November 12, 2023

Hiro.Report - 12NOV23

Hiro.Report - 12NOV2023

Happy Veterans' Day weekend to all here in the US! Here are a few fun things from this week:

• 🔠 Wilco Loft Sans: Wilco, yes, the Chicago-based indie band, released their first ever font this week, and it's a total delight. Produced with the super talented type foundry, Simplebits, it's just really fun, relaxed and highly legible. If you're familiar at all with Wilco's music, you'll see it and immediately go, "Oh, of course, that's Wilco's font."
• 🤖 Humane: A couple of ex Apple folks (and, I assume a whole army of engineers) revealed the much hyped Humane AI Pin this week. The somewhat low energy 10 minute announcement video is worth a watch, there's some very cool tech at play here: A privacy-oriented camera and microphone that pair with AI to give you realtime, personalized feedback about the world around you, a laser projection display that you interact with via gestures, etc. From what I've seen, I'd say this device is very much not for me, but I'm honestly really excited to see a new company making innovative personal tech that's not just a rehash of the smart phone. I'm eager to see some reviews when this thing actually releases next year.
• 📠 DAK Catalog: Speaking of innovative personal technology, Cabel Sasser, founder of Panic and one of the makers of the Playdate portable gaming device, dropped a bombshell of a blog post this weekend, wherein he revealed that he's spent the past decade collecting and digitizing issues of the amazing DAK Catalog. I honestly don't know if I ever came across any issues of this in my youth, but man would I have loved the heck out of it if I did. It ran from the early 1980's through the early 1990's and featured all kinds of wild personal and home tech. Take a look for some serious 1980's tech nostalgia-- high tech portable cassette players, wrist watches that serve as remote controls for your TV, telephones attached to a computer monitor and keyboard, etc. Cabel is also just a great writer, so the post is really fun to read.
• 📔 OrbitKey Folio: I backed this project quite a few months ago when it was a Kickstarter, and finally received it last week-- It's a really nice leather folio in an A5 size for holding a small bullet journal or other notebook. It also features thoughtful organization for holding business cards, a few other loose papers, and likely an iPad mini. Honestly, in terms of Maslow's Hierarchy of needs, a leather notebook cover comes very shortly before or after self actualization, but man it's nice.
•  Spatial Video: Apple released a new public beta this week for iOS 17.2 which adds a new setting buried deep in the Camera settings: The option to turn on the toggle to record Spatial Video with the iPhone 15 Pro. Spatial Video (a fancy name for stereoscopic or 3D video) can really only be viewed on the as yet unreleased Apple Vision Pro, but several very lucky bloggers and journalists got to give it a try this week with stellar reviews. Several of the reviewers described the experience of watching Spatial Video as being like "watching a memory" playback, which was enough for me to run out and download the beta and start trying to take a much Spatial Video of my kids as possible. I'm especially looking forward to trying it out to record the holidays.

That's it for tonight! Have a great week, everyone.