15DEC2024

Happy Sunday everyone! This week we crossed the 1,000 email subscriber mark for this nerdy little newsletter. Whether you’re reading this via email, RSS, or just surfing the web, I sincerely thank you all for giving me the opportunity to share all this fun stuff with you each week. I’m working on some fun things to celebrate the milestone and will keep you all in the loop when it’s ready!

Separately, this week I asked everyone what they’re using for feed readers. Many thanks to everyone who responded over on Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads! Some great apps and services in the replies. For now, I’m primarily using the new Reeder for a more zen feed reading experience and trying out News Explorer for keeping track of the feeds I absolutely don’t want to miss. I’ll be trying the other recommendations over time.

On to the good stuff!

• 📰 TRMNL - I’ve been looking for something like this for a while—a simple, beautiful e-ink display that can update itself with key information throughout the day, like RSS feeds, weather, business/social KPIs, and more. They also seem very invested in making it easy for developers to make their own plug-ins. I’m making this a late addition to my personal Christmas list.

• ☕ MHW-3BOMBER Scale* - I’ve bought some pretty fancy and expensive coffee scales over the years, but I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by this dirt-cheap scale from the extremely awkwardly named MHW-3BOMBER. It is tiny, water-resistant, USB-C charged, and weighs accurately down to 1/10th of a gram. It also has a built-in timer for your extractions and an automatic tare function that sets the scale to 0 the moment you put a cup on it. The only thing missing compared to some of my fancier scales is Bluetooth connectivity, but that’s just not a feature I ever use. Recommended. *Amazon-affiliate link to support my tech and coffee habit.

• 📲 PassCollect for iOS - We recently joined a rock climbing gym in the area, and they gave us the world’s smallest barcode tags to scan whenever coming in for a climb. I knew right away I would for sure lose mine, let alone the kids’ tags, so I went in search of a solution. I landed on PassCollect which just launched in the last week or so and couldn’t be happier. Simply scan whatever library, gym, grocery store, membership, or rewards barcodes you have, and it stores them in a handy virtual wallet, ready to be scanned whenever needed.

• 📆 JoiPlanner for iOS - I’m always on the lookout for new calendar and organizer apps, and this beautiful new one has been a lot of fun to use. It takes a unique approach by asking you to choose your recurring priorities (e.g., meditating, going for a walk, taking a coffee break, etc.) and then shows those as to-do’s that you slot into your existing calendar each day. It’s got a beautiful, very iOS-native design that I’m really digging.

• ⏱️ Time Since Launch - I found this cool little piece of tech art via Jason Kottke’s excellent Holiday Gift Guide. It’s a timer that starts counting whenever you pull out a pin, and then the self-contained unit will just keep counting upwards for 2,000 years on its own power. A really neat way to commemorate how long it has been since some major milestone—a wedding, moving into a house, launching a product, etc.

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

Hey, how was this issue?

• 👍🏽 Lots of good stuff!
• 🤙🏽 Nothing really new, but it was fun.
• 👎🏽 Not interesting to me.