👀All My Links,Revisiting Retro + Beeper,Live in a Train Car

You want the train life don't you?

David Nichols

Apr 15, 2024

Hey friends!

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Land of Random.

I think we had the final week of false spring here - at least I hope so.

Our garden is now planted.

I’ll keep you updated as the plants grow.

Did y’all get a chance to watch the Eclipse last Monday? Very cool.

Now it’s time for the millions of Cicadas to descend . . . .

I finished the second season of Halo last week. It was surprisingly good - given just how disappointing the first season was.

I’ve gotten back into Tubi horror movies - Camp Host is a campy yet entertaining horror comedy, and Preservation is a pretty disturbing survival horror film.

If you get a chance to check out what NewDemos showcased the other week - make sure you check it out. Really cool software demos!

For example - this futuristic RTS is unlike any game I’ve seen in recent memory.

Shall we dive in?

🖇All The Links

FINALLY - I’ve done it.

I’ve figured out a way to automate my links in such a way that I can share them and not have to do a lot of extra work.

I’m close to - or over 2,000 links at this point. I want to share them with you in a fun and interesting way, rather than a spreadsheet.

You may remember that I promised a solution for this last year. (In fact - here’s a link to the absolutely insane mindmap).

(It may be one of the biggest mindmaps on Kinopio).

It took so long that I got deeply discouraged and gave up.

SOOO - instead I turned to a solution that fixed three things.

Ease of use - The other mindmap was so big, it was a slow and clumsy browsing experience—information overload. It’s so incredibly complex, exploring it is difficult. Heck, sometimes it doesn’t even load on my computer. It’s that slow.
Automation - If there’s anything that makes me frustrated, it’s doing work over again. I wanted to automate things within my current workflow. A good friend of mine helped me figure out how to do json webhooks for Kinopio, and we were off to the races. (more on this later)
Exploration - I wanted to allow people to explore my link curation and I wanted to share different things I’ve worked on. Now people can easily explore tons of links, ideas, see what I’m testing, and more.

Here’s the new workflow.

I find new content via Inoreader, and share it to Raindrop. Once I decide what I want to write about/share, I tag the link and send it through IFTTT to Kinopio. (This will save me so many HOURS of work). Title, note, tag, and images pass through to Kinopio - the tag determines which board it goes to - thus eliminating my need to move things around manually. The question mark signifies something I’m thinking about adding - so keep an eye out for surprises.

The best part of all this is that it works across mobile, desktop, or iPad. Completely cross-platform!

Each board has different things to explore - crazy links, cool links, stuff to watch, tools, random stuff, software I’m testing, and more.

I’ll be updating this (for real this time) every week!

Be forewarned - there’s only a few links in each board at the moment - I have a lot to backlog into them.

But - what matters is that I now have an automated path forward.

Check it out at the link, and save it to your bookmarks. Here’s the RSS feed too if you’d like to stay up to date.

Explore The Land of Random

😊Revisiting Retro and Beeper

Retro

I’ve been using the Retro app for about two weeks now - and I have to say - this is way better than Instagram.

Well - at least better than the past 7 or so years of Instagram.

The “share your photos” app has become a bloated monster - with everything from video calls to shopping - a mind sucking “scroll until you die” platform.

Do you REALLY get on Instagram to meaningfully interact with friends/family, or is it just to scroll reels and occasionally share them with friends?

Retro rolls it all back to basics - share pictures or videos with your friends, comments, chat - the basics.

If you’re opening an app to see friends and family, it should be easy to see family and friends first. And you shouldn’t have to wade through a sea of other content and fall down rabbit holes just to get there. You should be able to close the app session and feel like you got exactly what you were looking for. (Retro About Page)

The UI/UX has some reminiscent elements of TikTok - which is a smart choice honestly.

Photos are separated by day, and you can upload from your gallery - and it uses the photo data to automatically assign it to the correct days of the week. You can upload videos/photos going back years if you want to!

The cool extras are a journal feature (create a photo dump with friends to signify a special occasion) and postcards.

Send photo postcards to friends - which is a really interesting feature to build into your app.

Check out Retro at the link if you’re interested!

Retro App

Beeper

The “all in one” chat app has been in the media cycle quite a lot these days.

Heck, the “iMessage on Android” war may have been one of the tipping points for that government lawsuit against Apple.

I could have signed up for Beeper in the past - but I wasn’t willing to pay $15 a month (if I remember correctly - might have been $10) for it.

The main premise is that all of your chats are available in the same app - one place to chat without opening multiple apps.

If you’re like me - opening WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Instagram chat, Signal and Lord knows what else every day is annoying - especially when

Last week - Beeper finally came out of beta, and is currently available for free.

Once you connect all your chat apps - it’s pretty straightforward to use.

New chats surface to the top, and a small logo lets you know which platform they came from.

The best part is the desktop apps. Those are awesome. Now I can plug in my phone and still have all chats accessible.

This may be a permanent part of my “smartphone app deck” but we’ll see!

Check it out at the link.

Beeper

🚞 Live in a Train Car

Choo Choo!

How about living in a train car?

I’ve heard about train hotels but i’ve never heard of train homes.

I recently discovered this niche after seeing this sad abandoned model train on Reddit.

Someone in the comments mentioned that model train websites will often try to find buyers for homes that have giant model train displays. buyers who won’t yeet them off to the dump.

That got me thinking. Hmmm. Homes with trains. What about train homes?

No - not the train cars you can buy and run on a train track (that’s a whole nother rabbit hole to explore).

Trains you can live in - like this one.