📕🎮📲🎧 Books & Product Recs: A Beet Salad
Cool mobile apps, AI tools, summer reads, and recs for building your own computer
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Ten recommendations from our life
One type of post we do is called a Beet Salad - a mix of recommendations that has come up in our personal and work lives recently. In no particular order:
💻 BYO Computer: Frame.Work Laptops
We did a computer upgrade in our house recently and someone recommended to us Frame.Work laptops. Modular, customizable, and upgradable - they sit somewhere between do-it-yourself and a manufactured computer. It was fun to set up and teach the kids about the basics of computing innards.
💀 Fictional Podcast: Hamlet by Make Believe Association
My dad recently recommended this and it’s a high-production-quality rendition of the play’s events told through Hamlet’s inner voices. Each episode is short (10-20 mins). It’s been getting a lot of buzz in the theater community. (Apple Podcasts).
📖 Summer Read: Dungeon Crawler Carl
This is my summer addiction that I discovered after a friend dressed up as Carl for a Comic Con. It’s a 7-book fictional series and the best way to describe it is Ready Player One meets Old Man’s War meets Temeraire, written by an indie author. After an apocalypse, aliens make humans compete in a RPG-like dungeon, all televised where fan count is a key metric. It follows Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s talking cat Princess Donut. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and mixes action and mystery to keep things fast paced. The LitRPG writing style is unique, with a good dose of humor thrown in thanks to a sarcastic systems AI that controls the environment.
📖 Elementary School Read: Land of Stories
I just finished this 5-book series with our eight year old. It’s a delightful mix of adventure & world building written at just the right maturity level for “middle readers.” Random factoid: It’s written by Chris Colfer, an actor from the TV series Glee.
🎮 Puzzle Video Game: Blue Prince
This should be the Game of the Year. Other than Mario, I only play 1-2 video games per year and this one is a perfect mix of puzzles, world exploration, story, and grinding to level up. You play a young boy who has inherited a mysterious manor from your grandfather, if you can find the “46th room” of the house. Every day (a day in the game takes anywhere from 10-50 minutes), you get to lay out the rooms of your house in a 9x5 grid, solving puzzles and unlocking the path to this 46th room. (Steam).
🌳 Mobile App: iNaturalist
Take a picture of any animal, plant, and fungus and this app will identify it for you (using AI and crowdsourcing with experts if needed). I thought ChatGPT could do this - but a dedicated tool focused and tuned just for this is way better. It also has cool features like the ability to save all your identifications in an easy to recall virtual backpack. It’s part of a larger non-profit dedicated to helping people experience nature - check them out and get the app on their website.
🧑💻 Rapid Prototyping Tool: v0 by Vercel
Web UX prototyping tools have transformed the product discovery process. It’s never been easier go from idea to a visual UX representation and iterate on it from there. I’ve been using v0 by Vercel the most, after I had a chance to interview their CEO for an internal Microsoft PM event earlier this year.
📃 Newsletter: USAFacts.org
Care to know the hospital incident rate from firework injuries on the 4th of July vs. other days of the year? Or get non-partisan facts about bills proposed in Congress? USAFacts.org sends a weekly newsletter with timely facts based upon available government data - repackaged in an easily consumable form. Spending one minute on their website will let you know the type of factoids that you can get dropped to you, based upon what’s going on in the world right now. It’s a non-profit funded by Steve Ballmer.
👔 Men’s Clothing: Proper Cloth
Proper Cloth offers custom tailored men’s clothes with a large variety of styles and patterns. Every piece is made to order based upon your saved neck size, shoulder width, arm length, et cetera. It’s a cheat code for upleveling your dress clothes & style without having the spend a lot of time on it.
🏆Cool Swag: NYT Games Store
We are a Connections, Wordle, Strands, Mini family - our mornings proceed in that order. So when I saw they have custom stickers, hats, and mugs over at the New York Times Game’s Store, I immediately grabbed some of our favorites. A “But first, Connections” mug is out for delivery as I type this.