⚡ 10AUG2025: One Week With The Brick
Another free subscriber giveaway, mindfulness tech, smart home safety, espresso tech, and more...
Happy Sunday everyone!
It was a pretty nutso week so I didn't get to spend too much time surfing the webs, but I did get to start making some silly pixel art game experiments with ChatGPT 5 and picked up some nostalgia-inducing comics at my local comic shop. We also cobbled together a lemonade stand in our neighborhood, reminding me just how much I love this citrus juicer I linked to a few weeks back.
Thanks to a very generous donation from longtime reader, Blair, we have a digital download code for the Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening remake for the Nintendo Switch / Switch 2. I'm blown away by the generosity of the community, you guys make this whole thing super fun. Thank you, again, Blair for keeping this going!
Entry is simple: you just need to be subscribed to the Report, be 18 years or older, and have a Nintendo Switch or Switch 2 (or plans to get one). Members of the $1/month Super Secret Supporter Cabal get double entries.
I'll announce the winner in next week's Report!
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!
📱 Brick - The Brick is a small grey square with an NFC chip in it that acts like a key for unlocking all the distracting apps on your phone. I've had several folks recommend this thing, and have resisted it for a long time—I keep telling myself I have more self control than I actually seem to possess. The reality is I pull my phone out of my pocket often throughout the day just to take a peek at something and then find myself 5 minutes deep into a social media scroll or work email exchange. One week with the Brick and I'm becoming way more aware of just how often that muscle memory kicks in. When you set it up, you select all the apps that you'd like to lock away (for me it's basically social media + work apps) and either set a schedule of when you want them to be locked (like in the evening when I'm playing with my family), or you can just selectively lock them when you want to focus (like during your morning routine). When you want to "unlock" these apps, you have to physically walk over to wherever you keep your Brick and tap the phone to the NFC chip inside.
⬈ Mighty Cursor - I've been using this app for just a few days, but I'm enjoying it so far. It turns your mouse cursor into an AI assistant that you can control with voice commands. It will answer questions, provide context-aware analysis, and more. Best of all, you can use your own API keys for the AI provider of your choice and let you bring your own Elevenlabs keys to give it the voice that you want.
🔥 X-Sense Smart Smoke + Carbon Monoxide Detector - Last week one of our fire alarms went off in the middle of the night, woke everyone up (including our two very freaked out kids), and yet there was absolutely no smoke or fire. This was the second time it'd happened in a month. A month or two before that we had one of the fire alarms start chirping in the middle of the night indicating it needed a battery. It took 10 minutes just to figure out which fire alarm it was. I was fed up, and decided to go shopping. I wanted to get a "smart" alarm so that I could get notified of low battery on my phone rather than via chirping in the middle of the night, and I also wanted to be notified if an alarm is going off when I'm not home. The X-Sense checks all those boxes for way less than the now discontinued Nest Protect smoke alarms. Set-up was super quick and easy, and so far no false alarms!
☕ OutIn Claro Espresso Scale - I grabbed one of these to take on a trip late last month and enjoyed it so much that it's now my primary espresso scale and my older MHW-3Bomber scale is in a drawer as back-up. It's compact, looks great, and has been highly accurate in my testing. I particularly like that you can control whether or not it beeps when you press buttons. Though I've not used it for pour-overs, it also has a handy feature to automatically tare and track your coffee grinds to water ratio.
📙 MOFT Dynamic iPad Pro Case - I've had a Magic Keyboard Case on my M4 iPad Pro since it first released. It's fantastic, but lately I've been using my iPad less for productivity, and more for consumption (basically playing Balatro + reading vintage comics in Marvel Unlimited). I went looking for a new cover that wouldn't weigh as much or be as bulky as the Magic Keyboard, and have wound up really liking this one from MOFT. Apart from being both sturdy and minimal, the cover can also be folded and tucked in a dozen different origami-like patterns to get the exact right stand angle for your purposes.
That's it for this week! May the birds chirp just a little louder when you walk by.