A few days ago, I received a plea in my normal email from the media outlet Tangle.

The last six months have been a difficult time for media outlets. Overwhelmed by the news, many readers and listeners are tuning out. Those who are staying up to date are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence round-ups to get their news, which has caused website traffic to fall.

I feel bad about the situation that Isaac Saul, who founded Tangle, and his crew find themselves in. They have a publication that does a wonderful job balancing perspectives on the news of the day. They are trustworthy and thorough. Yet, I find myself deciding again and again not to upgrade to a paid subscription when I consider the option.

Zachary Brown writes for the Verge about a new game/utililty from Hank Green. The premise of the Focus Friend app is sort of like an updated Tamagotchi for phone addicts. You are the virtual caretaker of a character like Billy Bean King, a bean who can only work to upgrade its environment and wardrobe (it knits) if you put down your phone.

As it turns out, helping furnish a virtual bean’s lo-fi room is exactly what I needed. Over the last week, Billie Bean King and I have been on an absolute grindset. We’ve been locking in for half an hour and hourlong chunks of work: Billie knitting while I clack away on a keyboard. The longer I work, the more Billie can produce, and the better the decorations I can buy for their space. (I’m saving up for the gorgeous plant-covered furniture in the Greenhouse set.) The gamified nature of the app has helped quiet the static and improve my focus. I’m motivated to work because I want to unlock the best decorations for Billie’s home, and, like a Tamagotchi, I want to care for them.

Brown, who admits to struggling with attention for most of his life, found Focus Friend to be effective, but having blown through other methods of avoiding distraction, wonders if it will stick. Fortunately, Green is adding more pieces to the game to give its bean something else to work towards.

Microsoft made the Model Context Protocol (MCP) a major focus of their Build conference last week. Though the Microsoft engineer I spoke with, who is heavily involved in AI thought the emphasis was a little overplayed, it’s easy to understand some of the excitement. Seeing your favorite applications easily plug into agentic AI through a standardized protocol can open your mind to the possibilities. The first integration to spark my interest is with Readwise.

In simpler terms, setting up your own Readwise MCP server allows you to chat with your Readwise highlights using an external chat client (such as Claude), rather than the Chat function on the Readwise website.

Hunter Tice (a man after my own heart) writes for Christ and Pop Culture about the importance of physical media in a world that is increasingly detached from the material when engaging with art.

An increasing reliance on digital micro-conveniences results in digitality becoming a powerhouse vehicle of mindless consumption and physical disengagement. As our culture endorses digital consumption in more facets of life, it inherently devalues the significance of physicalness. That has incredible implications on how society functions, including how we perceive the world of media and artistic expression.

Bandcamp is finally adding a feature that I, and other like-minded enjoyers of music have been wanting for some time. The new ability to create playlists feels like it aligns with the ethics of the service, which is mostly a good thing, but the focus may be a bit too heavy in that area.¹ Bandcamp describes the feature as, “Like digital mixtapes.” There’s not much need to describe how it works, everyone is familiar with the concept of playlists and this feature appears to do exactly what it says on the tin.

Mozilla made a surprise announcement today that they are closing the Pocket read-it-later service. With nothing but a bland, corporate statement to go on, I imagine users have a fair amount of confusion about the move. I was actually looking at the Pocket entry on the App Store earlier in the day to see if it had been updated lately. I always had dreams of the service/app being improved, so I could go back to using it with a Kobo, which is a quite delightful combo. I had a Kobo a few years ago, and the sync with Pocket, while it could use a few features (like highlight sync), was key for me. I probably read more articles than books on the device. I kept this option in the back of my mind for a possible switch back.

I would have been extremely frustrated if I had bought another Kobo under the assumption that I could fulfill my use case of synchronizing with my saved articles from Pocket.

I noticed that The Cure was advertising their heavily praised new album Songs From A Lost World in a bio vinyl format. I was curious about what that meant. Fortunately, I had my good buddy Claude to help answer the question. He responded with this:

Bio vinyl refers to vinyl materials manufactured using bio-based or renewable raw materials instead of traditional petroleum-based ingredients. This type of vinyl is part of a broader category of sustainable alternatives to conventional plastics.

It seems that being a Firefox user means being in a constant state of trepidation about whether the app will last the year. For a long while now, it has been well known that the browser’s very survival depends on the largesse of its search partner, Google. The Mozilla Foundation, which develops Firefox, is a non-profit, but it gets 85% of its funding thanks to the commercial interests of the biggest beneficiary of ad revenue on the internet.

It’s hard to believe that I hadn’t heard of Hookmark until recently. The crowd I follow online doesn’t tend to miss Mac productivity tools, but this one seems to have escaped mass publicity within that community. The premise seems like a powerful one:

Hookmark is the standalone contextual bookmarking app. It complements your launcher by also being the contextual launcher. Hookmark enables you to create and link robust bookmarks to files, emails, tasks and more, making it easy for you to access information without needing to search.

Amazon’s Rufus, which must be some kind of AI chatbot, wonders if I’ve got the following questions about Stereolab’s upcoming album Instant Holograms On Metal Film:

• Can it be used on any type of metal surface?
• Does it leave any residue after removal?
• Is it easy to apply without bubbles?

The future is cleaning your tub with space-age bachelor pad records.