Philips Hue For the Rich and the Poor
The Kernel No. 2: Plus, in this week's Kernel: Lights, screens, e-ink, and gaming dreams — all the tech you need to know.
Welcome to The Kernel No. 2, your guide to all the wonderful things happening the tech world. (If you are new here, hi & welcome. Expect plenty of fresh gadget releases this season, and if you want to catch up on past issues, you can find them all on The Kernel homepage.)
This week I am dealing with a change of work duties so most of my time is dealing with that.
The Unboxing
Philips Hue: Philips announced a whole new set of smart home products that are both affordable and “pro”. There is an also a new bridge that pairs nicely with the lights, matter-over-thread for the bulbs, and an awesome new light strip called the OmniGlow.
Instagram on iPadOS: No words on this other than…. finally?
reMarkable Paper Pro Move: Other than this awful name, this device is actually cool. If I had $449 to shell out on this thing I so would. It is about the size of an iPad mini but more pocket friendly and comes with a color e-ink screen.
Legion Go 2: Handheld gaming devices are not going away, and Legion is proving that with their new device which features an upgraded 8.8in OLED touchscreen, beefier battery, great specs with 2TB SSD max storage, and detachable controllers. 🤌 Chef’s kiss.
Screen Share
For this editions screen share, I got my friend Kwajo to share his homepage on his phone. Here is my take on it:
The Phone: This is the iPhone 16 Pro.
The Wallpaper: Looks like a plain green wallpaper which is surprisingly one of my favorite colors.
The Apps: Honestly, the homepage resembles a tech-workers homepage, which is not bad hahaha, just someone I would think we have a lot in common. Obsidian for note-taking is a good choice since it supports markdown. Brick is a cool productivity app that lets you block off certain apps so you’re not getting distracted. Beli is an app Kwajo showed me that lets you rank the restaurants you have been to for any foodies. And finally, AP News for factual and unbiased (alright, slightly left-leaning) news—great choice.
My Internet This Week
I caved and opened up a Bluesky account this week to keep up with other developers and tech-influencers. It really does remind me of the Twitter I remembered using back in high school, but without retweets of fights and those weird parody accounts. I also opened back up my Threads account just to try it out. I originally shut it down because I felt like they were heavily deciding the algorithm, but now it shows my following threads first before giving me the algorithm — now let’s bring that into Instagram!
I opened up new domains to control my emails better. Obviously I will not share them here, but it is a move away from the solution I used with Gmail where I had like 8 different emails for 8 different purposes and had them all encapsulated into one main email. I set up the custom domains through Apple Mail. Hopefully it goes well. Good part is that I can move these domains into Google Workspaces or Proton Mail if needed. In the effort of trying to change a lot of my account emails to my new ones, I am running into a range of issues that makes me wish I never did this in the first place.
Recently, I found that I can read The New Yorker on my Kindle Paperwhite which has not been the case since Amazon Newsstand stopped selling subscriptions. It is a bit illegal (probably, but I am a subscriber anyways), but through Calibre, you can fetch news from WSJ, NYT, TNY, etc. and email them to your Amazon account as epubs. This solves a new issue I found at the beach this week when the ink was coming onto my skin due to a chemical reaction with my sunscreen.