16JUN2024
Happy Sunday and Happy Father’s Day, everyone! In the spirit of parenthood, I have to share one of my favorite buys for our kids from the last few years—a bounce house. After renting bounce houses for a few birthday parties (and paying through the nose), I decided to see how much it would cost to just buy one. I was shocked to find that I could get a bounce house to own for about the same price (or cheaper) than renting one for the weekend. It’s been a hit with the kiddos and always invokes cheers of joy whenever we bring it out. The one I bought a few years back isn’t available anymore for me to link to, but there are plenty of options worth exploring for reasonable prices on Amazon, Wayfair, and more.
- 💻 Macbook Privacy Screen - For those who value privacy when working out and about at coffee shops or on planes, a privacy screen can provide great peace of mind. Unfortunately, most privacy screens look awful and degrade the viewing experience. I finally found one I can stand from Amazon. It works well and attaches ✨magnetically✨ for easy attachment and removal. I’ve been using this for a few months now and really liking it.
- 🗡️ Paper Apps Dungeon - This looks like a little spiral-bound pocket notebook on the outside, but inside contains an entire rogue-like D&D-style adventure you navigate using just a pencil and a six-sided die. You get to create your own character, crawl through dungeons, collect loot, and level up. Each notebook is procedurally generated too! Super creative and fun concept.
- 🔎 Vanilla - This is admittedly a little niche, but there was some brouhaha earlier this month over one of my favorite Mac utilities, Bartender, changing ownership without proper communication to the user base about intentions, new owners, etc. Like many others, I went looking for alternatives and found that another indie Mac developer that I adore, Matthew Palmer — the maker of the excellent Rocket for Mac, has a menu bar manager substitute. Vanilla lets you rearrange and hide the menu bar icons at the top of your display, much like Bartender did. With about 20 different utilities running at any given time on my machine, Vanilla is a simple solution to replace Bartender’s functionality and clean up my menu bar so I only see the ones I need to use exactly when I need to use them.
- 🍎 All the Little Things Apple Left Out of the WWDC Keynote - Apple held their Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) this week and shared previews of all the exciting new features coming to the next versions of their software platforms. While they revealed lots of fun, the star of the show was their unveiling of “Apple Intelligence,” a privacy-first AI integration throughout their operating systems. I’ll have more to say about that once I’ve tried it out when it’s released to beta testers later this summer. For now, I’m enjoying the early beta updates for the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. The above linked article is a fun summary from The Verge on all the neat little things Apple is bringing to the next OS updates that weren’t mentioned in the keynote. If, by chance, you missed the headlines, The Verge also has a great 18 minute summary video of all the big stuff announced.
- 📷 Rollei 35AF - With an off-the-top-ropes high-five to BLC for sending me this, there’s a remake/rerelease of the iconic Rollei 35mm film camera coming to market later this year. It will keep the same classic 60’s design, shoot 35mm film, but adds LiDAR-powered autofocus and autoexposure capabilities. I’m thrilled to see more new film cameras coming to market, as it’s my favorite medium for shooting photos. Hopefully, the market will also bring faster, cheaper, and easier ways to develop and scan film negatives to keep up with the increased demand. I, for one, hopped right on the waitlist for this beauty.