⚡ 04JAN2026: Sound Burger
A wild new flashlight, music generation in your pocket, a tool to help you stick to your resolutions, a portable record player, and more...
Happy Sunday and Happy New Year everyone!
This week, I've been playing this amazing fan-made X-Men retro arcade game, marveling at the incredible new Olaf robot the Disney team built for their parks, making a whole lot of these honey graham cracker lattes, doing basic music theory exercises in the Waay app, thinking about hacking one of my home mirrors into a smart mirror, and loving the idea of this actual plant that will die if you use your phone too much.
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.
On to the good stuff!
🔦 LoopDot EDC Flashlight - Santa picked up a pair of these flashlights for my kids after I stumbled across this quick YouTube short about them a few weeks back. The LoopDot is a super fun, pocketable, fidgetable flashlight with a pixel display that can be customized to show you the remaining battery levels, act as an RGB light source, and even play simple pixel games on. It's super satisfying to handle, and I love that you can switch between flood and spot light modes just by giving it a shake.
🎹 NanoLoop Q Pocket Groovebox - The NanoLoop Q is a tiny pocket groove box that takes the shape of a retro game pad with a 4x4 grid of monochromatic orange LEDs. Those make up a 16-step sequencer. You get up to four channels to use built-in synthesizers to create your own catchy loops and beats. I'm a sucker for any small, good-looking, pocketable devices with buttons and lights on them. Bonus points for it making really fun sounds, being USB-C powered, and having over 30 hours of battery life and multiple years of standby battery life.
🥾 Thru: Virtually Hike the PCT for iOS - This fun indie app uses your daily step count to simulate your hiking the gorgeous 2,650-mile-long Pacific Crest Trail. As you walk/run/move throughout your day, your virtual character advances on the trail map, and you unlock cute badges commemorating famous sights you've reached. I love this mashup of health, nature, and tech.
🔈 Audio-Technica Sound Burger Portable Record Player - This amazing little portable record player is impressively compact, plays remarkably well, and features both wired and Bluetooth audio out options. This is essentially a crate digger's dream. I want one.
✅ HabitKit for iOS - I put out a call earlier this week for recommendations for habit trackers to play with for the new year. After downloading half a dozen or so, this is the one I'm sticking with for the next few weeks/months. In short, apps like this help you keep track of whether or not you've completed some habit you're trying to build, or if you've successfully avoided some unproductive habit you're trying to quit. You simply mark in the app that you've done (or not done) the thing that day, and then it presents you a nice chart of your progress. HabitKit is simple but with a lot of deeper features if you want them, and best of all it looks nice. As nice as it is, there's no way I'm going to be able to stick to my resolution this year.
That's it for this week! May your 2026 be filled with all kinds of surprising delights.