Archive

03NOV2024

High tech and low tech coffee gear, great unexpected apps, tech to keep you comfy wherever you are and more!

27OCT2024

A couple of awesome under the radar apps, a retro tech toy kit, fun nerdy media rec’s, and more

20OCT2024

A beginner espresso machine, a typeface I'm loving, essential travel gear, and new tech for retro gamers

13OCT2024

The best beginner drone, a weird alarm clock, eating healthier with iOS, an aesthetic iPhone home screen hack, and neanderthal sunglasses.

06OCT2024

The premier of the The Hiro Lab™, Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, new satellite tech, my favorite health wearable, and some fun iOS and Mac apps to make your life easier.

THE HIRO LAB: Ray-Ban Meta Limited Edition Smart Glasses

Hey, welcome to The Hiro Lab™! This is a secret, subterranean facility at Hiro Report HQ where I will be occasionally testing and share thoughts on fun tech in a bit more detail than the format of the regular Hiro Report issues allow. Consider the following less a formal review

29SEP2024

Joining the global treasure hunt, super overpriced coffee gear, a directory of indie blogs, speedy video capture, and making your iPhone look even better.

22SEP2024

My favorite indie apps with iOS 18 updates, a lust-worthy pen, and gear fit for any adventure

15SEP2024

A micro retro handheld, open-source off grid comms, outdoor hydration gear, an earth friendly notebook, and taking more natural iPhone photos

08SEP2024

Miniature vintage computers, smart home holiday lighting, stress free charging tech, an essential iOS newsreader, and a sleeper hit camera drop

01SEP2024

An astronaut database, life-saving plant tech, the return of some cinema legends, the key to digital hoarding, and an easy way to level up video calls

25AUG2024

A modern treasure hunter's essential, build your own AI model, killer brew without the buzz, and a retro remake.

18AUG2024

Indie iOS and Mac Apps, an addictive game, a game changing HomeKit device, and an everyday carry essential

11AUG2024

Three of my travel essential apps and gear, a lawn transformation device, and a retro photography throwback

04AUG2024

Two great iPhone and Mac apps, luxurious coffee, a crazy slim wallet, and an insane keyboard

28JUL2024

An iOS App, a Mac app, an essential design resource, a killer audiobook, and something that totally sucks.

21JUL2024

A sweet pencil, some really helpful software, a movie rec, and a stabby thing.

14JUL2024

Two great apps, a photo tool, hippy nostalgia, and a touch of magic ✨

07JUL2024

Happy Sunday, everyone! Let’s get straight to the good stuff this week— * ☕ Cometeer - After hearing about this for a while and thinking it was a gimmick, I was eventually swayed to give it a shot by Matthew Panzarino’s glowing review on his The Obsessor blog. They work

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

23JUN2024

Happy Sunday, everyone! Welcome to the newly redesigned Hiro Report! Beyond changing up the logo and formatting, I’ve also switched to a new email provider that will hopefully make subscribing, sharing, and unsubscribing easier for everyone. If you experience any issues with delivery, formatting, or links not working, please

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

09JUN2024

Happy Sunday, everyone! Welcome to the ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL EDITION of the report! I sincerely thank everyone who has taken the time to read this weekly missive, send feedback, and share it with friends and family. It’s been a blast working on it. As I head into the

02JUN2024

Happy Sunday everyone! Lots of good stuff tee’d up this week, let’s get to it— * ⌨️ The Lost Typeface That Was Thrown in the Thames River - This is a fascinating bit of history. In 1917, two type foundry founders had a falling out, leading one to dump their

26MAY2024

Good evening and happy weekend to all! We're heading into an exciting time in tech. After several years of stagnation, where a few big players just iterated on their usual products, we’re now seeing a flood of innovative new concepts. Of course, not all of them will

21MAY2024

World Meditation Day!

19MAY2024

Happy Sunday to everyone! This week's report is being typed with love and care on a new 11" M4 iPad Pro. Obviously the new iPad Pro is bonkers fast and sublimely built, as every other reviewer has mentioned. Agreed. I also agree that a lot more could

12MAY2024

Happy Mother's Day to all the Mom's out there! I'm going to keep this issue brief so I can go back to celebrating the incredible mother in our household, my amazing wife. Let's get to the good stuff-- * 🍲 FoodNoms - I'

05MAY2024

Happy Sunday everyone! We took a break from Disney classics for our family movie night this weekend and revisited another set of family faves-- The 1960's Toho Co's Godzilla movies. Specifically, we watched 1967's The Son of Godzilla. It was, like the other Godzilla

28APR2024

Happy Sunday everyone! We had a great mix of weather this weekend in Austin with beautiful outdoors weather yesterday, followed by mellow rainy day vibes today. We took great advantage of the indoors time today and used some recently foraged moss and sticks to make some terrariums, a really peaceful

21APR2024

Happy Sunday to all! Let's jump right in to the good stuff this week-- * 🎲 Wyrmwood Table - The maniacs over at Wyrmwood are back with another Kickstarter to launch their new modular gaming table. Watch the video to see the concept, but in short, it's a

14APR2024

Happy Sunday to all! We got a rare opportunity this weekend to sit down uninterrupted and watch a movie, and so we decided to watch the undisputed feel bad movie of the year, The Ironclaw. Holy heck, what a movie. Since it's inspired by real life events, I

07APR2024

Happy Solar Eclipse-eve! We're back from a great, much needed vacation at the beach, and feeling rejuvenated. Keeping fingers crossed that we don't pay the price for all the fun in the sun by having rain or cloud cover during the totality tomorrow. On to the

24MAR2024

Happy Sunday to all and sundry! We're two weeks out from the great North American Total Eclipse-- Do you have your glasses and plans sorted out yet? Take it from someone who waited until the last minute for the last eclipse, you don't want to be

17MAR2024

Happy Sunday to all! We're freshly back from a fun camping trip out along the San Marcos River. It was our youngest little one's first time camping, and despite getting essentially no sleep whatsoever, we had a blast. Everyone's eager to get back out

10MAR2024

Happy Sunday, all! I've been laid out with a nasty flu or cold for most of the last week. The upside, is it gave me lots of time to make my way through Dune Messiah while winding down before my many much needed naps. No spoilers, but whoo

03MAR2024

Happy Sunday, everyone! We have a short and (hopefully) sweet one this week: * 🪄 Philosopher’s Desk - I am obsessed with these Philosopher's Desks by by the Lucky Rooster Company. They are beautifully designed corner desks that are themed around various magical or mythological elements, and are absolutely

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

18FEB2024

Happy President's Day weekend to all! It's been a fun one here in Austin between an outing with a good buddy to see a Zombie Surf Rock trio, an amazing date night with my lady, and even more Lunar New Year celebrations with the kiddos. I

18FEB2024

Vision Pro Special Edition

11FEB2024

Happy Lunar New Year to all who celebrate it! We visited Austin Beerworks for their Lunar New Year celebration this weekend-- for anyone local to Austin, or passing through over the next few weeks, I highly recommend trying to get ahold of their seasonal release to celebrate the holiday. Their

04FEB2024

Vision Pro Notes

28JAN2024

Breaking News: It's going to be February this week. I literally am still finding food in our pantry that expires in January 2024 and my first thought is that I've got a few months left on it. Anyway, here are some things that are much fresher

21JAN2024

Welcome back to another Hiro.Report! With pre-orders opening on Friday last week,  Vision Pro fever is in the air, and I could not help but board the hype train. While there are still a lot of questions about what the platform will eventually become, I'm already very

14JAN2024

Happy MLK Weekend all! Hopefully everyone is getting some much needed rest and down time. Apart from getting some great family outings, I've been having a blast playing with Teenage Engineering's EP-133 K.O. II Sampler and Sequencer. Here are some rough, early beats I'

07JAN2024

Happy New Year! Hopefully everyone is feeling recovered and rejuvenated from the holiday season. Here are a few fun things I was digging over the break-- * 📱 GameBoy Wallpapers for iPhone - I love this pack of Gameboy-themed iPhone wallpapers. I've been rotating them out with these Teenage Engineering-themed

31DEC2023

Most Used Gear of 2023

17DEC2023

The holidays are super duper nigh! For those of you running iPhone 15 Pro, I’d suggest updating to iOS 17 and starting to film as many home videos as you can with the new Spatial Video capabilities. Although the footage will just look like regular videos on your phone

10DEC2023

Hey everyone, happy Sunday! A couple of kind readers gave me a heads up that some of the links in my last few emails have been throwing up weird alerts, it looks like my newsletter service has some analytics "features" built-in that I needed to turn off. Hopefully

03DEC2023

December is here! Thanks to Texas being Texas, we had the unique experience of sweating while hanging up outdoor Christmas decorations this afternoon. Here are a few fun things from this week: * 🔌 USB-C Wall Outlet - I recently stumbled across these wall outlets with built in 30W USB-C plugs, and

26NOV2023

I can't believe Thanksgiving has already come and gone. Hopefully everyone got to enjoy a little too much food with people they really love, and reflect on a few blessings from the year so far. And, speaking of gratitude and giving thanks, let me not skip over this

19NOV2023

Happy Thanksgiving week to all! As the cooler, fall weather settles in, we're getting in to winter decoration mode. I've just picked up a set of Govee Outdoor Smart Lights to string on the eves (whenever it stops raining), and have also cranked up the 3D

12NOV2023

Happy Veterans' Day weekend to all here in the US! Here are a fun things from this week: * 🔠 Wilco Loft Sans: Wilco, yes the Chicago-based indie band, released their first ever font this week, and it's a total delight. Produced with the super talented type foundry, Simplebits,

05NOV2023

Busy weekend resulting in a super quick hit version of the Hiro Report this week. Hope you find some fun stuff you enjoy in here! * ✨ In 1952, a group of three 'stars' vanished—astronomers still can't find them - In 1952, a group of three '

29OCT2023

Halloween is nigh! This week I've been out in the garage tinkering with the 3D printer a lot, working on some props and accessories for our various costumes, while listening to the hilarious (and crude) Hello from the Magic Tavern podcast. After using the excellent Overcast podcast app

22OCT2023

We're freshly back from an adventure in the woods this weekend. Fall hiking is the best hiking, hands down! We had the chance to attend a lecture with a really entertaining astronomer last night who reminded us all that the Orionid meteor shower is peaking tonight (22OCT23), so

15OCT2023

Happy Eclipse Weekend to all who got to celebrate it! Here in Austin we were very close to the epicenter of the Annular Solar Eclipse and got a heck of a show, nearly a full ring of fire. It was even more fun because the climax was right in the

09OCT2023

Goooood Monday Evening, all! Typically, I post on Sunday night, but given the long weekend here, I decided to keep my posting to the last night of the weekend, instead. Rather short round up this week as I was waylaid with COVID and rather grumpy and lethargic. Fortunately, much better

24SEP2023

What a week! We had two kids' baseball games (including our first game that we didn't lose-- a tie!), the return of the heat in Texas, a Tropical Storm on the East Coast, and some wild world events-- accusations of political assassination in Canada, missile strikes in

17SEP2023

Sweet mana from heaven, it is finally cooling down! We got some rain at long last, and the temperatures started hinting that they may have some greater awareness that Fall is, in fact ,nigh. We had one day this last week where the high was under 90ºF and I went

10SEP2023

Aaaand we're back after a brief break for the holiday weekend last weekend. Hopefully everyone got some good rest and even better food. We had a great trip to San Antonio to see some sea life, play with some legos, and eat very tasty food. Here are some

27AUG2023

Goooooood Sunday evening to everyone. We're getting the first drops of rain in way, way too long as I write this... This week we've got everything from a verrrry attractive and expensive pokey thing, to a sneak peak at a new, retro-style iOS game, and the

20AUG2023

Last week I wrote about it being the "last week of summer." Apparently, someone forgot to notify the weather because it's been over 100ºF/38ºC everyday this week. Our backyard thermometer hit 110ºF/43ºC this afternoon. Fun! Hopefully this week's "cool things"

13AUG2023

Last week of summer here in Austin, Tx with all the kiddos heading back to school tomorrow. Lots of "last Summer hurrah" vibes abound. Hope wherever you are, things are starting to cool down. * 🎬 Callsheet - Casey Liss has a new iOS app out this week called Callsheet

06AUG2023

Hi All, a bit of tech and a bit of reading for your enjoyment this week: * ⌨️ 8bitdo Retro Nintendo Keyboard - The preorders opened for this amazing Nintendo / Famicon-inspired keyboard. I have more keyboards than I know what to do with, but I came this close to snagging one of