⚡ 17MAY2026: Grimoires and Alchemical Tomes
Processing film at home, the new Raycast, my new favorite dictation app, a powerful smart lock, my next pen, and more...
Happy Sunday everyone!
This week, I've been reading about Stu's new watch collectors' app, dreaming about getting a Filmomat tabletop automatic film processor (thanks Sterling), thinking about building my own nub mouse, dreaming about visiting Yale's world-class collection of grimoires and alchemical tomes, seriously contemplating getting this convertible hidden arcade cabinet, listening to WWII RAF bomber crew radio chatter, and enjoying Indigo as a hybrid Mastodon/Bluesky surfing and posting solution.
Note that some of the links in this issue of the Hiro Report are affiliate links and may earn me a small commission at no additional cost to you.
Plinky is my favorite way to save, tag, organize, and sync links across my devices. In fact, every issue of the Hiro Report is basically a dump of my Plinky collection over the last week. Apart from the great functionality and excellent customizability, Plinky fully embraces the whimsical design style that feels right at home for those of us who grew up in a time when software design was more playful and fun. Plinky is running a 50% off sale this week, getting you access to its entire suite of macOS, iPadOS, and iOS apps for one low price. Don't miss it!
On to the good stuff!
⌨️ Raycast 2.0 - Raycast, one of my most essential apps and the first thing I install on any new Mac, has finally released the public beta for their next big version. For the uninitiated, Raycast is a bit like Spotlight on your Mac but on steroids— it'll quickly open any app, do math and conversions for you, find files, tell you sports scores, control your smart home, use AI to quickly answer questions, look things up on Wikipedia, play your favorite playlist, and more. It's super customizable and expandable with community-generated extensions. Version 2.0 doesn't bring any big "WOW" updates, but rather feels dedicated to just improving and speeding up all the things it already does well. I'm only a few days in with it, but I'm noticing it feels way more responsive, with lots of small quality-of-life upgrades.
🖊️ Tactile Turn's Off Grid Limited Release Pen - Tactile Turn makes some of my favorite everyday carry pens. They're pricey, but they're all machined in small batches right here in Texas. One of the coolest things they do is seasonal releases with custom parts and beautifully Cerakoted colorways. This spring's release is a mottled sand-colored body, copper-color paint accents, and a dark gray clip carrying a multilevel laser-etched topographic pattern from an actual landscape in the mountains of West Texas. It's a limited run, ships in a commemorative box with a magnet, and is priced just right to make it really hurt if you lose it. It's going on my summer birthday list.
🔌 Nimble Wally Stretch 65W Wall Charger - These are some really good-looking wall chargers that launched this week with a built-in 2-foot retractable USB-C cable as well as a spare USB-C port for charging two devices at once. They come in some fun colors (like the above-linked Teal and Electric Yellow), and are apparently well enough made that Apple is stocking them in-store. I'm going to grab one to try out.
🚪 SwitchBot Lock Vision Pro - I've previously written about my SwitchBot device that I use for toggling dumb device switches via Siri and HomeKit. It works great. As a result, I'm pretty intrigued by their new smart lock offering that offers seven different ways to open the door— 3D face recognition, palm vein, fingerprint, PIN, app, voice assistant, and a physical key— all running Matter over WiFi with no hub, so it shows up natively in Apple Home, Alexa, Google Home, and Home Assistant on day one. It replaces a standard home front door lock with just a Phillips-head screwdriver and a fifteen-minute install. Its built-in 10,000 mAh battery is rated for 12 months, and there's a CR123A backup good for 500 emergency unlocks (and a 5-year standby at -4°F), plus a USB-C port that accepts any power bank if the lithium pack ever does fully run out. I just replaced my smart locks last year, so I think it's too soon to update, but I'm very curious about this one.
🗣 Monologue Dictation + Notes - There are a lot of great macOS dictation solutions out there for everyone— free/paid, local/cloud, raw/formatted, etc. My favorite until recently has been Wispr Flow, which remains very good. However, this last week, I switched over to Monologue. It does everything Wispr Flow does, but with one key differentiating feature they just added— a command line interface (CLI). Now, you can use the Monologue app on macOS, iOS, or watchOS to dictate any text into any text field and record notes that are all accessible via CLI, meaning you can ask your favorite AI agent to pull, process, and manage your transcriptions. For example, you can be out on a jog, quickly dictate an email that you want to send to someone later into the Apple Watch app, then when you're back at your computer, ask Claude to pull up your last dictation, format it for email, and send it for you. Personally, I'm using it for daily note updates on the go— I quickly dictate a thought or journal entry on the go and then have a cron job running on my machine that pulls in any voice notes I dictate with the words "Daily Note" in them and adds them to my Obsidian Vault's daily note. Wild times!
That's it for this week. May you awake to a peaceful sense of abundance.
My thanks again to Plinky for sponsoring this week's issue— don't miss out on their excellent 50% off sale this week, ending May 22nd.