📱Tiny Phones,Old Knives,and Noteshelf 3

It never was, and never will be

Jul 22, 2024

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

Was your job affected by the HUGE Crowdstrike outage?

Crazy that so much could go offline from a bad update. Y2k.

I think my FAVORITE part was how multiple airlines had to ground but SOUTHWEST is running on Windows 3.1 so they were fine.

It’s crazy just how much of our world runs on olddd outdated tech.

Anyway - I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Redbox is about to close up shop entirely. The website is still up but no longer works.

Rip to the final incarnation of Blockbuster.

Here in Tennessee we’ve been eating the last of our garden red potatoes, and we’re still waiting on our gold potatoes to finish growing.

Our tomatoes are about to ripen like crazy so I guess I need to buy a lot of mozzarella? I do love caprese salad.

We finished the latest season of the Boys (for those of you who’ve also watched - crazy Slenderman vibes right?) and are now about to start on Fallout soon.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

📱Tiny Phones

The last “decent” tiny phone we ever got was the Asus Zenphone 10.

They stopped the idea when they released the Zenphone 11 - so people have been on the “hunt” for a good tiny phone with decent specs since.

Eric Migicovsky has been working on a small Android phone project for some time, but I’m not sure when it will come out.

A new player has emerged on the basically nonexistent small phone playing field - a new Unihertz Jelly phone.

The Jelly Max.

It’s currently on Kickstarter - but the specs are incredible.

Tiny, lots of ram, decent battery, decent camera, and Ir remote control.

That’s about everything I’d every want in a phone.

The good news is that Unihertz makes real phones. I don’t believe this is vaporware.

The bad news is that it probably won’t get any updates any time soon. Unihertz is notoriously bad about updating phones.

It’s on Android 14 now, and likely will be forever.

It’s also THICK. like “Holy crap is this 2014 thick.”

I bet it would be easy to hold with one hand though - that’s probably why it’s like that.

Here’s a review I found.

I’m definitely going to add this to my shortlist of possible “next” phones - could be fun to have a tiny phone!

The Jelly Max

🔪Old Knives

I saw a wild tweet the other week and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.

Here.

I looked into it and it’s one hundred percent true.

Like - check out this listing.

The vibes here are incredible. I’d be happy to spend hours sharpening these for the simple joy of having cool knives.

Hey bro that’s a cool knife bro.

Yeah bro I imported it from Japan.

Prices are all over the place, and so are the types of knives available. Steak knives, little chef knives - lots of different kinds.

To get a whole set - you’d probably need to spend upwards of $200 or so - but the good news is you could split that with friends.

A lot of the sets have four or five knives, but each set is usually only one type of knife.

Ebay seller Charlie Japan has a lot of auctions, but there’s quite a few out there.

Before you get allll excited and head off to buy cool Japanese knives . . . people have a lot of mixed results with buying them. Here’s an interesting thread to pore through.

I’d love to give it a chance someday!

Check out some knives at the link.

Used Japanese Knives

💻Noteshelf 3

My iPad has two purposes most days.

1). Mind maps in Kinopio

2). occasionally scrolling Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok bc I don’t keep those on my phone anymore. (light social media detox)

I’ve discovered a new useful app that I’m considering buying the premium version of.

Noteshelf 3.

Noteshelf is a notetaking app designed to be used with an Apple pencil. You can create different journals, and take notes just like you would on a normal handwritten journal.

It works across devices too - iPad, phone, Mac. There’s an Android app too!

The journal function is pretty epic. You can take notes, use fun stickers, tag different pages, templates - you could easily do just about everything in this app.

My favorite feature is the ability to upload PDFs.

You can annotate them directly in the app!

notes, highlights, sticky notes - the works.

It’s the most intuitive PDF annotating app I’ve found so far.

Features I haven’t tried yet.

There’s some AI functionality you can use, as well as the ability to record meetings or classes. There’s a TON of templates so you could even use this as a weekly planner or calendar.

I’ll be buying the pro version soon. It’s $10 - one time only!

Check out Noteshelf at the link.

Noteshelf

🐙The Land of Random

Diveeeeeeeee into the Land of Randommmmm

Essential Phone PH-2

Someone got their hands on one of those CRAZY Essential prototype phones that were shaped like a narrow candybar. This thing is NUTS. I wish this thing actually came out . . .