⚡ 12OCT2025: Chronic sweaty back syndrome
My no brainer pocket knife recommendation, getting cinematic footage on your iPhone, killer widgets, and a spooky kid's book
Happy Sunday everyone!
This week, I've been dreaming about finding a cache of literal sunken treasure like this, switching my AppleTV keyboard over to grid format thanks to this tip from Stephen, reading the Monster Support Group series with my kiddos, trying to figure out how much smoke and mirrors is involved in the Figure 03 humanoid robot announced this week, and checking out all the cool apps made during RevenueCat's Shipaton event this year.
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!
🔪 Benchmade Mini Bugout Knife - A buddy of mine asked me this week for a recommendation for an EDC knife, a topic that I could spend hours talking/writing about. While there are a million good options depending on one's budget, needs, style, etc., the one that is the easiest for me to recommend is the Benchmade Bugout. Benchmade makes fantastic, long-lasting knives that will last forever with good maintenance. The Mini Bugout is compact, discreet, comes in a million different color and blade options, and there is a whole universe of DIY 3rd party modifications out there for changing out the grips, thumb studs, and more. It's a great all-around pocket knife.
💾 Lexar Pro Go SSD for iPhone - I've become hooked on shooting video with the new iPhone 17 Pro (c.f. this moment of Zen on the Oregon Coast)… The phone's ability to shoot both Open Gate and Apple ProRes RAW means you have a professional-grade video camera suite in your pocket. The only catch is that footage just devours storage… and some footage settings literally require an external SSD before the phone will even let you shoot them. Enter the Lexar Pro Go, which is an insanely tiny external SSD that discretely clips onto the back or bottom of your phone. I just leave it clipped on when I'm out and about shooting, and it's barely noticeable.
🎥 Kino and OpenCam for iOS - Speaking of shooting video, here are my two favorite apps for shooting cinematic video on the iPhone. Kino gives you full manual control of your format, shutter speed, etc., and even lets you apply LUTs (essentially video filters) to your footage in real time while you shoot. OpenCam, on the other hand, lets you shoot Open Gate footage, meaning that it will capture video from the entire sensor without cropping in to the typical widescreen format we usually get from video footage. It ends up giving you a really cool large format feel to your footage, or gives you the flexibility to crop and reframe to your liking in post.
📱 Koco Widgets for iOS - I stumbled across Koco Widgets a week or two back and have really enjoyed it. Koco has lots of highly customizable widgets (and Live Activities) that you can use on your phone for tracking useful information (like health data, calendar, news, etc.) or just to bring some fine design elements to your screen layout. I particularly like the widgets that include hot buttons for launching specific apps, letting me save some space on my homescreen.
🪑 Embrace Chair - The folks at Elgato announced a really compelling new office chair that looks to be competing directly with the classic Herman Miller Aeron office chair. It's leveraging the same slightly transparent, highly breathable style that's perfect for those of us afflicted with chronic sweaty back syndrome– but presumably at a much better price point. I'm pretty happy with my current chair, but if I were in the market, this would be the one I would grab—every Elgato product I've had (including my beloved Key Light) has been a delight.
That's it for this week. May you find a really great Norm to challenge.