⚡ 16AUG2026: To the edge of space

Happy Sunday everyone!

This week, I returned from a great trip to Colorado, experienced a potent cocktail of dopamine and nostalgia while watching this ad for forthcoming Dungeon Crawler Carl action figures, got extremely excited about all the announcements coming out of D23 this weekend (especially the new X-Men movie cast!), spent HOURS playing the new Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion remake on the Switch 2, and narrowly resisted the temptation to grab a set of these D&D/fantasy-themed keycaps.

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On to the good stuff!

🗒 Paper Guardian - Shout out to Bobby for finding this awesome recycled-ABS notebook shell that lets you recycle/reuse your old piles of scrap paper for note-taking at your desk. The shell clips up to 60 sheets of scrap Letter/A4 paper into a refillable notebook, with three section dividers and (best of all) a built-in cutter to cleanly cut your 8.5x11" paper in half. Love the look of this thing and the ethos of reusing scrap paper for notes.

🛰 HabSat Near-Space Flight Module - Midnight Make is a really cool DIY-kit shop run by a robotics PhD, and they are in the midst of finalizing this at-home HabSat that you can strap to a balloon to send up to the edge of space to get sweet photos of the curvature of the earth. The HabSat streams GPS, atmospheric telemetry, and photo thumbnails back to a mission-control app that gives you constantly updated predictions of where it's going to land when the balloon inevitably pops and it deploys its parachute. Because the HabSat is under 300 g, there is no license or FAA permit required to fly it in the U.S. (Which seems, uh, slightly concerning?) In any case, I totally want one— they're targeting a late 2026 ship date.

📆 Hibi Calendar: Daily Journal app for iOS/iPadOS - Hibi ("days" in Japanese) is a cool little app that turns your calendar into a stack of textured paper pages that you can doodle on, add stickers to, and tear away with a swipe. The app integrates your real Apple calendars and reminders with no account required and zero tracking. I love whimsically designed apps like this, and the new feature that lets you turn your photos into washi tape is really sweet.

🍲 Sori Yanagi Colander - This stainless steel colander is my new product obsession this week. Sōri Yanagi (a postwar designer who had a major hand in defining modern Japanese industrial design) designed these beautiful, award-winning colanders with the intention of making a buy-it-for-life type tool that fixes a lot of the problems with standard wire mesh strainers. By using punched steel holes, it makes it harder for little bits of food and water to get stuck in the mesh, and also allows water to flow out into the paired stainless steel bowls he designed to pair with the colanders. I love stuff like this.

🗿 Nendo — Bring your drawings to life - Nendo is a really well done web app that turns any sketch or drawing you give it into a full-color 3D-printed figure. All you have to do is upload the drawing, give it a few minutes, and then it will generate a detailed 3D model you can spin around, or even send to your phone to look at in augmented reality with your camera. If you like what you see, you can order an actual, full-color 3D print of it. I've seen other services attempting to do this, but in my early experiments, this makes the cleanest 3D models of any I've played with.

That's it for this week. May the birds chirp just a little louder when you draw near.