⚡ 12JUL2026: My hips do not lie
Making your old speakers Airplay-compatible, an inflatable tent, super powered screenshots, a gorgeous typeface, and the secret origins of Comic Sans...
Happy Sunday everyone!
This week, I started reading The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All after seeing it recommended in a few places, fell absolutely in love with this early 20th Century Egyptian Tourism-inspired typeface from Dan over at SimpleBits, found myself intrigued to try out Kerouac — a work studio for bloggers, felt inspired by this ESP-32-powered desktop local flight radar, and read DocPop's essay on How the Watchmen inspired Comic Sans.
🔈 WiiM Pro Plus — AirPlay 2 Multiroom Streamer - I received one of these earlier this summer as a birthday gift and have been absolutely loving it. These WiiM boxes let you turn any set of speakers into AirPlay 2 (and/or Google Cast) endpoints, and likewise will let you broadcast analog or digital inputs to any other box around the house that is also connected to a WiiM at up to 24-bit/192kHz. I've got mine hooked up to my record player so I can stream its analog output to all the speakers in the house via these WiiM Minis. They all work with Alexa, Siri, and Google Home as well for remote command. Super pleased with this ecosystem.
🏕 Puffer Inflatable Tent - This is a really cool concept for an integrated tent and sleeping pad that packs down fairly small and inflates in minutes into a rigid, lightweight campsite on the go. It comes with a portable electric pump that inflates/deflates the whole thing in about two minutes. Apart from the speed and consolidation benefits, I like this for helping simplify the camp set-up and tear-down in poor lighting conditions that we often seem to run into when we go camping. I can imagine this working amazingly with my absolute favorite car camping sleep pad.
🏃➡️ pliability: Stretch & Mobility - It took multiple rounds of several week-long PT stints before it finally sunk in that I should just be stretching more before and after I work out. (Apparently my hips do not lie, and they are saying "For the Love of God, stretch us out!") After looking at a couple of different apps, I've settled into a daily routine with Pliability (formerly ROMWOD). It's a little pricey, but I really like that it builds custom stretching / mobility routines for you based on your preferences, your typical workouts, AND a cool LIDAR-powered assessment they have you take to get a sense of your actual mobility range.
🖥️ CleanShot X for Mac - I've featured this app a few times in the past, and though I use it every day, I was reminded again this week just how special it is. CleanShot X is a little utility that makes it both easier to capture your screen and makes sure that your screenshots look nice. It supports all kinds of handy little features, like scrolling capture for full-page shots, built-in annotation and background tools, on-device OCR, pinned floating screenshots, and one-click cloud uploads of screen recordings with shareable links. You can also add custom backgrounds behind your screenshots; markup, highlight, or draw arrows pointing to what you want to call out; or even make little animated GIFs of your screen recording to make the file smaller. It's one of those remarkably well-designed apps that just makes little things easier and more delightful.
🔌 Anker Prime 160W 3-Port Charger - We can never have enough chargers and cables in our house, and after fruitlessly digging for yet another laptop charger last weekend, I grabbed one of these while they're on sale over on Amazon. I love Anker's stuff, and this one definitely doesn't disappoint — it is just barely larger than an AirPods case, but has 3 USB-C ports that can charge a 16" MacBook Pro, an iPhone Pro Max, and an 11" iPad Pro all at the same time. It also has a display, which does… something? I'm honestly not sure what it does because I've never even looked at it. All I can say is this thing is crazy tiny and charges like a beast. Still 30% off on Amazon as of publishing.
That's it for this week! May all your devices get one extra bar of signal.
Oh, and before I forget, have you checked out the new Hiro Report Archive? It's a searchable and filterable database of every item I've featured in 3+ years of writing the report. It got a really nice feature in the latest issue of Jared Newman's fantastic Advisorator newsletter, and on internet legend Ben Brown's excellent link blog.