26JUL2026: Affirmations on my Home Screen

Happy Sunday everyone!

This week, I’ve been drooling over this special edition La Marzocco espresso machine made in honor of Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca, revisiting my love of ancient letter locking techniques, revisiting Fire Emblem: Three Houseson the Switch 2, getting extremely amped over the upcoming X-Files Lego set, reading the dark secret about stretching before/after runs, having feelings about the new James Bond game-inspired Omega Seamaster, and getting my first VO2 Max/Lactic Threshold test done.

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On to the good stuff!

📱 Light Flip — The Light Phone - The makers of the OG minimalist, distraction-free phone announced their new take on a flip phone this week and I’m honestly pretty intrigued. It looks great, comes in six different colors, and has all the essentials like Calendar/Directions/Music/Text Messaging plus niceties like voice-to-text dictation and USB-C charging, but none of the addictive crud that I personally tend to stuff onto my smartphone.

✈️ Flighty v4.10 - Connection Assistant - Flighty is one of my all-time favorite iOS apps. It’s gorgeous, delightful, and incredibly handy for travelers. A lot of airline apps are just now starting to introduce features that Flighty has had for years. Fortunately, Flighty is not resting on its laurels, and continues to innovate. This week they introduced Connection Assistant, which maps out every step of your layover (passport control, bag recheck, terminal changes, etc.) with typical times for each checkpoint, tailored to your specific trip, nationality, and even your seat. They also added Gate Predictions, which guesses your arrival and departure gates from historical data and sharpens to the exact gate on travel day, helping you get actual estimates of just how long it’s going to take you to make that connection.

📷 Field Bracket by Peak Design - The absolute mad men and women at Peak Design are back with their seventeenth Kickstarter. This time they are selling a frankenstein’s monster of a modular L-bracket / camera cage / camera grip / tripod mount all rolled into one. Apart from letting you connect your camera to pretty much anything OR connect pretty much anything to your camera, it also has a sneaky built-in Find My-compatible tracker to help you track it down should it go missing on you. I love Peak Design’s stuff, and this looks to be an awesome addition to the line-up.

🗒 Mononote: One Note for iOS - I’m a big fan of the stuff created by Easlo, a self-proclaimed digital minimalist. He dropped a new minimalist notes app this week that does one thing— it lets you write a single note. Whatever is the thing you need to remember or record right now. Then, you have the option to pin it to your phone’s Home Screen with a widget or push it to the Lock Screen or Dynamic Island as a Live Activity, so that note lives like a sticky note reminder whenever you look at your phone. I’m using it for a mix of affirmations on my Home Screen and, when needed, an actual reminder to not forget something important.

🤖 Open Minis for iOS - Federico over at MacStories did an awesome write-up of this wild on-device iOS AI agent that piqued my interest this week. In short, Open Minis is a power user AI agent that actually does things on your phone— browsing the web, reading HealthKit data, managing your calendar, driving HomeKit, and chaining multi-step tasks through native iOS frameworks and Siri Shortcuts. Best of all, it’s all local-first, keeping your data on your device, but with the option to use your own API key for the AI provider of your choice. This feels like one of those apps that’s a preview of the kind of stuff that Apple will eventually bake into its future offerings.

That’s it for this week. May you discover a new mysterious bookstore within walking distance of a killer coffeeshop.