Hey friends! I’ve got some very exciting news for you this week.

We put an offer in on a house here in Tennessee . . .

and it was accepted! We are now in closing, and will close next month if all goes well. As first-time home buyers, this process is all a bit confusing and intense.

I’m excited to get out the money pit of renting - and into something we can build equity with. I’ll also be able to have an office space too! I’m looking forward to setting up my monitors and equipment on an actual desk.

I also want to start gardening too! I used to grow tomatoes, beans, squash, and other vegetables when I was a kid. I’d like to expand to potatoes, blueberries, and maybe blackberries.

Before we put an offer down on the house - I ran a report on “Died in House” to make sure nothing sketchy has happened - like drug labs, mysterious deaths.

Can you think of anything worse than buying a house and experiencing some poltergheist phenomena.

Yeah. No Thank you. I always want to know if anything “weird” has happened.

If you haven’t run one before - they’re quite interesting, and even show you the names of previous owners! If you’d like to run one - here’s my affiliate code.

Died in House

We’ve been watching the latest seasons of The Boys and Stranger Things - and I’m not sure how I feel about this season of Stranger Things.

Stranger Things always had horror vibes - but I feel like they kicked them to American Horror Story levels this season.

As the “gang” gets older - so do the stakes I guess?

Don’t get me wrong - I love horror, but I always felt like Stranger Things leaned more into the mystery/suspense side of things more so in seasons 1-3.

I’m curious to see where this season goes . . .

Speaking of horror movies - I watched this cheesy WWII one called “Warhunt” this week. It was definitely B or C movie - but still quite interesting.

I picked up a Bored Breakfast Club NFT this week. It’s likely the last NFT I’ll buy for a while - as I’m mostly waiting to see how a lot of the projects I’m “hodling” do.

I’ll get free coffee from this one though.

Everytime their “community wallet” fills up - every holder can redeem a free package of coffee! Some nice IRL utility! :)

💀Dead Man Trigger App

Years ago - we learned the important words from What about Bob “We’re all going to die.”

It’s a hilarious if morbid scene.

In a world where we’re all hyper-connected through tech - how do we prepare for this eventuality?

When we pass beyond the vale - and our Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Blog, personal website, Crypto wallets, Discord chats, gaming - all fall silent.

unless we’ve set up little bot automations to do stuff - which always ends up looking whacked - like when someone famous dies and their twitter account still does the “thank you for following me _____” tweets.

I think eventually we’ll be able to set up AI personalities that try to emulate us - but that tech is still about 5-10 years away from working properly.

At the very least - we need to have a little black book with all our PW’s and wallet keys inside - with some instructions for what to do for our most important contacts.

Message _________ on Discord and tell him the news of my passing - and ask him if he wants any of my EverQuest gear.

There’s a new app called Fline that’s built to monitor your phone usage - and message trusted contacts of your choice - if you haven’t used your phone in 24 hours.

That’s a brilliant spin on the “dead hand” concept. I’ve often thought about this idea - and couldn’t figure out how to ensure that alerts went out at the proper times.

Would you have to click a button every few days? Would the message go out if it didn’t track you using Twitter at all? Etc.

Phone activity is a great way to figure out if something has gone wrong.

I’d say it should go one step further and be connected to your laptop/tablet use as well. This would account for an accidentally smashed phone - for example.

However - for a beta, this is a fantastic minimum viable product.

Hopefully - it will let you customize the messages you are sent. For example - you could proactively give your trusted contacts a USB with your most important information - but encrypt it so it can only be decoded with a specific password.

Heck - maybe you could even set it up with an automation where if there’s no phone activity for 10 days, it could automatically send out a message saying where to find the will, etc.

I’m looking forward to getting access to the beta!

We're all going to die

Cheaper Prescriptions

In the USA - Prescription drug costs are messed up.

Other than the RX companies themselves (and probably many of their employees would agree after a few drinks) - just about everyone will agree that “the rent is too dang high” so to speak.

I’m excited about Mark Cuban’s recent startup “Cost Plus Drug” which seeks to make things much more affordable by cutting out ALL the middlemen.

Seriously - this startup is literally the definition of “techno optimism.”

The cost savings are insane - like Moviepass insane.

According to the site - Imatinb retails for over $2000, but they sell it for $14.40.

Mind blowing!

Heck - you might be able to find one of your medications on the site right away, and start saving money once you transfer the prescription through your doctor.

The prices are laid out very transparently too!

Cost Plus Drugs only takes a 15 percent markup - and they tell you that too.

Every product we sell is priced exactly the same way: our cost plus 15%, plus the pharmacy fee, if any. When you get your medicine from Cost Plus Drug Co., you’ll always know exactly how we arrived at the price you pay. And as we grow and our costs go down, we will always pass those savings on to you! (source)

I really hope Cuban’s startup ends up taking on all the big pharmaceutical companies - and wins.

Now someone needs to do the same for hospitals . . .

Check it out at the link!

Cost Plus Drugs

👂Listen to the Fruit

Listen! Do you hear it?

The fruit is speaking

Oh! What does it say?

It says that if it isn’t eaten soon, it’s going to rot away into a puddle

CEO Katherine Sazove and Strella Biotechnology are listening in to what the fruit is saying.

Sizov is . . . working to reduce food waste by deploying hardware that detects ethylene, a chemical released by fruit as it ripens. “The food supply chain doesn’t treat food like a living organism,” Sizov said. But fruit communicates with other fruit through the language of ethylene. “Why don’t we listen to what these organisms are saying to us?” (source)

It’s a really interesting question that I’ve NEVER thought about. Why don’t we track the chemical ripening process of fruit to determine its ripening?

Strella has developed IoT devices that monitor the conditions of harvested produce, such as temperature and humidity, as well as the amount of ethylene emitted. They can be deployed in warehouses after picking, in shipping containers traversing the globe, and at retail sites where food is sold. The startup has algorithms to make sense of the ethylene levels and other data to let businesses know which produce needs to move when and how close it’s getting to being overripe. The company said it’s providing monitoring for more than 70% of the U.S. apple and pear market. (source)

This technology has the potential to feed millions and save millions.

In this one Mashed article - there’s an estimate that we toss over $500 worth of fruit a year.

If we paid $50 for a IOT device that told us when it was going bad - we’d probably eat way more of it.

Notification Popup: You waste $5 if you don’t eat those apples by Thursday. Make a apple pie or something.

Think of all food we could save AND all the PR for food companies.1

Heck - Food stores could employ the tech to give discounts based on chemical signals.

I plan to keep my eye on Strella to see where this tech goes . . .

Check out the website at the link!

The Fruit is Speaking

🐙The Land of Random

Randomness for your random web adventures

Corrupt a File

This nifty little webtool will corrupt files for you. I imagine most of the web traffic to this site comes from colleges.

Corruption

High Tech Monster

Yeah . . . if this thing is chasing me, I don’t think there’s any hope. James Hawkins is really talented at concept art.

This Website is IdiotProof

Like, there’s absolutely no way to make a mistake on this website.

There's just one thing to do

To Blockbuster We Go

Hop in the Delorean fren

Hamster Home

Care for your digital hamsters in this simple game. It’s hilarious. Mine is hiding in the sawdust . . .

Feed tha cute Hamster

Play with the Altair 8800 Computer

I have no idea how this works but it has cool lights. They say if you can understand this - you have a good idea of how a computer REALLY works.

Altair 8800

Big Tech Gamed the System

Fascinating little bite sized stories of how Whatsapp and others played “the game.”

It's all a game

🎵TikToks You Can’t Miss

I thought that was ice or rocks for like 10 seconds

Yo I want a fake switchblade skateboard too

How the heck did that come off the tree like that

I’m all ears

I’m down to drink one of these every morning!

Rip for our friend Tiffany. Extremely sad.

🕸️The Land of Web3

Easy Demons Club is a neat anime inspired project that aims to create streetwear, figurines, and more. I’m very partial to anime - and the ole’ skull and bones, so I’m quite looking forward to buying a cool jacket when they release them! They’ve worked in the streetwear space since 2017 - so they have legs to stand on. I own the one above, and may pick up another at some point.

Easy Demons Club

This offline Bitcoin looks interesting. I’m curious to see how secure it is. It would be fun to have one of these as “emergency bitcoin.”
Salesforce is adding Nft’s to their platform. Seriously!
This crypto cycle was absolutely nuts - this thread is a fantastic summary.

That’s all for this week! See you next time. :)

1

The one downside of being in the marketing profession is that it makes me quite skeptical of companies and their “missions.” It’s PR turtles all the way down most of the down . . . .but I digress. This startup’s tech would quite literally be peak PR news - like when you drool at a good steak.

The Land of Random

💀Dead Man Trigger App, Cheaper…