25FEB2024
We made it to Leap Year Week 2024, I hope everyone enjoys their bonus day on Thursday!
On to the week's good stuff--
- 🌌 Galactic Compass - Have you ever wandered which direction the giant black hole at the center of our Galaxy is and exactly how far away it is? ME TOO. This handy iOS app uses your location and the Earth's location in its cycle around the sun to point you in the right direction if you wanted to travel the roughly 26,000 Light Years to visit it. As of this writing, on Sunday night, the center of the galaxy is down through my living room floor (i.e. on the other side of the planet from here).
- 📸 FUJIFILM X100VI - At long last, the good folks at Fujifilm have released the follow-up to the viral favorite camera of the last few years-- The Fuji X100V. I have owned three different generations of X100 and have loved every one of them. I'm sure this new one will be a delight, especially with the new 40mp sensor and built-in image stabilization. If you've been trying to get a X100V and striking out for the last year or two like so many others, I'd hop on the pre-order for this sooner than later.
- 💬 iMessage with PQ3 - Apple Security Research - Fascinating new tech announced this week by the Apple team. iOS 17.4, which is due to launch in the next week or two, will bring a new quantum safe encryption technology that will make it safe not only against modern decryption techniques but also the expected decryption advances that will come with the rise of quantum computing over the next decade or two. This will effectively make Apple's iMessage's more secure than Signal and other encrypted chat software.
- 📻 Radio is a Foreign Country - Oh boy, I was excited to find RIAFC this week. It's a curated, streaming internet radio station that exclusively plays obscure, retro global music that would very rarely ever have been heard outside of their native countries. Over the course of listening this week, I've heard a recording from the 50's of Jordanian bedouins singing accompanied by their own rifle fire, Ghanain pop, folk music from Belize, and more. Great to put on and just be surprised. If you like this, you may also like Radiooooo, which I've mentioned on the Report in the past, which lets you pick specific countries and time frames and hear music from the place/period.
- 📶 The Great ATT Outage - As most folks in the US are probably aware, ATT suffered a massive service outage this last week, leaving millions without cell phone service for much of the day. Many will recall T-Mobile had a similar incident a few months ago. This is just a good opportunity to remind everyone that many common, modern cellphones support multiple eSIM card slots, meaning you can have more than one phone plan / phone number on your phone. I highly recommend getting the cheapest phone/internet plan you can find on another network from your main provider (even if it's just a pre-paid MVNO plan for ~$15/mo) to have as a back-up for outages like this, or even to use when you're road tripping through a dead zone for your normal carrier and really need to make a call or stream some music.
A quick bonus for my Vision Pro friends, if you haven't already, I recommend checking out Vision Directory. It's a website that is updated every day with all the newest Vision Pro apps, and offers much better sorting and category search than Apple's Vision Pro App Store does (befuddlingly enough).
That's it for this week! Be well, everyone.