Productivity and MagSafe

It’s fall here in New York, which means its time to get ready for longer nights and shorter days. This is the time of year when I take note of any new software I want to try and store them in my cheeks for winter like a hungry squirrel. Plus, an overlooked accessory that came out with the new iPhone 17 phones.

in this issue

🔎 Raycast

🦊 MagSafe Wallet

💪 ChromeOS Flex

🔎 Raycast

Raycast is one of my favorite software discoveries this year. Though it's been available for years, I never felt like I needed it considering I rarely use the built-in Spotlight search on Mac. What I learned is that Raycast isn’t just a Spotlight replacement – it’s a macro lovers dream. Sure, it can search for your files and apps better than Spotlight can but that's a low bar. What really made me fall in love with the app is that you can bind specific keystrokes to actions. For example, clicking option + n runs a script I made that creates all of the new folders I need for a new work project, saving me from manually finding and running the script each time. Pressing option + ⬅️ or option + ➡️ handles my window management, snapping the current window left or right. I can also center a window by pressing option + ⬆️.

Raycast can do more than window management, though. Browsing through the community built extensions to see what other people have made is one of my favorite time wasters. The best part is that if you find an extension someone else made you can download it and use it immediately . I highly recommend diving deep in the settings and customizing everything to your liking. Not only is it interesting to see just how powerful the app is, but it makes you feel like an anime hacker once you’ve got all the shortcuts down. Raycast is available for Mac and is about to launch on Windows, though there's currently a waitlist. If you're eager to try the Windows beta, here are three invite codes! If these links don’t work then sorry someone else snagged them already.

Invite 1 | Invite 2 | Invite 3

🦊 Apple MagSafe Wallet - Fox Orange

If you're a fan of Teenage Engineering design, then seeing a hint of orange on any tech product brings a twinkle to your eye. No? Just me? Well the new iPhone 17 Pro dropped this month and with it a new orange color that has everyone drooling. You might even be reading this on your new orange iPhone right now. While I haven’t fallen in love with the particular shade of orange that Apple made the new 17 Pro, I've been drooling over the new orange MagSafe wallet that they dropped. In person, it's more of a dusty/burnt orange which looks fantastic. Plus, now that I’m rocking a Pixel 10 Pro which has PixelSnap (Google's version of MagSafe), I can use all of my old MagSafe wallets that I’ve collected over my year as an iPhone boi.

The new FineWoven material gets a lot of hate but I actually don’t mind it on the wallets. Would I prefer the old leather wallets? Absolutely – nothing patinas like leather. Still, I appreciate the grungy way the FineWoven MagSafe wallets look as they age. I wouldn’t want my phone case to age this way, so I get the backlash to the material in general, but the wallets are an exception. And this new orange looks incredible on the porcelain Pixel 10 Pro.

💪 ChromeOS Flex

One of my favorite things to do when I need a new project is to resurrect an old computer that's on its way out. Typically, I do this by installing some new Linux distribution I find interesting or (by trying to uninstall the last one I found if I’ve ever done this recently). But this time around I think I’m going to try something a little different and instead try out ChromeOS Flex. If you're unfamiliar, ChromeOs is Google’s operating system which answers the question “What could Chrome be if it used my RAM for good instead of evil?”

If you’ve ever used or seen a Chromebook, you already know what ChromeOS is. ChromeOS flex basically turns your existing machine into a Chromebook. If you have a brand new powerful Mac or Windows computer then this might not be for you, but if you have an old laptop that you want to breathe some extra life into instead of sending it off to be recycled then converting it into a Chromebook could be the move. I once had an Acer Chromebook that I loved but I haven’t had much experience with ChromeOS since then. So I figured what the hell, let’s see how bad I can break this thing before sending it off for recycling.

🎬 Behind the scenes

It has been a while! I moved this entire newsletter away from Substack and onto a new platform called Ghost. This should hopefully mean nothing to you, but if you happen to have any issues or problems viewing any of this please let me know because I’m working to make this look/feel a lot better. I would like to have an entire new look for this in the coming months so I’m going to be tweaking and changing things constantly, but that’s half the fun. Ghost is a distributed platform so this post should hopefully also go out on its connected Bluesky account, so follow there if you’re tired of e-mails but still want to occasionally learn about cool things.