The Miniphone Ultra, or “mpu”, is essentially just a case for the Apple Watch Ultra (versions 1, 2 or 3) that turns it into a miniature, minimalist smartphone. “There’s a guy I’ve been talking to who bought [an mpu] a while back,” says Jelley. “He told me that he’s had his phone shut away in his desk for two weeks. Nowadays, that’s kind of wild.”
OPERATIONS: wiping a bunch of stuff off my boards today READING:THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)
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Lots and lots of news, and I lost all of yesterday to keeping up with that while also trying to get moving on a couple of difficult jobs and trying to stay across email, all of which I pretty much failed at. See, I have a family member who’s supposed to be changing planes in Dubai in less than three weeks….! DXB (Dubai International Airport) is currently a shitshow. I was up watching BBC news until 1am.
And I lost the first chunk of the day to trying to e-sign a contract that, it turns out, has been locked by the person who signed it first. So it’s going to be that kind of day, and I’m checking out until tomorrow.
The Midwest-based startup has built what it calls Paper-fi: physical books with synchronized audio soundtracks that follow readers in real time as they turn each page. No chips embedded in the paper, no QR codes to scan. The system uses patented computer vision and other modes through a smartphone or smart glasses to track your place in the book and play the corresponding audio. Whether music, ambient sound, or narration, the soundtrack moves with you at your own pace.
The Kodak Charmera is an objectively awful camera and I love it.
ViviLnk
It’s not so much “point and shoot” as much as it is “spray and pray.”
I was at Konsztrukting Soundz last night – an unusually full house, which means I probably caught a new iteration of the mange, and a really good night. I have a few Bandcamp rabbit holes to go down this – Julia Brussel, who played violin, and Sylvia Hallett, who played violin, bicycle wheel and saw. Hearing someone play a mic’d-up bicycle wheel with violin bow and seashell was quite a thing.
Of course, All The News happened last night while my phone was muted. Khamenei dead, which I presume was an attempt at regime decapitation by people who don’t understand how Iranian government works.
I read about an influencer who identifies as a snake and was found slithering all over the streets of Japan in a snakeskin crop top and matching tail. Its been living rent-free in my head ever since.
2 years now in an environment that is snow roughly half of the year, and I have become a penguin. I am one with the ice. The trees are heavy, limbs decorated and hanging low. Layered and thick, holding their breath alongside me. We wait. It is beautiful, the waiting.
It was 15C yesterday and 17C the day before that. My winter clothes hang unloved. I’m in a thin viscose base layer and a chambray snap-front in grey like it’s May.
OPERATIONS: scripting, newsletter, processed an option offer STATUS: Frazzled by schedule but generally pretty good. Really wanted to move the office to the deli today but I have too much typing to do. Printing off visa shit for herself, for the grand trip I’m sending her on for her birthday. Inbox 116. READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+) and THE VISIONARIES, Wolfram Eilenberger (UK) (US+)
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Gorgeous day out there, and I’m stuck indoors waiting on several deliveries and trying to get my head around a project whose first-stage parameters shifted last night, while also trying to solve the prose serial project and talking through a possible new and odd thing with an artist acquaintance.
I skimmed the news and decided I couldn’t really be bothered. It’s all the bloody same again. I could ascribe ennui to trying to cut down on the cigarettes again and still having this mange in my system, but it seems today like everyone is reporting on the same five things and I couldn’t give a shit about any of them.
TRAGIC MAGIC by Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore arrived in the post yesterday:
Woke up, hung out with the mancub a bit, sat outside with coffee reading the news, ate berries and honey, did a couple of pages on the laptop, walked up to the coffee shop, worked in the notebook over a couple of double espressos, had a chat with the Italian ice cream man who lives at the top of the road. I feel like 90% of myself at this point, and like my 2026 has finally gotten started.
STATUS: inbox 116 but an embarrassing number of those are delivery notifications READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+) LISTENING:New Music Show LAST WATCHED: the new series of MOCK THE WEEK
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
I am almost back to normal – just a cough and a sore throat for the most part, which means everyone else was right when they told me this mange going around lasts three weeks or so.
I have just been informed that a new coffee shop has opened, around the corner from me. When Uber came to town last month, I considered using it to get to Leigh, where Little Fin Roastery is, and then I caught the mange. And then Uber pulled out of town, apparently because they didn’t want to meet the council’s standards on private car hire. I am not Uber’s biggest fan, but huge chunks of my area are poorly served by public transport and I’m not walking for an hour and a half just to get a decent cup of coffee. And my deli of choice doesn’t do coffee! So I’m going to walk up to the new place in an hour and see if it will serve as a morning office. And once my chest is cleared and my voice comes back, I’ll be using the deli as my afternoon office for half the week, drinking £10 glasses of fancy wine and telling myself I am getting a great deal of thinking done and I have begun the great leap forwards.
AI is prompting investors to reassess every business model under the sun (vaguely reminded of that tech news website that clearly used a random headline generator into which they plugged the tech buzzword of the moment, which is how you got the headline “Can IoT Help With Bicycles?” There’s also a sense of people thinking they can see a huge hammer in the distance, even though it’s mostly made of smoke, and assuming everything around them looks like a nail. I saw a story, I think on World Of Reel, about a guy who’d been given 30k to make an AI film and was trying to crowdsource an idea for what film to make on social media)
OPERATIONS: I have a huge consulting job to nail down and a prose serial project to solve and it all needs to be done this week. And I’m out on Saturday night, so I need to land the newsletter before then, too. I am copy-typing out of a notebook for the next hour. STATUS: I really need to stop buying clothes and I really need to stop looking at the watches at Sputnik1957. READING: READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)
…first prize went to the Wineflask, in which the almost centenarian Cratinus defended his own drinking with the line, ‘You’ll never fashion anything clever by drinking water!’
LISTENING:
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Yesterday I reduced a viburnum by half, hacked back salvia and holly, raked a bed, dug a trench in it, mixed a hundred litres of compost into the trench, and planted three cherry trees. Today I am actually less achy and knackered than I expected, especially bearing in mind that I still have this plague in my system. Once I have some charge in my phone, I’m going to check the weather and see if I’m going to have the space to plant some apple trees today.
Today it’s the Swatch Metropolis, yesterday it was the G-Shock G-Rescue because it was a day of working with saws and chainsaws and other implements of destruction.
READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)
When asked why he had made death the penalty for most offences, Draco replied that he considered the lesser offences to deserve it and had no harsher punishment for the greater ones.
I saw one of these on Valeluminal‘s IG account last night, and went straight to Amazon to look it up. I remember the Kodak Fling disposable camera from the 80s, and it turns out this is an intentionally low-res digital camera styled in a similar way. Charges off USB and runs off a TF card. There are six or seven different styles, and you don’t know which one you’ve got until the box arrives. Mine showed up eight hours after I ordered it.
Not my favourite of the designs, sadly, but it’ll do.
It’s about as long as my little finger and it comes with a keychain. The battery, according to reviews, gives out about three hours of steady use.
I have always loved digital cameras, but, if I’m honest, the better the iPhone camera got, the less interested I got. I loved the old digital cameras, that were a bit fuzzy and weird. I even did a photography book with an EyeModule, which was a black and white digital camera that plugged into a Handspring Visor PDA.
The Charmera comes, of course, with absolutely no instructions.
This was taken by accident while figuring out the pre-loaded image filters. I’m not mad at it at all. In fact, that was very much what I was hoping for. It’s going to get clipped to my day bag and I’m going to have some fun with it.
TODAY:
Snow-generating stickers. This is a weird one. Stickers that express chemicals on contact with snow, which rise up into the sky and seed clouds… so ski resorts can have more snow.
OPERATIONS: Many Things suddenly started Happening last night, right in the middle of me trying to dig my way out of all the things I’m behind on. Every time I walked away from my phone for five or ten minutes yesterday, I’d come back to another half-dozen notifications. And I still have to do Sunday’s newsletter. STATUS: I have had to put the Apple Watch back on, which displeases me but lots of Things have suddenly started Happening. Also had to fight a cat for access to my office today. Inbox 141 and climbing. READING:THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)
Empedocles himself claimed to have already been a bush, a bird, and ‘a mute fish in the sea’. But now, as a doctor, poet, seer, and leader of men, he had reached the highest rung in the cycle of incarnations—and could, just about, count himself among the immortal gods. In a story that is almost certainly false but too good not to tell, he killed himself by leaping into the flames of Mount Etna, either to prove that he was immortal or make people believe that he was.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
