15MAR2026: A Cryptic Word Game
A travel wifi cheat code, a transparent cd player, trading knowledge like cards, leveling up your screenshots, and more...
Happy Sunday everyone!
This week, I've been trying out the new cryptic word game from the creator of Wordle, drooling over this stunning EV version of a classic Italian Gran Turismo, loving this site that turns YouTube into a 1990s-style channel guide, playing the 1988 Apple II point-n-click game based on William Gibson's Neuromancer, and marveling at this concept of making a digital sensor for your old film cameras (thanks Wassim!).
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.
Imagine being able to drink as much coffee as you want without worrying about losing sleep, getting the jitters, or soul-crushing anxiety. Yep, that's the power of decaf. Historically, decaf has come with a whole bunch of sacrifices in the flavor and fun departments. No longer. Wimp makes legitimately great decaf coffee for machine brewing, pour over, and espresso. Join the decaf movement and give them a try.
On to the good stuff!
🛜 TP-Link Roam 7 Travel Wi-Fi Router - I grabbed one of these to bring on some upcoming travels, with the goal of being able to use it to share the airplane and Airbnb's Wi-Fi connections with the entire family without having to log each device in. The travel router lets you run a VPN on the device so all traffic from all devices connected to it is automatically protected. This model is a little thicc but has really great range and offers Wi-Fi 7 for bountiful speeds and throughput. That said, if it wasn't permanently sold out everywhere, I probably would have grabbed the Wi-Fi 5 travel router from UniFi just because it's so tiny.
💿 TINYL SPLIT Transparent Bluetooth CD Player - I've got an enormous pile of old CDs in my closet and have been thinking about brushing them off for little listening parties. This beautiful transparent desktop player may be just what I need. It's got a clever modular, magnetic design that lets you split the Bluetooth speaker off from the CD player so you can take the player on the go, or bring the speaker with you as you move around the house. The CD player can also transmit via Bluetooth to any Bluetooth headphones or speakers you might have. Features aside, they had me the moment I saw the beautiful transparent case.
🎴 Wikipedia Trading Cards - This is a really fun vibe-coded project from Vijay that basically turns Wikipedia into a series of collectible trading cards like Pokémon with varying degrees of rarity. You get a few starter packs of cards that you can then tear open and flip through, all embedded in the site. You can also trade cards with friends and the community via a fun marketplace mechanic.
ℹ️ Text Sniper for macOS - This is one of those little utilities I use a ton and just forget that not everyone knows about. In short, this little applet runs on your Mac and lets you select and extract text from anything on your Mac's display. Handy for pulling text out of photos, PDFs, locked-down websites, YouTube videos, etc. It's my favorite way to OCR.
🎙 Monologue for macOS / iOS - While I'm pretty embedded in the Wispr Flow ecosystem, I've played with and really enjoyed Monologue, a competing voice-to-text dictation tool for the Mac. It's the best-looking, with a really fun retro-skeuomorphic design, and equally strong at transcribing your voice dictation into any text field on your computer as Wispr Flow. I ultimately abandoned Monologue when Wispr Flow beat them to market with a really great iOS app. However, Monologue has just recently released their own iOS keyboard app that once again looks and works fantastically in my testing. I'm currently experimenting with both and may wind up jumping ship back to Monologue. Both apps are cloud-based, which means much faster and more accurate transcription, with the downside being that your recordings are leaving your device—that said, neither app keeps any of the recordings, and they do not let your recordings or transcriptions be used for training LLMs. (If you want the option of doing local transcription, check out Superwhisper, which is also pretty solid.)
That's it for this week! My thanks again to Wimp Decaf for sponsoring this week's issue. May your coffee or tea be the perfect temperature with every sip.