25MAY2025: Weird Little Cameras
Turning online ideas into real action, watches on display, a Mac level up, and camera stuff aplenty.
Happy Sunday everyone!
This week, I've been drooling over this Scandinavian futuristic cafe racer, getting pumped for the release of Missile Command Delta this summer, writing about the TrimUI Brick* in the latest Hiro Lab, loving the ingenuity of the poetry camera (H/T Alex's great newsletter), and experiencing gratitude for the men and women who have given everything so we could enjoy the freedoms we have today– a great inspiration to not let those freedoms now be eroded away.
On to the good stuff!
🗺 Sortd App for iOS - I've been beta testing this app for a good while and was excited to see that it finally launched last week. In short, it solves the problem of saving Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok videos that have practical information in them but that you never get around to extracting. For example, my algorithms know I like food so I get a lot of Reels about new restaurants and recipes I want to check out, but it's kind of a pain in the butt to actually write down the recipe or the address of the new restaurant in the moment. With Sortd, you just share these videos to the app, and it "sorts" all your saved videos into different categories (e.g. Restaurants, Recipes, Products, Books, et al), uses AI to extract the practical information and then gives you links to go find the restaurant in the Maps app, go buy the book online, or simply read the recipe without having to squint at the small caption text. It's got a great, friendly design, and is made by a hard working indie dev. Go check it out.
⌚ Holme & Hadfield Watch & Knife Display* - I don't think it will surprise anyone that I have a bit of a watch and pocket knife collection. My sweetheart bought me one of these Holme & Hadfield display / valet boxes a few years back and I still use it every day. I like how it lets me put my watches on display but also has a handy pull out drawer for picking out a pocket knife or pen (or both) to bring with me for the day. It looks like they have a nice sale going on this weekend, so I thought I'd share.
🖱️ Linear Mouse for MacOS - Thanks to Jared Newman over at the excellent Adviserator newsletter for flagging this great, free MacOS app. Linear Mouse lets you customize how your different pointing devices (trackpad, mouse, etc) work. You can set up device-specific scrolling speeds, click rate preferences, and even custom actions for when you click certain buttons within specific apps. I, for one, am using it to customize my Logi MX Master 3S* without having to use the bloated Logi app.
📷 Fuji X-Half - Fuji is back to making weird little cameras, and I love it. This week they released the Fuji X-Half, a little camera designed to get you as close as possible to the experience of shooting an analog half frame film camera in a digital camera. The camera shoots vertically oriented 3:4 photos by default and even has a thumb wind "film advance" lever. One of my favorite things is that you put in virtual rolls of film, wherein you choose what sort of film simulation you want to use, how many frames you want to be on it, and then you shoot away through the optical viewfinder until you finish the roll—only then can you see what you actually captured. The camera will even save a virtual contact sheet that shows you all 36-72 photos in one image, in addition to each individual frame. There's a lot more fun stuff this camera can do that makes it seem like it would be a blast. I love seeing Fuji experiment like this.
📲 Glif iPhone Tripod Mount - After being sold out for ages, Austin-based Studio Neat has finally found another Texas-based manufacturer that is going to help them bring this awesome iPhone accessory back to market. I've had mine for years and it's still my favorite way to mount an iPhone (or any similarly shaped device) on a tripod.
That's it for this week! Stay tuned—next week is the 2nd anniversary of the report and I'm hoping to do something fun for it!
*Asterisks indicate links that may generate a small commission to support the site at no extra cost to you. These links are not sponsored, and I have no relationship with the makers of these products.