10SEP2023

Aaaand we're back after a brief break for the holiday weekend last weekend. Hopefully everyone got some good rest and even better food. We had a great trip to San Antonio to see some sea life, play with some legos, and eat very tasty food.

Here are some fun finds from the last week or so:

• 💡 I Can Eat Glass - One of those weird internet projects that I'm just happy to know existed. From the Wikipedia page, "As Mollick explained, visitors to a foreign country have 'an irresistible urge' to say something in that language, and whatever they say (a cited example being along the lines of 'Where is the bathroom?') usually marks them as tourists immediately. Saying 'I can eat glass, it does not hurt me', however, ensures that the speaker 'will be viewed as an insane native, and treated with dignity and respect'."
• 📷 Pixii.FR - This one comes courtesy of my dear friend, Abu C. For years, Leica has been the only company in the world making digital rangefinder cameras-- Namely, the lustworthy and wallet-shattering M-series digital bodies. Unbeknownst to me, a small French company called Pixii started producing a very unique digital rangefinder camera body a few years back. What's neat about their offering is it 1) Accepts Leica's glass (all M-mount lenses will work) 2) Its internal hardware is upgradeable as new sensors, processors, and even viewfinders are developed 3) It costs about 1/4 of what a Leica body costs. Lastly, this is not some aspirational Kickstarter project, they have been selling the Pixii since 2018 with a regular stream of internal upgrades being released ever since. The 2023 version (and associated upgrades for older versions) include a 64-bit processor, an advanced Monochrome RAW capture mode, and upgraded Wifi to mobile capabilities. I'm super intrigued.
• 🗿 The Wisdom Limo - Merlin Mann is one of my favorite full-time internet persons, someone really smart and funny who just seems to spend all of his time writing and talking on the internet. He has started collecting some of his rules for living and aphorisms in a Git repository. Think of it as a 21st-century Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Highly recommended.
• 🌁 The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - Ok, hear me out on this one. This is an incredibly long and detailed search to answer what should be a simple question: Why did they build this bridge over I-494 outside of Minneapolis? It sounds like mundane research, but it’s a very funny and fascinating story written by someone willing to go to absurd lengths to figure out the rationale for what appears to be a completely pointless pedestrian foot bridge.
• 🔖 Postmarks - As a long time user of various bookmarking services (Delicious, Pinboard, etc), I’m very interested to see where this federated, self-hosted alternative could go… especially if we can eventually get Google Reader-style social commenting, etc.
• 👾 Tidbyt - We've been wanting a display to have in the kitchen that we could use to flag important family calendar events, show the weather and moon phases, track holidays, etc. Surprising no one who knows me, there was no way we were going to get a Google/Meta/Alexa device for it, and Apple sadly doesn't make any equivalent yet. So we settled on a Tidbyt. It's a really neat little 32x64 LED pixel display that you can customize the heck out of with various applets from your phone. Beyond running built in weather and clock apps, I've also built custom pixel art greetings for my kiddos each morning featuring drawings I've made of some of their favorite cartoon and video game characters. It's been a hit, and unlike some of the other offerings I've tried like the LaMetric Time, it's very responsive and has not had any connection timeouts.

That's about it for this week, thanks for reading!