⚡ 07DEC2025: Only When It Snows in Switzerland

Happy Sunday everyone!

This week, I've been digging this remake of Bronski Beat's Smalltown Boy performed on a little groovebox, giggling at this dad's 2025 Parenting Wrapped (a la Spotify's year-end wrap-up), and once again being tempted to buy a modded Nintendo 3DS thanks to this review from Byte Review. I've also been swooning over this super fun new Omega x Swatch Moonshine Gold edition that features both moon phase and earth phase complications, and is only available for sale in stores on days when it happens to be snowing in Switzerland. So neat!

On to the good stuff:

🏠 Meross HomeKit Garage Opener - Like many families, our garage is more a cross between a gym and bulk storage space than a place for cars. As a result, we wind up walking in and out of it much more than driving in and out of it. Having this Siri-enabled smart garage attachment has been a huge help, letting us quickly open the garage by voice command or touch of a button from a homescreen widget on our iPhones. It's also nice for being able to quickly check the status of the garage to make sure it's closed when we're away from home… and if it's not, we can close it from wherever we are.

📔 2026 Standard Memorandum Book - Years ago when I lived overseas I used to keep a memorandum book like this—a simple journal with just a few lines for each day to let you capture just the highlights. I appreciated the constraint as only having space for 3-4 lines helped me be more consistent with my journaling habit, knowing that it would be a 2-3 minute exercise rather than a 30-minute, multi-page brain dump. These daily record books look terrific. I grabbed one for 2026 and also picked up a pack of their Adventure Logs for memorializing our travels next year. (Thanks Bobby!)

📖 XTEINK X4 Magsafe eReader - I love this concept. It's a small eInk device that attaches to the back of your iPhone via MagSafe connection that allows you to keep your ePub library of books handy everywhere you go. I will probably wind up grabbing one of these after Christmas so I can make progress on my reading backlog rather than doomscrolling in the new year. Could I just use the Kindle app or any other ereader app rather than firing up Threads/Instagram/Mastodon when in line at the grocery store? Totally. Do I do that today? I do not.

🗣️ Chirp for Apple Watch - I don't too often have Apple Watch specific apps to recommend, but I've been really enjoying Chirp. In short, it is a voice-enabled LLM on your wrist. At the push of a button on my watch face, it brings up a microphone button for me to hold and make my request. Chirp then uses Google's Gemini to go search for whatever I need and comes back with a very high-quality voice response. You can also use it to set reminders and dictate messages that you want to send. Best of all, you can get 7 queries a day for free, which is honestly more than I generally need.

💡 Govee Permanent Outdoor Lights — I mentioned these last holiday season and thought I'd reshare them in case anyone is looking for a great Christmas light solution. These HomeKit-compatible lights are a fantastic year-round lighting set-up that let you pick from different lighting combinations for the different holidays, or make your own from scratch. I've had them up for over a year now and now a bunch of other houses in the neighborhood have been getting in on the action.

That's it for this week, may your hot drinks stay at the perfect temperature just a little longer.