29DEC2024: My Most Used Tech This Year
A lengthy Hiro Report special edition
Happy Sunday, everyone! Last Sunday of the year. I hope everyone is getting some much-deserved time to rest, reflect, and reset as we roll into 2025 next year. I suspect it’s going to be a wild one, and we’re all going to need each other.
This week, amidst all the festivities, I’ve been having my hair blown back by discoveries while playing around with ScreenCred and revisiting 1983’s The Right Stuff, getting a little cyberpunk with my watch face, and diving into this amazing illustrated guide to how mechanical watches work. I also took a super fun workshop on making latte art from the fine folks at Greater Goods Coffee Roasters out in Dripping Springs, TX.
With us wrapping up the year this week, I thought I’d do a special edition of the Report revisiting some of the most useful tech and gear of 2024 for me, personally. My Christmas cookie-addled brain is undoubtedly going to have overlooked some things, but this should be a good mix of stuff highlighted over the last year and a few previously unmentioned things.
As usual, none of this is sponsored, but any link with an asterisk* next to it would generate a small commission for the site at no additional cost to you should you purchase something with it.
Enjoy!
The Obvious Stuff
• 💻 MacBook Pro - My 2021 MacBook Pro remains my go-to machine for most work, writing, and photo editing. It still feels blazing fast and is just a lot of fun to use. MacOS Sequoia has brought a lot of much-appreciated quality-of-life improvements, led foremost by iPhone Continuity.
• 📱 iPhone 16 Pro - This phone is honestly overpowered for most of the stuff I do, but I upgrade year over year for the camera. According to the Photos app, I took just under 8,000 photos with it this year. 🤯
• 🎧 AirPods Pro 2 - Absolutely essential for surviving my workdays, and they just work insanely well.
Not Mentioned On Purpose
• 🕶️ Apple Vision Pro - It’s absolutely stunning hardware, but I have not used it nearly as much as I thought I would. Part of that is due to IT restrictions with my day job and less travel than usual this year. I’m hopeful I’ll figure out how to use it more next year.
• ⌚ Apple Watch Ultra - The Apple Watch Ultra is an amazing tool, but again I sadly did not go on nearly as many adventures as I’d normally like this year, so its features were largely overkill. Also, being a mechanical watch lover and avid Oura Ring user, I pretty much only wear my Apple Watch when working out or when going to bed thanks to its unrivaled silent alarm feature.
Accessories
• 📔 StudioNeat Totebook - This handy, flexible notebook has been my primary note-taking and sketching medium for the bulk of 2024. I love the fountain pen-friendly paper, the tasteful dot grid with subtle guide markings, and the pages in the back that are pre-perforated for both tearing out and for easily tearing into smaller index card-sized sheets.
• 📷 Insta360 Link Webcam* - Being a bit of a photo nerd who works from home, I take my camera setup for video calls more seriously than is probably reasonable. After using a dedicated DSLR with a video capture card for years, I switched to the Insta360 Webcam a little over a year ago and haven’t looked back. It offers great video quality, with easy integration on the Mac, and a nice built-in privacy mode. They updated to version 2.0 this year, which looks like a tempting upgrade. Just make sure you get some good lights*, otherwise no camera can save you.
• 📱 Anker Magnetic iPhone Case* - I’ve had at least one model of iPhone every year since they were first released, and I’ve tried A LOT of iPhone cases over the years. There are some great ones out there—I really like the cases from Peak Design and Moment in particular. That said, I am all in on this new Anker Case. It’s a relatively thin but strong case, with the distinct feature of having a small ring that unfolds for extra grip and can also rotate to serve as a kickstand in either landscape or portrait orientations. The real win is that you can both do MagSafe charging through the ring, and it features extra-strong magnets that allow you to attach your phone to any sufficiently metallic surface. I’ve attached mine to the fridge while cooking, to the squat rack while working out, to an airport rail while waiting for a flight, and more.
• ⚡ Anker 3-Port Fast Charging Block* - I promise I’m not sponsored by Anker. They just make ridiculously good stuff at a decent price. This 3-port charger goes everywhere with me. It’s got 2 fast-charging PD USB-C ports and one PD USB-A port. Pretty much all I need whether its a quick coffee shop run or a week in Europe.
• 🎒 CIVIC Travel Bag 20L / CIVIC Travel Bag 26L - Hands down my favorite backpack for both working from a coffee shop for the day or for taking into the woods for a day hike.
• 💧 Owala Freesip* - Like many modern households, we have multiple drawers and cabinets completely dedicated to our irrationally large collections of water bottles. We’ve tried most of the main brands, but my favorite and most-used this year is the Owala Freesip. Having the built-in option to chug or sip from the straw is super pleasant, and I appreciate the built-in locking loop that allows me to hang it from a carabiner* when needed.
• ✍🏼 Molotow Acrylic Markers* - I discovered these Sharpie alternatives this year and have been super impressed. The black is much blacker than a black Sharpie, and these things can write on anything. If you’re a maker or regularly need to leave really permanent markings on random things, I highly recommend them.
• 💵 Allett Sport Wallet - A dear friend very kindly gifted me one of these wallets this year, and I’ve been absolutely loving it. Very slim, lightweight, gender-neutral designs, great looks, and thoughtful touches like an optional micro-pen slot and built-in RFID-blocking materials. I cannot emphasize enough how thin both the leather and nylon versions of these wallets are, even more front-pocket friendly than my usual Bellroy.
Apps and Services
• 👨🏽💻 Raycast - Everybody has that first handful of apps they’d download right away on a new computer. Someday I might write out my full list, but I’ll skip straight to #1 with a bullet here—Raycast. It’s become so essential to many of my workflows for how I use my computer. In short, it’s a quick “everything bar” for your computer—sort of what Apple’s Spotlight is supposed to be but never quite delivers on. Raycast lets you search your computer, convert currency or units, do an AI query, queue up some music, and more, thanks to an extensive free shop of community-built plugins.
• 💬 ChatGPT - A little controversial, I know, but I’ve used ChatGPT a ton this year for everything from quickly retrieving information to practicing my Spanish and Arabic, proofreading my writing, and helping me get some starting points for research. Obviously, I have to double-check its math quite a bit, and I’m mindful about what I’m willing to share with it, but it’s been a very helpful tool for me.
• 🔍 Kagi - Apart from the fact that it is very privacy-centric, does not run ads, nor sell our information to advertisers, Kagi’s search engine results are easily the most accurate and helpful of all the search engines I’ve experimented with over the last year, consistently beating Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, and others. I happily pay the monthly subscription.
• 🧘🏻♂️ Zenitizer / The Way - It’s been a wild and tough year. I have not been nearly as consistent with my meditation practice as I’d like. As some master once said, “When you have absolutely no time at all to meditate is when you most need to sit down and meditate.” When I actually manage to take that advice, Zenitizer is easily my favorite unguided meditation timer and meditation habit tracker app, and I’ve tried dozens. For times when I need help staying focused and want a guided meditation, my go-to is The Way from Zen master Henry Shukman—absolutely wonderful.
• 🥐 Croissant - With Twitter’s accelerated descent into an echo chamber for crypto bros, fascist bros, and crypto-fascist bros, there’s been a fun (albeit slightly chaotic) splintering of the online short-form social space into three front runners. I honestly like Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky all for different reasons and visit and post to them all regularly. Croissant has been a huge help in keeping my toes in all three ponds.
• ✉️ Fastmail - I transitioned from Proton to Fastmail this year and have been thrilled with the switch. I find it to be way more user-friendly and the email search functionality to be much more accurate (an essential for me). It still also includes lots of great privacy features that I’d previously appreciated with Proton, like support for aliases and anonymous temporary emails.
• 🐻 Bear App - Bear is, simply put, my favorite writing and note-taking app. There are a ton of great options out there, but it’s the one that best fits how I like to capture information. In fact, I write the first draft of all my weekly Hiro Reports right here in the app. It’s got a really clean, minimal design that quickly and effortlessly syncs your writing between their Mac, iOS, and iPad apps. It lets you write in both Markdown and Rich Text and export to whatever format you like. It also supports back-linking to other notes within the app. While it’s not as powerful (or complex) as something like Obsidian or Notion, it is aces for my own informal zettelkasten / PKM efforts to track books I’m reading, my favorite things I’ve ordered at various restaurants, movies I want to watch, and so on.
That's it for this week, see you all next year!
Hey, how was this Special Edition?