Happy Sunday friends! Another Sunday, indeed, and we inch closer to the busy Christmas season with each passing hour. I’m not sure whether Christmas’s busyness is a good or a bad thing — there are so many people to connect with, and the joy of the season is worthy of praise and worship. But there’s also endless spending and gift giving; endless parties and events; endless drinking and eating. Every so often, the season can be overwhelming.

I’m still getting over the heartbreaking events of last weekend’s World Series finale. I truly don’t believe you could lose in a more crushing fashion. So much so that I’m unsure if I’ll ever get over the loss. Like, in my entire life. I’m expecting this is going to haunt me forever. Especially if the Blue Jays don’t make the World Series for another 35 years.

Lastly, I took the last week to do some research on margin investing and opted to open a margin account for the first time. I learned something pretty important, too, (which may cause some to question my financial capacity): You can actually lower your tax bill through margin investing. It is unclear to me why I didn’t know this before. This does depend slightly on your tax bracket — in Canada, you’d likely need to have taxable income greater than the base federal bracket of $57,000 for this to work. But here’s how it works:

Say you invest in shares in your margin account that pay you $100 of eligible dividend income. If you are paid at a 5% yield (which is high, admittedly), you’d have to invest $2,000 in those shares to receive the $100 of eligible dividend income. Let’s assume that $2,000 investment is made, all on margin.

If your margin borrowing rate is 4.5%, you’d pay $90 of interest in the year on that $2,000 margin investment.

Easy math, right off the bat — $100 of eligible dividend income less $90 of interest expense means you’re ahead by $10.

But there’s more.

On your tax return, eligible dividends are grossed up, and you receive a big eligible dividend tax credit. The marginal rate on eligible dividends is only slightly higher than a capital gain in Canada. This dividend tax credit offsets tax otherwise owing on the grossed up eligible dividend.

And then you deduct the interest of $90 from your net income.

If I run this hypothetical scenario in a tax return, the tax liability decreases by $15. Meaning not only are you ahead the $10 on the dividends, you’re also ahead $15 on your tax bill. $25 on a $2,000 investment is 1.25%, which isn’t huge, but it’s large considering you borrowed the money to purchase the shares.

Overall, I find this entire idea pretty interesting. Margin accounts are high risk/high reward, so I don’t believe they are recommendable for everyone. If you’re curious, though, I’d recommend doing some research.

Thoughts on Buying the Bells and Whistles

We recently had the opportunity to purchase a new vehicle, opting to retire the aging 2007 Toyota Corolla I have been driving for the last eight years. I’m going to miss that car — it was rock solid, cost me next to nothing in fuel and maintenance, and was super easy to drive in congested areas or in the city. We officially say goodbye to the vehicle this coming week. I will remember these nine years fondly.

A local dealer received a vehicle on trade that we had our eye on for quite some time. It came in with very low mileage and had the top-end trim package — every trick and doodad the vehicle could come with, this one had it.

Because of the bells and whistles, though, the used vehicle was slightly pricier than a brand-new model, albeit a more “baseline” model. We went back and forth a bit but opted for the slightly-used-but-fully-loaded option.

Within minutes of driving off the lot, I knew we had made the right choice. There are certain features inside this vehicle I would have never considered paying for before. Features like a 360-degree camera for parking, or sensors to kick open the back door if you have groceries in your hands, or a 28-way adjustable driver's seat. Are these features a person needs? By no means! But for the first time, I understand why vehicle manufacturers produce these features, why they charge more for these features, and why buyers like these features.

I’d be curious if this extends to other areas of life. Is it always worth spending the money for the extra features? Surely, it’s not a universal truth. But how do you know where it begins and ends? I know I won’t use 96 GB of RAM in a Mac, though I know I will appreciate having that amount occasionally, here and there. Is it worth it to spend the money?

All this is to say, “Are the bells and whistles worth it?” most certainly doesn’t garner a universally true answer. It doesn’t garner a “Nobody needs those features”, nor does it garner a “You’re not experiencing the real thing without those features”. You have to know what you like, and if you don’t know what you like, you might have to take the risk occasionally to determine if spending the money is worth it to you.

In this particularly case, I am glad we opted to spend the money to experience the highest-end features.

Delegate everything

Seth Godin touches on the dreaded “delegation” work, which I’ve come to believe is a swear word. Not that delegation is in and itself a bad thing, but rather that it’s so often used as a way to hide a poor work ethic.

I am well aware that delegation is a necessary part of business. The business owner simply can’t do everything, especially when their skill-set is better served doing high-level work. I’m an accountant — this is literally how accounting firms are built.

But you can’t lead a group of people and always be telling them what to do. Leadership requires that you get your hands dirty on things that you shouldn’t be getting your hands dirty with, if only to show you are in the trenches with your teammates.

And delegation itself requires time — time to create the standard operating procedure, time to create the educative-aspect for your teammates, time to review the task when completed. Those three time grabs, combined with others, often amounts to the amount of time it takes to do the task itself.

But Josh!, you say, give a man a fish, and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime! Of course, those three-plus time grabs accrue benefit over time. However, they only accrue benefit if you have the same tasks over and over.

Again, I’m very well aware the modern professional world doesn’t work without delegation. And I’m hypocritical if I’m suggesting that I don’t delegate things to my teammates. I’m simply saying that “delegation” is far easier said than done, and is frequently done so much more poorly than what people lead on. I don’t think most delegators give delegation and its byproducts enough thought.

The Second Cup

Adam Savage’s Tested Review of the M5 Apple Vision Pro

I will order a Vision Pro here shortly to test for a few weeks. I have a few use cases I think it will work nicely for, including replacing my seldom-used Studio Display at home, watching sports, and end of day reading. We’ll see if it works — it seems most folks’ Vision Pro is simply collecting dust — but I’m hopeful.

Dodgers-Blue Jays was a World Series for the ages

Recency bias is so difficult in sports. I believe Connor McDavid is the best hockey player in the history of the world, simply because I have watched old hockey from the 1980s, and there’s no chance Wayne Gretzky would do today what he did back then. The same goes for baseball — I do not believe for one second Babe Ruth would have been a strong two-way player in today’s game given footage like this.

So if I say this was the best World Series of all-time? Well, there’s probably a lot of recency bias, and I’m most likely not correct. But to say it was the best World Series of my lifetime? I simply don’t remember any baseball ever being played in this exciting a fashion ever before.

Architect Breaks Down Iconic Baseball Stadiums

More baseball this Sunday. I can’t get enough right now.

QK Alice Duo, The Full Review

Alexotos is my favourite keyboard reviewer on the planet right now. His video work is great. He is entertaining. He’s Canadian! He shoots with a fantastic camera. And his photography is perhaps the best of the best. I’ve wanted an Alice Duo-style keyboard for some time, and I’ve largely held off because I am afraid of the build process. This review doesn’t help, though.

Happy Sunday. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.

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Let’s go Blue Jays! Happy Sunday everyone. I’m writing this before the nail-biting game 7 takes place, so only hindsight will tell if my comments and emotions are misplaced or on point.

This current Toronto Blue Jays run is bringing together our country in ways no political movement could ever do. Do the Blue Jays have any Canadian players? Sort of, if you count Vladdy Guerrero Jr. a Canadian. But this isn’t the point at all — these players have decided to play in Canada, to bring their families to Canada, and to put the Canadian flag on their chest. They’ve chosen us, so we’ve chosen them.

It’s been so long since this country had anything to cheer about. We need a little win here. And even if they don’t pull it off Saturday night, they’ve given this lifelong Blue Jays fan memories for the next 35-year wait. This has been my family this October 2025, and I’ll be forever grateful.

Update: Somehow, that game turned into the must gut-wrenching, heartbreaking loss a fan could ever imagine. I am crushed. I was so invested in this unbelievable group of players, who were so easy to cheer and root for. We’ll never see this group again. And to end it the way it did. Crushing. By all metrics, this may have been the greatest baseball game ever played.

Recall AI

If you’ve read any of my writing over the last 15 years, from Tools & Toys to The Sweet Setup to right here on The Newsprint, you’ll know I’ve long searched for a note-taking tool that satisfies a short list of must-haves:

• Ability to save all kinds of media, including websites, photos, YouTube videos, PDFs, and Markdown notes.
• Ability to connect and organize that media to unearth connections.
• A nice design that works across all platforms and preferably in the browser.
• A way to easily export everything in case the app ceases to exist or something better comes along.

Now, there have been apps for this for a while. I could point at Keep It, or Obsidian, or Craft, or maybe even Evernote. In many ways, even Apple’s Notes app could satisfy a good chunk of that feature-set above. For whatever reason though, after trying over and over for 10+ years, I haven’t found something that truly clicks.

Until (at least I think) now.

Recall AI, for whatever reason, only caught my attention this week. It could be its design (which I find to be a little wanting) that kept me from giving this a shot far sooner. But it checks all the boxes and adds AI in a tasteful and useful way.

Inside Recall, you can save all sorts of media, including URLs, PDFs, YouTube videos, podcasts, Wikipedia pages, images, and Markdown files.

From there, Recall will summarize everything in that media by providing a transcript and an AI summary of the transcript or article. You can then take your notes alongside each piece of media in Markdown. Recall provides a reader view to be used as a read-later option or as a read-now option right in the browser. It’s not the best “reader” view on the planet, especially if you can’t change fonts and customize a little. But overall, it works nicely.

Next, you can use Recall’s AI tool to generate connections across all your sources of media, automatically creating back-links across your entire library and auto-generating a knowledge map.

Then, you can use Recall’s AI chatbot to ask your library questions and find connections across your library with the help of AI. The resulting answers to your queries are filled with all the sources the AI bot uses and blends a combination of readily available internet data (like Wikipedia) with your notes.

And finally, if you are studying your material, you can use Recall AI to generate quizzes on your library to help you better understand everything you’ve consumed or to help you prepare for an exam.

This is the definition of a personal knowledge tool. Diehards will say all the above is available in this tool or that tool, or if you just learn how to build your own LLM, you can run this all locally on your machine. But for normal people, who don’t know how to do any of that stuff, Recall AI is sure to be one of the most useful tools in their toolkit. It’s like Google’s NotebookLM on steroids.

Now, it’s still an imperfect tool. The iPhone and iPad apps are certainly wanting — you can use them, but I find them best for capturing new sources or for taking notes. If you want to use Recall to its maximum capacity, I think you’d find yourself in front of your Mac more often than not.

I’ve been trying to use MyMind for this particular set of tasks over the last few months, and I’ve truly enjoyed my time with MyMind. The app is wonderfully designed and so easy to use. I love how the app continues to build out special ways to display new types of sources, like the new Instagram viewer or beautiful product viewer.

But MyMind doesn’t offer the same knowledge features, wherein you can use AI to chat with your sources, to uncover connections, to summarize transcripts, or to generate connections across your notes. In the grand scheme of things, I think I’ll sacrifice a little design to gain access to these fantastic knowledge-worker tools built into Recall.

Moreover, Recall is a very bit cheaper than MyMind. Which isn’t a shot at MyMind — I’ve really come not to care too much about price if the tool improves my life or makes me more productive in some way — but when it does more for me and costs less, well, that’s a good combination.

All in all, I’m thinking Recall will be a long-sticking tool for me. It’s been a ton of fun adding content to my Recall library this week and testing the chat functionality to determine answers from across my past school notes and general reading. What a powerful tool to add to the toolkit.

DPReview’s In-Depth Review of the Hasselblad X2D II 100C

I posed a question to my group of tech friends (they are more than “tech friends”, of course, but they are the most technologically knowledgeable group of all my friends) about what they might do if given $15,000 to spend on a camera. After years and years of photography, each of us have found cameras and systems we love. And some in the group have almost literally tried every single system. So the question had a bit more context to it.

The Hasselblad X2D II 100C was a near unanimous answer. Its combination of curb appeal, image quality, and ergonomics make it one of the most desirable cameras on the market right now.

I would rather not be one of those full-frame snobs. I know you can produce wonderful imagery with just an iPhone. But there’s also something truly magical about a medium format photo, at least to my eye. Lookup the FujiFilm GFX on Instagram and prepare to have your mind blown. Or, of course, the Hasselblad X2D II 100C. Medium format cameras are big, heavy, and generally pretty slow, so they aren’t for everything. But that “look” is definitely something.

The Second Cup

Melt Mouse

This looks like a fun little project to “replace” the Magic Mouse. I don’t know what it would be like in practice to have a number pad right on the surface of your mouse, but I’d love to try.

Success always spawns haters

I do not believe the world is built to please others. If you focus on pleasing others, you will be led down a terrible path for your health and spirituality. And, most likely, you won’t find the focus and boldness required to push boundaries and say “Yes” or “No” when just a yes or no will do.

In general, this is probably why you should never meet your heroes. If you put someone on a pedestal, you will be disappointed. And if you want to be on the pedestal, be prepared for people to hate you.

The James Brand x Timex Automatic GMT

I’ve long been a fan of everything The James Brand produces, even if I own none of them. (I think they are wonderfully designed, but I simply don’t find myself needing a pocket knife that often.) This collaboration with Timex looks great. For a pretty nice watch, the price tag isn’t bad, either.

This McDonald’s Ad is Pure Genius

I greatly enjoy finding advertisements like this. The best ads seem to be those which focus on core values, like family and friends. Like this one, from Volvo last year. Just so good.

There’s also this one from Wealthsimple just this week. Absolutely on point. Talk about knowing your audience and target market.

Happy Sunday. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.

P.S. — If you’d like to see this in your email inbox, please subscribe below. If you have trouble subscribing, shoot me an email, and I’ll get you on the list. Thanks for the consideration!