⚡️ 03AUG2025: Easy Espresso On The Go
A portable espresso machine, a human/AI hybrid assistant, a mammoth e-ink display, a physical app, and more!
Happy Sunday everyone!
This week I've been on the road, visiting family on the East Coast. It's been a delight getting the family time and spending time on/near the water. Apart from the vacation, I've been reading Silo author Hugh Howey's surprisingly down to earth workout and diet routine, playing this free demo of the new Shinobi game on the Nintendo Switch (thanks Andy!), reveling in the retro futuristic vibes of the new Fantastic Four movie, drinking a whole bunch of this crazy good coconut water, and listening to these banging heavy metal covers of K-Pop Demon Hunter tracks.
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On to the good stuff!
☕ OutIn Nano Portable Espresso Machine - I picked up one of these for a series of trips I am taking through the summer and fall. I was drawn to it by the smallish form factor, the fact that it can heat water for you or take boiling water from a kettle, and brews with either ground coffee or Nespresso pods. After having gotten to put it through its paces this last week, I don't think it's going to win any world barista championships, but I am really enjoying having this as a quick and easy espresso option wherever I go and it certainly beats hotel room coffee machines. I'll be bringing it with me on the rest of my travels and camping trips this year. Schedule allowing, I hope to write a more detailed review of it for CoffeeGeek this fall. It's far from perfect but it's sparking joy for me.
🦆 Duckbill Personal Assistant - Tip of the hat to Alex for introducing me to this interesting virtual assistant service that combines AI and actual human experts who can take care of real world tasks for you. As great as ChatGPT and the like are, they still can't (yet) call a doctor's office and move an appointment for you, or call three different plumbers to get quotes for a job, and the like. Duckbill lets you request tasks via text, website, and an app, and promises to either complete your task or get you an update within 24 hours. I'm going to try it out.
📝 TRMNL X - My friends over at TRMNL have opened pre-orders for a new, much larger version of their fantastic, DIY-friendly, e-ink platform. The TRMNL X rocks a 10.3" display with more shades of gray, a higher resolution, and a faster refresh rate. It also has a magnetic back mount, a waterproof case, and touch controls. It will still work with their awesome, community-driven library of plugins and integrations with various web services and information sources. Full disclosure: TRMNL has sponsored previous issues of the Hiro Report, but this is not sponsored—I'm just stoked about the new release and have already put in my pre-order.
🗒 Paper Apps LABYRINTH - Paper Apps makes super fun games that are played in a small, spiral notebook with just a pencil and one or two dice. I'm a big fan of their Dungeon game that I've written about previously and that has you play through a single-player dungeon crawl on the go. The new Labyrinth is a "3D" paper game from the same folks that has already way exceeded its funding goal on Kickstarter and is due to ship next month. There are three days left to back it/pre-order it; otherwise, you'll need to wait until they get it in stock on their website later this fall.
✉️ Cora for Email - I've been playing with Cora the last few weeks for my Google Workspace email account and really appreciating it. Cora is not an app; it's a web service that sorts your email, smartly pulling out just the emails that you actually need to read and sending the rest to you in a short briefing that you get sent twice a day. It will also scan your outbound emails and learn how you write so that it can create draft responses to important messages in your voice. It will never send these messages for you, but when you open an email in your Gmail inbox, it will often have a response pre-drafted for you. I've found it to be scarily accurate in both prioritizing my emails and in figuring out a good starting draft of how I would respond to an email. Importantly, your data is never used to train their models and is all siloed to your Google account. Sadly, it only works with Google Workspace/Gmail… I'd love to see them add support for Fastmail at some point.
That's it for this week! May you be happy, healthy, and at peace.