🏠Cosmic Homes, Waifu Earbuds, and the Return of Gizmos

Gizmos be Gizmoing

May 06, 2024

Hey friends!

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

Our garden is growing quite nicely now. The onions are sprouting nicely, and the carrots are all sprouting too!

I’m most excited to see our potatoes and strawberries come up.

I have a bad feeling that Peter Rabbit (sans jacket unfortunately but yes we have a big rabbit) will eat most of our strawberries, but oh well.

I watched Grave Encounters last week. Pretty creepy found footage film. I’m gonna try and watch The Borderlands as well. I’m gotta keep on this Found Footage kick while Tubi has a nice selection to watch.

We’re finishing up Delicious in Dungeon right now. It’s a great show!

Lots of cooking, but with monsters. Think Food Wars!

I still need to watch the whiskey anime movie - Komada - A Whisky Family.

Oh! I got my bloodwork back from the doctor - nothing serious. soooooo maybe the “almost blacking out” (see last week) was just stress?

Who knows!

If you’ve been waiting on Arc Browser for Windows - it’s now available by the way.

Let’s dive in.

🏠Cosmic Homes

Small homes continue to fascinate me.

Despite the fact that I’ll likely never live in one - the idea is quite fun.

Meet Cosmic Buildings, a new tiny home manufacturing company.

Their first batch of 100 homes is available in California now.

Cosmic focuses on self-sustainability - with each home coming with solar panels and battery by default. You can upgrade to full solar and a bigger battery - but you have alternative energy out the gate!

Want water recycling? You can add that too!

One interesting aspect is that they don’t just sell the homes to you - they also will install your home, lay the foundation and do all “that stuff.”

It doesn’t look like that’s included in the pricing of the home, but I could be wrong.

The sizes run as follow - Studio with 380 sq feet, 1 bedroom with 595 square feet, and 2 bedrooms with 750 square feet.

Each room looks quite spacious - despite the small square footage.

Here’s a picture of the Studio version.

The aesthetics are epic - and you can practically hear the minimalism of these homes—big empty rooms with no unnecessary elements.

DO YOU - DO YOU REALLY NEED A KITCHEN ISLAND??? OR A GIANT DESK??

I do!

Note: The Boxabl has more space in the kitchen.

Though I don’t think i’d ever embrace the minimalism of Cosmic Buildings, I do love the solar panel / water recycling features.

I personally lean more towards the Connect Homes when it comes to daydreaming about cool modular prefab tiny homes.

Check out Cosmic Buildings at the link!

Custom Buildings

🔉Waifu Earbuds

I stumbled across a new niche that I didn’t know existed.

I heard about a brand called Moondrop and their HiFi Smartphone.

It’s a CHONKY phone - check it out in this Youtube Reel.

The audience buying this phone is likely to be niche - so anyone buying this will care more about the audio DAC features than the actual phone itself.

As demonstrated by this audio forum member.

It’s an audio device that happens to be a phone too - essentially.

Moondrop sells a lot of earbuds, in-ear monitors, headphones, and other audio devices.

It’s more of an Audiophile brand, rather than a typical consumer purchase.

I had never heard of Moondrop before - so I did some investigation - and was surprised that they feature . . . waifus??

Each Moondrop product features an anime character. Heck, some even feature a little acrylic character to go on your desk.

WHAT.

There are other brands that do this too. Truthear is one such example.

It’s a thing across multiple companies too.

And apparently, the audio quality of some brands are better than Sony or Bose.

Wild what exists on the internet - eh?

Check out Moondrop and Truthear at the links!

(I’ve heard good things about these cheap Moondrop earbuds btw)

OH - and you can get a lot of them pretty cheap used on Ebay.

Truthear

Moondrop Lab

⚙The Return of Gizmos

Ever since the original iPhone - tech has consolidated down to a few portable mediums.

Phones, Laptops, and Tablets.

The average consumer usually has at least two of these devices - maybe all three!

Everything is a rectangular slab - with or without a keyboard.

Gone are the days of needing a recorder, or camera, or game boy . . . your phone/laptop/tablet does it all!

But - the times are changing.

Portable Gaming

The Nintendo Switch changed everything for portable gaming . . . but it took years before it had any serious competition.

After a few years, everyone said “huh” this is a good idea after all.

So, the Steam Deck, Lenovo Legion Go, and others have charged into the space.

Devices like the Playdate or Anbernic have added a “fun” spin to that category for the “alternative tech” crowd. Oh - don’t forget the Analogue Pocket!

In the space of a few years - the early 2000’s of portable gaming devices have returned! Based on how well the Steam Deck and its ilk are doing - I’d wager the category is here to stay.

AR/VR

AR/VR is also trying to break through into the mainstream. Whether it’s the Meta Quest or Apple Vision Pro - this category is still in its infancy. Until there’s a killer app - I don’t see this changing yet.

Maybe it’ll be some immersive RPG - maybe it’ll be virtual Tamagotchi. Who knows.

AI Devices?

AI devices are trying to “manifest” a new device category.

Though the AI pin and Rabbit are the most well-known (and infamous) - it’s worth keeping an eye on others in the emerging category.

Frame Glasses - AI glasses
Nothing is adding ChatGPT to their earbuds
and don’t forget the Meta smart glasses

Whether glasses, earbuds, or “gizmo” - one of these will probably stick in some way or another.

The question is - what device - if any - will make it from this category into mainstream use?

If I were to wager - I think the “insert random LLM here” earbud integration will likely be the winner. Most iPhone users already have Airpods. AI Airpods would be an easy sell.

The Alternative World

Whether it’s E-ink tablets, or tablets without blue light - alternative gizmos continue to make small inroads into the mainstream. Most of these are just different takes on the existing mediums.

Boox has gotten rather popular on TikTok
The Daylight tablet looks pretty cool
Hisense color e-ink phone

🐙The Land of Random

Let’s Get Random!!!!

Terminal Coffee

Have you ever wanted to buy coffee on a website that looks and operates like a terminal? You can! as soon as the coffee is back in stock. Mad props to the website creator - because this website is just plain cool.

Terminal Coffee