15JUN2025: A quick trip to Null Island

Happy Sunday, everyone, and happy Father's Day to all my fellow dads out there!

This week, I've been brushing up on basic phone security best practices and reading about Rayhunters, getting excited about a new Wu-Tang fighting game, flying with this Nintendo Switch 2 travel case from Belkin, and learning about Null Island thanks to a package of mine taking a quick day trip to Africa.

I want to extend my sincere thanks to TRMNL for sponsoring this issue. There's only a day or two left on their kind offer to get $10 off their fantastic e-ink display for all your most important information. Just use coupon code "hiroreport" at checkout.

On to the good stuff!

Note that some of the links below are affiliate links and the Hiro Report may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.

🔍 PixelDrop for iOS - This handy little free utility lets you easily redact sensitive or private information in your photographs by applying a permanent pixelation effect or black bar to the image. This is handy for things like removing folks faces from photos, or removing private information from screenshots. While there are plenty of other apps out there that will do this, I really like the clean, simple user interface and the smart features like auto detection of faces and text so you can quickly redact and share your photo.

📶 Heltec MeshPocket - I've written previously about Meshtastic, a really fun off grid, peer-to-peer, text-based wireless communication protocol. The MeshPocket is a new Meshtastic-powered Qi2 battery pack that attaches to your phone for wireless charging but also comes equipped with Bluetooth and a built-in LoRa wireless communication antenna and an e-ink display for showing signal status, messages, and more. The whole thing is hackable for devising your own specialized applications as well, so it's not just limited to Meshtastic.

🗣 Wispr Flow for macOS - This is the latest app I'm experimenting with for voice dictation/transcription on my Mac. With just a quick hot key, Wispr Flow will let me dictate perfectly clear text right into any text field on my Mac. It also has a really clever iOS offering in the form of a custom keyboard that you can pull up in any app to get much more accurate voice dictation than Apple's built-in offering. The app looks and works fantastic in my first few weeks of testing, and has quickly replaced the two other apps I'd been using for this.

🌬 HOTO Auto Care Vacuum + Blower - The folks behind the awesome mini vacuum/blower that I use to keep my keyboard and coffee bar clean are back with a new, more powerful version made for quick clean up in cars. This was an instant buy for me, as we're constantly needing to clean up dried mud, goldfish crackers, and other small things from our car mats. I also like that the blower is strong enough to blow leaves off your windshield wipers, another regular annoyance once we head into fall/winter.

🖋️ Diarly for iOS/iPadOS/macOS - I've happily used Day One for my digital journaling for years, but I've been feeling the itch lately to try something different. Diarly offers many of the same great features like multimedia journaling (include voice recordings, drawings, and photos), encrypted back-ups, custom and pre-made journaling templates, and so on. Where Diarly stands out for me is that it lets you sync your journal between your Mac/iPad/iPhone using an encrypted vault in your iCloud files, rather than requiring you to use their own proprietary sync servers. Beyond that, I appreciate that it gives you a little more customization over the look and feel of your journals. They're also being forward-leaning about letting you have the option of incorporating AI in your journaling for running queries, getting writing help, etc. It's only been a few weeks but I'm enjoying it.

That's it for this week! May you discover an ancient treasure or an eternal truth in the days ahead.

My thanks again to TRMNL for sponsoring the Report this month!