⚡ 06JUL2025: Random Beeping Sounds
Simple sleep tech, indie apps, summer backyard tech, gaming, and more!
Happy Sunday everyone, and happy 4th of July Weekend to all who celebrated!
This week, I’ve been playing around with iOS 26 beta and Shortcuts, coveting this beautiful new cassette player from Maxell (yes, that Maxell), getting incredibly amped up for the Project Hail Mary movie, taking an online art class from the inimitable Crom, and geeking out with this great tool for figuring out how to use your airline miles and credit card points.
I’ve also been thinking about all the families affected by the terrible flooding this weekend here in Central Texas. If you’re interested in sending support of some form or another, the Statesman has a good roundup of options.
With that, I’d like to thank our friends over at Foofaraw for sponsoring this week’s issue to announce their recent podcast launch…
Hey, is this thing on?! Oh okay... We're Foofaraw—a zine of surreal storytelling and worldly observations. We've been publishing some pretty, pretty cool and weird things for awhile now, but this week we launched something brand new! Foofaraw Frequencies is a fiction podcast narrating our weekly short stories—with stunning voice acting by Keenan of Friendship Material. Download the first episode and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or your app of choice.
💤 Loop Quiet 2 Ear Plugs - I have been on a multi-year sleep optimization kick. I’ve introduced a sleep mask and mouth tape to my routine, and my latest experiment is with ear plugs. I probably have too much tech in the house, but I can’t tell you how many nights I’m woken up by random beeping sounds either from my own tech stack or from some errant toy belonging to one of my kids that is gasping for a fresh hit of battery life. It's early days still, but these $20 plugs look to be just what I need to block out noise while I get some sleep.
👾 GamerCard - Grab & Go Gaming - Grant Sinclair, the nephew of the inventor of the original ZX Spectrum 8-bit computer, invented this beautiful and svelte retro gaming handheld that is the thickness of just a few credit cards. It’s got a 4in high-resolution screen, two touchpads on the front, a USB-C port, and 128GB of storage, which means it’s a super pocketable and slick way to get a quick fix of Yoshi’s Island or Pokémon Emerald, et al. (H/T The Verge)
📷 FujiStyle for iOS - If you’re at all into cameras, you probably know by now about Fujifilm cameras’ unique film simulation recipes that let you develop custom “looks” for your JPEGs so they can be transferred straight from your camera and be ready to post. The FujiStyle app appears to have cracked the code on a common complaint—that you typically have to manually thumb through a whole bunch of menu settings to build or replicate recipes. With the latest update, FujiStyle lets you effortlessly transfer recipes you find in their growing database of film simulations directly to your camera for quick saving in the C1–C7 slots.
🔥 Traeger Wood Pellet Grill + Smoker - Over the holiday weekend, a good friend asked me about my grill/smoker of choice, and the unequivocal answer is the Traeger. I should caveat that I am not a “grill guy”—I love cooking, but I am by no means a master of smoking meats or anything like that. With that said, the Traeger suits my needs perfectly, using small wooden pellets to grill and/or smoke everything from salmon to homemade BBQ, and imbuing a rich smoky flavor that varies with the type of pellet we use. Traeger has added a bunch of great tech to their line-up in recent years, including Wi-Fi control/monitopring and compatibility with wireless meat thermometer probes.
🔖 Send to Self for iOS - Shout out to Jay for sharing this fun new indie app concept for iOS that lets you send links, articles, bookmarks, notes and the like to yourself. The difference from just doing this via Messages is this app lets you organize content into categories and more easily search than you can with Apple’s built-in offering. However, like Messages, everything is synced via iCloud so you can access it across devices. It’s all free, with no subscriptions. Fun concept!
That’s it for this week! May you find an interesting woodland critter to befriend.
My thanks again to Foofaraw for sponsoring this week’s issue, please go check them out!