The Sunday Edition — 07.20.25

Happy Sunday everyone! At this point, this should likely be referred to as a “Monday Edition”, but it was a wonderful Sunday and I don’t want to kill my streak. Today marked my wife’s and my 12th wedding anniversary and this week marks 16 years we've been together. Getting married young continues to be one of the best decisions we ever made — we've grown together, from our poorest years of study and working three jobs, to our current life with three little girls, two careers, and not enough time away. It's been an incredible first 15 years of our adult lives and I'm blessed to be doing it all with my best friend.

Notion Is Becoming My Everything App

Whether intentionally or unintentionally, Notion continues to sneak its way into every corner of my technological life. Two weeks ago, we upgraded our office's Notion plan to the Plus tier, wherein we gain access to all Notion AI features. Now I haven't found all of Notion AI's features to be completely jaw-dropping, but certain ones have really stood out:

Notion AI Meeting Notes — We saw this debut in ChatGPT just this week, which goes to show how helpful this feature is for so many people. The ability to record an entire meeting and have AI quickly summarize that meeting with various action items immediately afterwards is what superhero dreams are made of. I tried it out this week on iPhone and the experience went off without a hitch.
Ask AI — We save a bazillion PDFs in Notion — from standard operating procedures to research memos and more — and each one of these PDFs gains access to an AI bot where you can ask the bot to summarize or provide answers for direct questions right from the uploaded PDF. It’s far too satisfying to use Notion AI to search for an uploaded PDF and then use AI to ask direct questions of that PDF.
AI Summaries — This sort of goes hand in hand with Ask AI, though at the database level. All our office standard operating procedures are stored in a database and these items have various properties for categorization. One of them is an AI summary, which nicely showcases a quick summary of the SOP at a glance from the database level, helping anyone in the office to better find the SOP they’re looking for. I work in a world of SOPs, so this is killer for helping answer office questions quickly.

I’m considering moving more into Notion, as well. These writings, for instance, feel like something I could put into Notion and utilize AI features for categorizing, proofreading, ideation, and more. I’m also working my way through moving an entire digital Bible into Notion, potentially providing opportunities to use AI across all my Bible study notes and research. Though I recognize this can all be done in Obsidian or other personal knowledge management apps, I feel far more confident inside Notion and have a strong feeling the app is around for the long haul.

Best of all, there’s even a Notion publishing feature, which may provide a simple way to publish a new blog idea I’ve had recently.

We’ll see how the overarching project goes over the coming weeks and months, but the allure of Notion and the simplicity to add my entire life has been surprising to me. I never thought this is the app I’d end up living inside. But here we are.

Two Awesome Donkey Kong Bananza Reviews

I’m not a video game reviewer and you likely haven’t read the Sunday Edition looking for video game reviews. The Switch 2 has become a really fun family toy, enabling me to transport my kids into a glimpse of my childhood. And — let’s be real — for me to revisit my childhood.

Everyone picked up Mario Kart World (and rightfully so) on launch day, but the real game to put your attention on is Donkey Kong Bananza. I’ve spent about 6 to 8 hours playing Bananza already (somehow I’ve become completely lost in the game, having eclipsed the midnight mark on multiple evenings and nearly killing my Switch battery one evening). I’m truly stunned. Bananza is so, so good.

But don’t take my word for it — here are two great reviews breaking down why Bananza is so good and what it means for the Switch 2 console and Nintendo as a whole:

I won’t be able to pound a thousand hours into this game, even though I will certainly want to. There’s something so exhilarating about smashing a way to success. If you have a Switch 2, this seems like the first absolute must-buy game available for the console.

The Second Cup

Some Early Tests and Notes on ChatGPT Agent - MacStories

It always takes someone’s brilliant brainstorming session to showcase how various AI tools can be used in your life. Here is a great idea from Federico Viticci:

I had an idea for a long-running task that I’d been personally putting off for a long time, and which felt perfect for a background agent. I asked ChatGPT agent to process hundreds of issues of MacStories Weekly on the Club MacStories website, open each one, find stuff that I wrote, and compile all my Club articles into a list. Then, I asked it to spot patterns and ideas for follow-up stories based on things I wrote months ago, and which I’ve likely forgotten about. I could have used a regular model to kick off a long-running task that, say, parsed an RSS feed for my articles on Club MacStories, but I was curious to see how the agent would perform on its own instead.

Long story short: it took it three sessions of 1 hour each, and the output was outstanding.

I officially have five different tasks I want ChatGPT Agent to perform when I sit down at my desk on Tuesday.