The Japan Trip and Local Search

I was thinking about the upcoming trip to Japan while walking the dog today. I realized I definitely need to pick up that Nitecore NEF nano fan before we leave. It gets so brutally hot there, and this thing just looks like an absolute must-have.

Local Agents and Tools

Anyway, I've been spending a lot of time digging into local tools lately. I found qmd, which is this mini CLI search engine for all your docs and meeting notes. I like that it tracks state-of-the-art approaches but keeps everything local. Speaking of agents, there is an amazing skill called last30days-skill that researches any topic across Reddit, YouTube, Hacker News, and the web to give you a grounded summary. It is genuinely so good. I also saw that Nous Research released Hermes Desktop for Mac. You just install it and start talking to this agent that grows with you over time.

Design and Fonts

On the design front, I stumbled into a deep rabbit hole of font discovery. I found Font Brief which is a fantastic tool for branding and editorial stuff. I also came across Fontpair, a really cool site for testing free Google Font combinations. I was playing around in their Cormorant Garamond & Inter playground and I just love how it shows color combos right alongside the font choices. It makes visualizing everything so much easier.

Video and Prompts

So yeah, I've also been looking at ways to capture things better. I saw Screen Charm, which is another screen recording app for Mac. It does smart zooms and motion blur, which seems nice for polished videos without needing a subscription. I also read a really interesting piece on prompting Nano Banana Pro with JSON. Giving a model structured information like that acts as a template and makes the outputs way more repeatable. With the right tooling, it can be incredibly powerful. Oh, and I keep meaning to grab a new controller, so I've been browsing AKNES. They are the exclusive partner for 8BitDo and GuliKit, which is right up my alley.