Top Links from Year One

• 🗡️ 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.

• 📱 Anker Grip Case for iPhone* - I’ve had at least one model of iPhone every year since they were first released, and have 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’ve ditched both and am all in on this new Anker Case. It a relatively thin, but strong case, with the distinct feature of having a small ring that unfolds for extra grip, and that 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. *Amazon-Affiliate Link to support my tech habit.

• 🚀 The Lunacy of Artemis - Maciej Cegłowski writes a lot (his site’s tagline is “brevity is for the weak”), and he goes DEEP on what should be very dull topics like infrastructure. Somehow instead of being dry academic treatises, he makes the subjects fun to read about. This last month, he turned his sights on NASA’s Artemis program to return American astronauts to the Moon. While an analysis of government contracting failures and budgetary bureaucracy should be a snooze fest, I was laughing (and, at times, ruefully sobbing) through this epic ~8,000 word essay.

• 🎒 Civic Panel Loader - 16L - Evergoods' Civic Panel Loader 24L is one of my all time favorite backpacks, and they recently launched their new, smaller 16L variant. I could see this being an awesome day pack or hiking variant when you don't need to bring a ton of gear.

• ✏️ New Rock Paper Pencil - I've previously linked to the Rock Paper Pencil by Astropad, and was excited to see they have just come out with a new updated version that looks to be a significant improvement on the original. Like the first one, it's a cleverly designed screen that you lay on your iPad that adds a really rich, paper-like quality to your screen surface when paired with the Apple Pencil. I've tried a bunch of offerings like this, and Astropad's is the best.

• 🛑 Stop the Madness Pro - While it's not the prettiest design in the world, Stop the Madness is a browser plug-in that puts you back in control of your web experience. Some of my favorite things it does: Skips YouTube ads, blocks auto-playing videos on websites, re-enables Copy/Paste on websites that have disabled it for some reason, bypasses URL-based tracking, and more. It's very powerful and totally great despite the 90's Microsoft-aesthetic of its design.

• 🔫 Spyra Go - My kids and I love us a good water gun fight. We also (as you might guess) also love us some tech. These USB-C powered Spyra Go water guns act like a semi-automatic rifle, i.e. each time you pull the trigger, it shoots out a powerful blast of water, no pumping required. It also has LED’s on top to keep track of water and battery levels. It’s not the farthest reaching water gun I’ve used, but it’s definitely the most fun.

• 🎮 Miyoo Mini+: The Miyoo Mini is an amazing little retro video game handheld, and they finally came out with a bigger brother in the new "+" edition. The original mini is terrific but was always just a little too small for my brutish hands, and this slightly larger edition is more comparable to a Gameboy, and lets you emulate every game imaginable from classic systems like Atari, NES, SNES, GBA, Genesis, and the Playstation 1.

• 🚀 Rocket Emoji - A super simply Mac utility app that lets you type a colon + any keyword into a text field and it will present you with a list of matching emoji, ASCII emotes, and unicode symbols to insert. So, for example, typing ": + shrug" gives me a dropdown list and I can use the arrow keys to choose ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ or 🤷‍♂️ and hit enter. Boom! Emotion. It's free, and is one of those apps that once you start using, it just completely disappears from your consciousness and becomes muscle memory. I have been using it for about a year now and honestly forget sometimes that it's an app, and not just something happening at the system level.