How to avoid overspending, Slack notifications on the Apple Watch, and an exclusive Disney interview
Plus, more charging tower progress, a fun Strange New Worlds trailer, how photography makes us question reality, and some Fallout fun.
I’m David Gewirtz. Welcome to this week’s Advanced Geekery newsletter. It’s been an exciting week. Let’s dive in.
My articles
Let’s kick it off with a quick recap of the articles I published in the last week on ZDNET.
How to enable Slack notifications on your Apple Watch: Learn how to always stay connected to your team without having to carry your iPhone everywhere. We step you through all the settings you'll need to make it work.
How Disney and Marvel designed a Vision Pro multiverse with you as its hero: Marvel Studios' Dave Bushore and ILM's My-Linh Le discuss the intricate process of bringing 'What...If?' to life in a groundbreaking VR format.
10 simple ways to avoid overspending on Amazon Prime Day: Even though Prime Day is over, future you will thank present you for checking out these 10 practical strategies to shopping smarter, on Prime Day and every day.
Ultimate Charging Tower: Battery frames
I’ve been working on the design of custom battery charger holders. The tower needs to hold not only devices that need charging, but all the separate camera, light, and standalone batteries I use.
I’m also trying to solve one key issue that bothers me every time I set up a shoot. When I remove a battery from a charger, the process requires two hands: one to hold the charger and one to pull the battery. But I’m almost always holding a fragile piece of gear when I need the battery, so I almost always have to balance something, somewhere.
My solution is to build battery frames that hold the chargers to the tower. That way, I can insert and remove batteries with one hand. Here’s a close-up of one such frame, which charges batteries for my Edelkrone camera robots.
Here’s another that holds my Sony EV-V10 camera batteries.
Here you can see how the holders might fit on the tower itself.
I’m still building the designs in Fusion 360 for the battery frames, so I’m not moving over all the chargers until I’m ready to power them in their new home. That said, I’m really happy with how this is turning out.
Stay tuned. I’ll continue to work on the battery frames. Next, I have to figure out what to do with my small power tool battery collection.
Must-watch YouTube
Moving on, let’s queue up some interesting YouTube videos for your entertainment and edification.
So this happened. This preview of Strange New Worlds Season 3 shows the new season will probably be just as much fun as the previous two. Poor Spock!
This is a great hack to help keep your laser cuts clean without too much soot.
Here’s the Fallout 4 theme, metal violin style.
Interesting reads
And now, some good stuff from around the Internet, well worth reading.
Fascinating article on how photography can make us question reality.
Speaking of changing reality, this is an article/video that reproduces what the Nixon speech might have been like if the Apollo 11 astronauts never made it.
Amazon’s Alexa business is apparently losing money. Jason Perlow has another insightful article on what Amazon might do about that.
Send in your projects
I’d like to regularly spotlight a reader project or two here. Your project doesn’t have to be a big Kickstarter launch. If you’ve built something cool, it has some pretty pictures, and you’re proud of it, I might be able to share it here.
If you have a photogenic reader project, send an email to me at david@zatz.com with the subject “READER PROJECT,” a few pictures, and a short one-paragraph description. If you have a social media link or a link to the project, include that, too.
Both my EPs are now streaming
Available on all your favorite streaming services.
More clicky
I’ve got a lot happening all over the web. Here are links to my various stuff:
House of the Head: home for my published music
ZATZ Labs: where I host my published software projects
Feel free to dig around, visit, and say hey!
Leave some comments
Substack supports comments, so feel free to leave some. I promise to read them. Just, please, let’s keep our personal politics out of any discussion.
That should do it for this week. This newsletter is really starting to pick up subscribers. Please help it out by sharing links on all your socials.
Have a great week!