My favourite stuff 2024
Here we go: it's time again for our yearly Favourite Stuff rendezvous!
Same as always: a few affiliate links, no particular order :)
Ikea Poäng
I'm not sure why I waited so long to get one. I've wanted a Poäng chair for like...twenty years? I guess it was just never the right moment, or the right fit, or something. But our now officially christened music room provided the perfect opportunity. It's no Eames, but it's darned comfy.
The app, not the FX show. Although the show's fantastic too...
There was a moment last month when I glanced at Obsidian again. Barely. A side-glance, really. Call it restlessness, or a recurring case of FOMO. Obsidian certainly continues to evolve in ever more powerful ways, but the truth is I've really come to appreciate Bear's focus on simplicity. Not to plunge into a philosophical abyss, but this also happens to mirror how I tend to view life these days. KISS.
My only gripe is with the app's harware keyboard support on iPad: it's been broken for months. Some of the keyboard shortcuts simply refuse to work (using the Magic Keyboard or any other Bluetooth options). I contacted support when the problem first appeared, but it's never been fixed. Looks like it's just me too, which is downright odd. Annoying, but not a dealbreaker.
Bear recently introduced multiple highlighting colors, something I missed from my Obsidian days. The app may not offer infinite customization, but its Shortcuts integration allows me to do everything I need it to. I'm still happy.
A-S301 + AT-LP120XUSB + T5
Hi-fi!
All of these have posts of their own, so I won't rehash what's already been said. But they still collectively deserve a mention: they're all favourites I use almost daily.
For more:
Speaking of daily: coffee. That legal drug we all love to wake up to. Our coffee machine recently died after over twenty years of service. That's a lot of cups, poor thing. But, faced with a new purchase, we revisited our habits and realized we no longer needed to brew a full pot every morning. Both of us were fine with just one cup (I sometimes add an espresso, but that's a different machine). In fact, we'd usually end up throwing some of it away, which was needlessly wasteful.
This Ninja single-serve is working out really well. We generally use the Rich setting which yields slightly less but more intense coffee per cup. The Keurig option is...well, it's Keurig. But Lavazza makes pods now and it's not half-bad if brewed right (rich setting+smaller size). Useful in a pinch. We bought Laura Secord hot chocolate pods for the holidays—I'm not hopeful but, who knows? Life can be surprising.
The machine also brews over ice—will be nice next summer.
This is as basic as it gets: a very soft brush to clean my records. It's not the only one I use, but it was the missing piece, usually the last step before I lower the arm. This brush is great at clearing away the dust picked up by carbon bristles. It's also gentler when all you need is a quick wipe.
WKRP in Cincinnati—Shout! Factory DVD box set
The year 1979 holds a special place in my heart. Me and Billy Corgan I guess. It's one of those charmed periods, on the cusp of change, where memories get infused with dark magic. Where half-forgotten experiences mutate through the heady perfume of nostalgia.
WKRP in Cincinnati was an American TV sitcom that ran from 1978 to 1982. It follows a team of misfits working at a local radio station after it changes music formats—from Lawrence Welk to Van Halen and The Pretenders. Cue the culture shock and the laughs. Howard Hesseman and Loni Anderson became the show's breakout stars, but it's an ensemble cast with perfect chemistry: the characters are funny, touching, and lovable, despite their obvious flaws (I'm forgetting Tim Reid as Venus Flytrap, another standout).
But the music of the era, which gave WKRP its cultural zing and relevance, lead to its demise once the show hit syndication: licensing rights eventually expired and nobody picked up the tab for reruns. A bastardized version of the series, using stock music instead of the original songs, aired for a while... and it was absolutely terrible. Enough to wipe it off the air entirely. Without the soundtrack of the times, too much of it fell flat.
Decades later, however, the folks at a company called Shout! Factory took on a herculean task: they first acquired the rights to the series for a DVD box set, and then negotiated new licensing agreements to almost all of the original music. WKRP was back, fellow babies!
I bought the set a few years ago, ripped the DVDs, and the sitcom has since turned into the equivalent of eating comfort food, sitting next to a fireplace on a winter's night, a warm blanket, a cold beer on a hot day... insert whatever feelgood item floats your boat.
Look, does WKRP show its age? Oh yeah. The Herb/Jennifer dynamic alone would raise hell today. But anytime I watch an episode it's like my dad's sitting in his chair, my mom's on the couch, and my sister's next to me in her pyjamas. And jokes about Carter, or Reagan, offer one heck of a throwback—boy, if they only knew then what we know now...
Ikea Tertial - My once and forever lighting solution
I keep coming back to this lamp, over and over again. Ikea's Tertial has been around forever and I've purchased too many to count at this point. There are two on my desk as I type this, including one purchased before we bought our house. The available colour treatments may shift, but the design has remained unchanged throughout the years: a boom arm and a table clamp. The lamp swivels, goes up and down, and left to right. Perfect.
Tertial checks three important boxes for me:
1. It looks nice.
2. It's inexpensive (crazy inexpensive).
3. It uses a standard E26 lightbulb.
E26 is the old, standard North American socket. This makes Tertial compatible with...well, any bulb brand you care to choose from. There's a trend in recent years to build lamps with integrated LED lights. This makes sense for specialized lighting solutions that offer functionality beyond turning on/off, but for a basic reading, or work lamp? The idea of throwing away an entire product when the bulb dies rubs me the wrong way. I use Tertial these with smart LEDs—either Hue or Tradfri—but the lamp itself is basically eternal. Smart bulbs provide full control over brightness, white temperature, colour, and automation. No reliance on anyone else's decisions.
In my book, this thing is a classic.
The tvOS 18 screensaver
Really? A Favourite? Yup. First of all: is anyone else tired of Aerials? I am. They can be quite spectacular but, ultimately, meh. There's no real emotional pull—it's decor.
This new screensaver uses personal photos from iCloud, and it applies the same tricks introduced on the iPhone and iPad wake screens: it composits a very large time display into whatever background image is loaded. Same layering technique, with results individually tailored for each picture. But it doesn't just add a big clock: it also frames, straightens (horizontally + vertically), and resizes images, to create an aesthetically pleasing layout. And here's the thing: I'm rediscovering my photo library under a whole new light.
All my keeper images are systematically uploaded to Photos in full res, so there's a lot for the app to pull from. Setting the screensaver to only use city and landscape images means that 1) I'm avoiding iPhone snapshots, and 2) I'm mostly seeing images that "work" for this purpose (no awkwardly cropped faces, or weirdly blurred hair). I find myself looking forward to the next picks.
It's like having an editor selecting and re-imagining long-forgotten images.
Fun.
Unread
It's easy to gloss over certain categories of apps, despite turning to them every day, multiple times a day. RSS readers, for instance. It's a category that's been around for ages, and yet still comes off as too geeky for the masses, who generally prefer relying on their friendly neighbourhood social feed. But even for those of us who use them, they tend to fade into the background. Always there, always reliable, yet easily taken for granted.
Unread is a name I've dropped a few times on this blog, and its spot on this list is long overdue. Not only is it a fantastic reader app, but it constantly gets meaningful, and useful, upgrades. The latest one is definitely for geeks, but I immediately jumped on it: native Shortcuts support inside the app (not just through the Share sheet), and an Unread dictionary that can be used for fetching specific articles metadata. Yes, geeky, most definitely. But fun :)
What I love about this app is that it never looks overwhelming. A lot of RSS readers default to the NetNewsWire three-columns text display, and there's nothing wrong with that. A lot of folks prefer this. But I like a more visual approach: articles in Unread are listed as cards, each one with a large thumbnail. It means less density, but that's exactly what draws me to it—the information feels manageable. There might be 200 articles I haven't read yet, but they're not all sitting in a sidebar in 10 point type. It's so much more...peaceful.
But the peacefulness extends to the app's content as well: when I open Unread, I'm in my Happy Place. I see no news, no doom, no content push, because I choose not to include those sources. Subscribing to feeds makes us active curators, instead of passive scrollers. Quaint, isn't it?
Unread uses a freemium model: the free version provides a lot of functionalities, but a premium subscription unlocks everything the app has to offer.
More info right here.
Ronco™ Presents a Christmas Gift
Alright! Let's finish this off with an honest to goodness Christmas story.
There’s this indelible memory: thick, bright orange, wall-to-wall carpeting, Christmas cards hanging from the windows, the tree lit-up in the corner, and my sister and I dancing to Tony Bennett's Santa Claus is Coming to Town, as it spins on the basement stereo. Every. Year.
That record was a compilation: Ronco's A Christmas Gift. It was a fun mix of Holiday classics, but the star attraction to our 6-8 year-old selves was the album's gatefold sleeve—a full pop-up nativity scene. Oh man. We'd gaze at it for hours.
Last year, with my resuscitated turntable at the ready, I pulled the album out of storage. The pop-up didn't pop so much anymore, and I noticed the sleeve feeling awfully light until...the horror. Nothing. Empty cardboard. The record had probably slipped out eons ago and I'd never noticed.
Cue profound disappointment.
And cue Discogs.
I don't buy or sell records on Discogs—I use the service to look up information and keep track of my collection. It was a useful ressource when I first brought back all my old vinyl albums (to check out release/editions etc). But on a whim I did a search for this old Ronco compilation, and boom! $8.00 CAD from a seller in Manitoba, in good condition, and with a functional pop-up scene.
The Magic of Christmas at work, folks. Speaking of… time for Tony methinks.
But no, I won't be dancing ;)
