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.
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