes app that launched last week. The aptly named Stardate lets you record voice notes of unlimited length and then transcribes them entirely on device with a downloaded large language model (LLM) fine-tuned for audio transcription. I've been using it for journaling, capturing ideas, making lists, and more. I cannot emphasize enough just how much better the transcription is in Stardate compared to Siri's transcription. In my early testing, the quality of transcription is on par with the also excellent Voicenotes app, however I really like that Stardate does not send your recordings off to a third-party AI service and everything is stored in your own iCloud Drive account. In fact, nothing leaves your device unless you choose to share the recording or the transcription with some other app or service. Lastly, the launch video for it has a puppet in it, and I love it all the more for it.
That's it for this week! May you find lots of clever ways to create good trouble this week.