⚡ 21JUN2026 - Extremely Amateur Field Recorder
eInk magic in your pocket, Markdown goodness, interactive robotics education, a cozy sci fi game for the iPad, and the camera I'm eyeing...
Happy Sunday everyone, and happy Father's Day to all the papas out there!
This week I've been reading this fun interactive guide to robotics hardware, feeling curious about Midjourney's pivot to medical devices, laughing about this innovative list of D&D challenges to present to a party, bookmarking this Vergecast episode on the history of Markdown, and ordering some of these little individual sachets of matcha powder for my next trip.
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!
🎵 Gauss Field Looper — I'm an EXTREMELY amateur field recorder, especially when traveling. When I'm out and about and hear a unique sound, I like to pull out my phone and record it. Could be the sound of a muezzin call early in the morning in Morocco, particularly animated grackles outside of the Central Market at sunset, my kids running and laughing in the backyard. The problem is I never really do anything with these recordings, I just hoard them. This app looks like a great tool to start to play with all these sounds for making loops, aleatoric music, etc. You can make extremely high-fidelity recordings directly in the app and then manipulate the tape both during recording and after the fact, and use this as an audio unit in other music production apps like Logic Pro.
🎥 Insta360 Luna Pocket Camera — Insta360 waded into the space currently dominated by the Osmo Pocket series of gimbal cameras this last week. It competes squarely with the new Osmo Pocket 4 that is sadly not available in the U.S., and in some ways surpasses it by adding some cool new tech like a detachable 2" rotatable OLED touchscreen that pops off for remote framing and control. The camera pairs two Leica lenses (a 20mm equivalent wide angle and 60mm equivalent telephoto) with a Triple AI Chip system, covering five focal lengths up to 12× zoom and reportedly great low-light shooting capabilities. While it sounds like they're still working through some early firmware issues here and there, I'm super intrigued by this one, especially since it's unclear if/when the Osmo Pocket 4 will ever be available stateside.
🗒 Lettera — The makers of one of my favorite Mac writing apps (Bear) launched the public beta of their new gorgeous Markdown editor this week. Lettera has all the beautiful, Mac-native polish that I love about Bear, but with the open local Markdown file format support that I appreciate about Obsidian and the forthcoming Outerline (which I also really am digging beta testing!). Unlike Obsidian and Outerline, which focus on providing rich support for internal linking and complex file hierarchies, Lettera is primarily focused on just providing a really clean Markdown writing and previewing experience. I see it working excellently side by side with either of those two apps, and as a bonus I've found that my quick capture app, Capture, works beautifully with it.
🎮 Planet of Lana — Planet of Lana is a cinematic puzzle-adventure game recently released for the iPhone and iPad — you guide a girl and her loyal animal companion on a rescue mission across a hand-painted sci-fi world, solving puzzles and evading machines along the way. I haven't gotten to dedicate time to playing it through yet, but I love the look and appreciate that it features touch controls, MFi controller support, and iCloud saves for carrying your game saves across devices.
📰 Elecrow ESP-32 2.13" E-Ink Display — I've been playing with Claude Code for local Mac software development, but have been getting the itch to do some custom software/hardware experiments with it. After doing a bunch of poking around, I wound up getting one of these little ESP-32-powered e-paper displays. My first project is this fun little pocket oracle that contains a full Tarot deck on local RAM and delivers a random card pull every morning without requiring any connectivity. Anyway, if you're at all curious to play with this kind of stuff, this unit is great and relatively easy to work with once you get the right driver installed.
That's it for this week! May you feel a perfectly cool breeze at least once a day.