May 2026: The Keepers, the Losers, and One Cute Charger
Welcome to a new series: the monthly rundown. The tech I'm actually using, the impulse buys gathering dust in the drawer, and the surprising cheap finds I love. My loves, my hates, the keepers and the losers. Let's get into May.
The Keepers
Anker Charger: The Cutest Travel Brick
I already mentioned this one in my Mother's Day gift guide, but it's earning its place again this month. It's not GaN, it's not the most powerful, but it's tiny, the prongs flip in all directions, and the screen. I mean, look at this screen. The cutest little display I've ever seen on a charger. Used it on trips to Santa Barbara, Paris, and Madrid this month. It's already got more mileage than most of my power bricks combined. Almost always on sale. Stellar travel accessory.
Jabra Evolve 50: Killing the DJ Voice Setup
Inspired by the great (or the greatest) Peter McKinnon, I spent a lot of time trying to engineer a "late-night DJ voice" for calls. Gemini, VB-Cable, OBS, Zoom, my Fifine mic on a boom arm. The works. Conclusion: pain in the butt, and on a voice call, nobody gives a single shit. So I ripped it all out and bought a Jabra Evolve 50. Perfect audio, perfect microphone, fraction of the price, fraction of the time. No late-night DJ voice (for now, I may come back with the same mic for podcasting).
Sony 40mm f/2.5 G: Chef's Kiss
This one is a definitive keeper. The accuracy and speed make it a fantastic lens. Can you find smaller? Yes. Can you find cheaper? Yes. Can you find both at the same time with Sony's first-party autofocus speed? That's where it wins. The G-series autofocus, paired with my A7C II, gets me consistently better keepers than any third-party prime I've tried in this range.
AI Shared Memory: Finally Useful
Thanks to Andrej Karpathy's recent article and a lot of work completing my own LLM-managed wiki, I've been genuinely impressed this month with how far personal AI memory has come. The setup: Claude maintains a wiki of my interests, my work, my opinions. It cross-references sources, surfaces patterns, drafts in my voice. It went from "interesting demo" to "actually saves me hours" pretty fast. Bonus: once the memory is structured well, it's portable across systems. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini all benefit. If you're tinkering with personal AI workflows, the unlock is treating memory like a real, structured artifact, not a bag of conversation logs.
Plaud Note: The Reason I'm Publishing More
Plaud is genuinely the reason this site is more active than ever. It's such a useful little gadget. Parent-teacher conference? Covered. Soccer team's first meeting? Covered. Random idea while driving? Also covered. My current workflow:
Plaud captures the raw thought or conversation
Obsidian: refine and polish the base ideas once or twice
Claude: correct the English, structure the post
Gather pictures, publish
I'm French. When I think, I sometimes flip mid-sentence between French and English, creating a very interesting hybrid that most transcription tools choke on. Plaud handles it. The bilingual quality is genuinely impressive.
The Losers
Rabbit R1: Better, But Too Late
Sometimes you ship too early. The Rabbit R1 shipped way too early, and way not finished. I gave it another shot last week. It's actually better now. It feels more like a refined portable Alexa+ device than the half-baked thing it launched as. But "better" isn't enough. It's not as smart as ChatGPT. Not as integrated as Gemini. Not as portable as the Meta Ray-Bans. Not as good at capturing ideas as Plaud. In a world where everything is going through claudification, gemini-fication, and whatever-fication, the R1 doesn't earn its place on the desk. Or in the bag. Or in the drawer, honestly.
I'm going to put it back in the drawer.
The Pattern This Month
If I look at the keepers and the loser side by side, the pattern is the same one I keep landing on: the gadgets that earn their place are the ones that do one thing extremely well and disappear into my workflow. The Anker charger doesn't try to be a power station. The Jabra doesn't try to be a podcast rig. Plaud doesn't try to be a personal assistant. It just transcribes, in two languages, beautifully. The Rabbit R1 tries to be everything, and so it's nothing.
See you in June.