30JUN2024

Happy Sunday, everyone! I’ve been experimenting over the last week or so with Threads to see how it holds up compared to old Twitter and modern-day Mastodon. While I find it much less conducive to community building and conversational engagement in general, I do have to say that its algorithm is quite good. In particular, I’ve found the photography community on there to be fantastic—I'd go so far as to say Threads seems like a better place for photography than Instagram, which is a very surprising twist indeed. All this to say, I’m not abandoning Mastodon anytime soon, but if you’re on Threads at all, say hello!

On to the good stuff—

• 📷️ Sebastiaan de With’s Gear Guide - Speaking of photography, a few weeks back, I linked to Kino and Halide, two excellent video and photography apps from Lux. This week, Sebastiaan, one of Lux’s co-founders, shared his photography gear guide. Do NOT read this unless you’re prepared to develop a bad case of G.A.S. (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) for some very nice cameras. He has incredible gear and takes beautiful pictures of it. A deadly combination.
• ☁️ Ente - I’ve been growing increasingly nervous about having nearly ALL my photos in one basket (iCloud). I do have a local network-attached storage (NAS) device that I’ve backed up many of my pre-iPhone photos on, but most of the daily memory photos from the last decade+ are in one cloud service. I need a good backup solution that lets me back up both my NAS photos and my iPhone photos. I haven’t tried it out yet, but Ente looks promising—it offers end-to-end encryption on photos, mirroring Apple’s security model, which would give me peace of mind about storing my photos offsite while having some redundancy. Furthermore, the software (and its hosting solution) are open source and audited by the same team that audits Bitwarden, a well-regarded password storage solution.
• 🧊 Therabody Cold/Hot* - Through a series of unrelated accidents over the last few weeks, I’ve managed to get myself pretty banged up, with multiple visits to Urgent Care for various sprains and fractures. I found myself going through a lot of ice packs and eventually found my way over to this wonder device from Therabody. It’s a small cube that you strap on to whatever trouble spot you’re having, and it quickly chills or heats it according to your desired setting. It even offers alternating hot/cold contrast therapy. It’s been amazing.
  *Amazon-affiliate link.
• 🗣️ ElevenLabs Reader - ElevenLabs makes some insanely good text-to-speech software, and lately, I’ve been really enjoying using their Reader app. In short, you can take any article, PDF, ebook, etc., and this app will read it to you in a very natural, human-sounding voice of your choosing at whatever speed you like. I’m loving being able to listen to some of the longer journalism pieces I’ve had on my “to-read list” forever.
• 🇺🇸 Washington’s Dream - In the spirit of the upcoming 4th of July holiday for us here in America, I’ll leave you with this hilarious SNL skit from last year.

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

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