🏠Order a Dream Home,Widget Media, and Cubby!

buy a house like new shoes

Hey friends!

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

Last week there was some kind of weird error where Gmail said my newsletter was “dangerous.” No idea why - I assume Substack is having some kind of DMARC/DKIM issues.

We had a big Tornado here in Columbia - but it passed us by! (I accidentally drove through the first rotations on the way home from work). There was some pretty bad damage in the area though.

Did you get a chance to see the Northern Lights? I had to use my camera to see them - but it was incredible! I NEVER thought I’d ever be able to see the Northern Lights in Tennessee of all places.

The solar storm is proving to be a boon for Ham Radio operators though - I found this thread pretty interesting.

FORTUNATELY - this solar storm wasn’t the “improbable but not impossible” BIG ONE soooo I’m thankful for that.

My youngest son is CLIMBING - CLIMBING at just around 9 months old. He climbed up the ladder on our little swingset. INSANE.

There’s a lot of cool software coming out in Beta right now.

I got early access to Granola.so and Feel Muddy - so I’ll be reviewing those soon.

Notion broke out in the old days of 2016 - and it kinda feels like we’re watching some sort of non-linear revolution against it.

Shall we dive in?

🏠Order a Dream Home

I’m on some kind of “cool home” kick right now - so I do apologize for the second home article in a row.

My wife sent me the website for Welcome Homes and I said to myself - Oh this is cool. I gotta write about this.

Unlike the homes we looked at last week - these have an “all in one” price.

First of all - shout out to whoever they hired for Copywriting - because this is good stuff.

Building a home sounds hard. It doesn't need to be. We've streamlined the homebuilding process down to a few clicks. Design your home, select your property, and leave the rest to us. (source)

YESSS.

Welcome Homes takes care of everything - property AND building the home.

Just search for a property in a state where “Welcome” offers homes, and check out the “all in one price.”

Welcome Homes is more expensive - like your second home with an established, well-paying career kind of home.

For example - this 3-acre property in Georgia features the all-in-one price of just under 1 Million Smackaroos.

source

You can choose from different home models - so the price fluctuates depending on what you pick. There’s lots of models - from traditional to cutting edge modern COOL.

Once you choose your home - you can do different customization options and upgrades.

You can easily turn a 800K home into a 1.5 M home in no time flat. They got upgrades people, upgrades.

From steam showers to towel warmers, and generators - it’s incredible.

The standard homes are epic - so if in a hypothetical world - I bought a house like this I’d probably add a generator and maybe one or two other things.

What’s wild is the checkout page - you can start an offer, or book a consultation.

Like - that’s it. Once your “all in one” price is accepted, your loan, approval, and all that is done - you just sit and wait for your new home to be built.

Pretty cool!

It’s exciting to watch the “scary world of home building” turn into something that feels more like buying a custom pair of Vans.

Check out Welcome Homes at the link!

📱Widget Media

Widget social media is one of the most interesting trends I’ve been tracking over the past few years.

Locket, Airbuds, Vibes . . .

They’re lowkey ways of interacting with people without the “brain drain” of endless social media scrolling.

A new one called “Bubbl Widget” is a kind of “social sticky note” app where you share thoughts, feelings, random ramblings.

You can see new posts on the widget - and send reactions (kind of like a mini social media feed).

At the moment - the app is only available on IOS.

It’s uncannily similar to Vibes - and Vibes has more features.

Vibes works on your lock screen - and can include text, images, geolocation, and Spotify music from a small group of friends.

That being said - it’s fun to start seeing some different competitors in this nascent space.

Whether Bubbl, Vibes, or any other social media widget app - it’s fun to see the various “core” functions of social media (pics, statuses, reactions) deconstructed into simple apps.

Social media - just for you and a small group of friends - not endless brainless content that you’ll scroll until your eyeballs fall out.

Airbuds remains my favorite - I’m curious to see where the space goes from here!

Check out Bubbl at the link.

📝Cubby

Have you heard about Cubby?

It’s a new AI assisted LLM research tool.

…That’s a lot of buzzwords…let me boil it down.

It’s a app where you can post links, article highlights, notes, YT videos, podcasts, PDFs.

Oh! You can also add RSS feeds, Twitter Bookmarks, Podcasts, Youtube Subscriptions, and Newsletters.

It’s not just a bookmark manager, but also a curation tool, and an AI tool!

Use AI to create articles and summaries of all your findings.

Cubby is essentially what one could call the next evolution of a Bookmark manager like Raindrop.

Add and browse content, but “do stuff with it” using AI. (You can also add a team and comment and such too).

THAT is pretty interesting.

Sometimes I get pretty deep into my research rabbit holes - and a software where I can add a YT video and get a written AI transcript of the entire video is tempting.

no - I don’t have an hour to watch this. Let me read the transcript in ten minutes to see if there’s anything useful.

It can be pretty useful to summarize long docs - one cool features that Cubby utilizes is to provide sources when it does a summary of a article.

So - when you find something interesting, you can jump straight to the text for further reading.

For example - I used a Cubby doc (AI created summary or whatever you want via prompt injection) to summarize a reddit critique of the Barber Beats music genre.

I asked it to link me to references - and it did!

There’s definitely a lot of use cases I could see myself using Cubby for - especially if I wrote The Land of Random every day as my full-time job.

Example: Summarize this 1 hour long video about abandoned train stations and tell me which one is the most interesting or scary.

Cubby is cool!

The RSS / bookmarking features aren’t quite robust enough for my use case (example - running through 10,000 links a week in Cubby would be rough, or 40 different Cubby folders to sort links) to justify my moving from Raindrop or Inoreader - but I still think it’s pretty powerful software.

Once there’s a IFTTT integration - I might just circle back . . .

Check it out at the link!

For those of you interested in what tools I add to my toolchest, Cubby doesn’t make the list yet - but it might someday if I ever reach a point where I’m doing The Land of Random at a grander scale.

🐙 The Land of Random

Into the Land of Random we gooooooooooo!

Le Blob

Blob le blob. It’s more like Flubber, but move your mouse around to watch the blobs jump around.

Welcome???

Don’t know what this website is. Don’t know what it does. but . . . it’s cool and cyberpunk.

Doom Scroll

It’s Doom, and you scroll. What more is there to want in life?

Duolicious

Today we dip our toes into the dark side of the internet to learn about Duolicious, a 4chan dating app.

Cat Go Boom?

La La La La La La La

Plinky

This is an interesting little Bookmarking app. More of a Bookmarking app for “casuals” vs hardcore Raindroppers like me (and maybe you). Nice UI/UX so I’m curious to see where it goes.

Trashboard

It’s a dope skateboard THAT USES RECYCLED AIRCRAFT CARBON.

🌹Walled Garden Finds

Usage based Spaghetti is wild.

I’d like to do something like this once. just once.

This slaps.

I fear the day a restaurant near me sells one of these.

Ah yes, the “contact us” to cancel. Cursed.

That’s all for this week. unless you want to read about a flame-throwing robot.