Gannon Burgett

iA Notebook

This looks like a beautiful little product. I’m not short on notebooks at the moment, but I might just have to pick one of these up when they become available.

I’m unsure why, but as time goes on, the less and less I enjoy being away from home. Our family went on a little trip this week, stretching merely Monday-Wednesday. It was an absolute joy and the kids had a blast, but I couldn’t help but want to be back at home having the usual evening routine after only 24 hours.

I’ve always considered myself a homebody—an introvert to a high degree. But, at the same time, I’ve always enjoyed being in the car on a road trip or exploring and learning about new places. Now though, it feels as though that is coming to an end in some capacity. Or, at the very least, undergoing a serious transition. I crave routine. I crave the simple, almost boring evenings at home with my wife watching our favorite shows, playing our favorite video games next to each other, and snacking on our favorite treats after tucking in the kids for bed.

It feels strange to be so complacent with the mundane. But it also feels like the inevitable after the first 30 years of my life, which saw me move more than 15 times, attend 12 schools from pre-K through college, and go through cancer at the age of 19 (which coincided with a then-gutting breakup that more or less altered my entire social life).

After all of that, simple feels safe and solitude feels sublime. It’s taken a decade of active measures to get to a place where simple is achievable and solitude is obtainable (as much as is possible with a five-year-old and four-year-old at home). So, for now, I’ll embrace this stage of life and continue to embrace the minimal stress and complications it affords.

“Time flows in a strange way on Sundays."

– Haruki Murakami

The older I get, the more I want to work on smaller screens.

I started writing on my glorious little 13” plastic white MacBook, moved up to a 27” iMac and continued to explore various multi-monitor solutions in every configuration imaginable. Now all I want is a cozy mechanical keyboard (my Keychron K2), a comfortable mouse (my Logi Ego M575), and a reasonably-sized screen (my 11” pre-M1 iPad Pro).

Larger displays only lead to more room for distractions and if there’s one thing I don’t need any help with it’s getting even more distracted than I do in the best circumstances.

I previously mentioned I was at Virginia International Raceway as part of Car and Driver’s annual Lightning Lap event. While my driving of fast, expensive cars was mostly limited to hauling them from one side of the track to another at no more than 30mph, I did manage to sneak in a hot lap as a passenger inside the Air Sapphire, a ridiculous EV made by Lucid.

I’ve loved fast cars all my life and have spent years shooting them trackside. But I haven’t gotten to ride in too many cars at high speed. Combine that with the fact I, until this event, had never ridden inside a fully electric vehicle, my breadth of experience is limited. That said, the Lucid Air Sapphire, at least at speed, was unlike any other car I’ve been in.

The amount of torque the Air Sapphire puts out on acceleration is incredible and taking high-speed turns felt like cutting through recently-Zamboni’d ice with a fresh pair of skates—on edge while still having just the right amount of grip. It’s clear why they named this vehicle the “Air.” No oversteer, no wheelspin—just pure speed and the grip to keep it all between the lines (with some help from our talented driver, Car and Driver Technical Editor, Dan Edmunds. Granted, you’d expect this from a $250,000 EV, but actually feeling it in action was an experience I won’t soon forget.

The above photo is one I snapped of the Air Sapphire as it sat after a hot lap around VIR’s Grand Course. It was shot on Kodak Gold 200 inside my Contax 645 with a 80mm F2 Zeiss lens and developed/scanned by Nice Film Club out of Brooklyn, NY. I’m not sure what magical elements all came together to get the exact look if I’m being honest, but the green tint to the glass, the soft purple shadows, and the colorful reflections instantly made me think of the iconic work of Saul Leiter, who photographed much of his color New York street photography on Kodachrome (his black and white work is incredible as well).

Leiter has always been a photographer whose work I’ve come back to time and time again and Kodachrome is a film stock I’ve always wished I’d had the opportunity to shoot with before it was declared dead, so to get this look with a modern film stock is a nice surprise.

Every single day I manage to completely forget a word I’m looking for while writing. I know exactly what I want to say conceptually, but the specific word alludes me.

Today, that word was “impromptu.”

The release of all these always-recording devices and software (Rewind and company) as of late has me thinking about this quote I have stored away in My Mind:

“Never in history have lives been less lived, yet so well documented”

I didn’t have the author of the above quote noted, but searches suggest it’s derivative of this quote from comedian Dennis Miller.

Last week was one of the wildest experiences of my life. As part of my Testing Editor role at Hearst Autos, I tagged along with Car and Driver for their annual Lightning Lap event at Virginia International Raceway.

While I didn’t get to drive cars at full speed, I did get to move around cars that cost more than twice as much as my home and managed to get a Mustang Dark Horse to a meager 70MPH around the track while lining it up for the full-car photo shoot.

In addition to snapping photos and videos for forthcoming Car and Driver e-commerce articles, I also lugged around my trusty Contax 645 and snapped a few photos of the cars we had on hand for the event. It’ll be a while before I send off the film and get back the scans, but it’s been a while since I’ve shot 120 film, so we’ll see how the Kodak Gold 200 turns out.

There needs to be a way to turn an old iPhone or iPad into a CarPlay module. I have a few old devices I could mount onto my dash and use for Maps/Music/Etc. And you’d assume the tech for Wireless CarPlay is there from a current iPhone given AirDrop and other wireless capabilities.

I’ve spent a bit of time this week reducing my online footprint.

I’ll never get it to zero. After all, I’ve spent the past 13 years building an online portfolio of writing, photography, and video work under my own name for various publications whose content I no longer have any control over. But aside from the publications I’ve written for over the years (and continue to in my current role), my goal is to get my footprint as small as possible in terms of deleting social profiles and other content that shows up in search.

In an ideal world, I would’ve started my career with a pseudonym and kept with it over the years. But as an 18 year old with a unique name, I figured I’d run with it. Not to mention I started in photo/journalism, where pseudonyms are rather frowned upon. Alas, it is what it is and all I can do now is to delete, discontinue, and remove what I can in hopes the inevitable link rot will do the rest.

After a week of high-80º and low-90º days, this forecast is very much welcomed. Now all we need is some rain. We’ve only had ~1” of rain in the past 30 days or so, which is ridiculous for a Michigan spring.

FaceTime for Apple TV is long overdue and will be very welcomed. As someone with two children who often FaceTime grandparents and aunts/uncles, it’ll be supremely nice to be able to toss an old iPhone atop the TV and FaceTime w/o worrying about holding a device in hand.

The ability to make Webb apps from any website in Safari will be fantastic. Too many native apps lack feature parity with their web versions (or are far behind), particularly enterprise-grade services used for work.

Standby mode for iPhone is also long overdue. I was never sure why Apple didn’t drop this when its AOD was introduced. Seemed like a no-brainer, given the Apple Watch had/has a similar mode.

Live Voicemail and FaceTime Messages are going to be a favorite of mine. I’m a slightly anxious and introverted-ass human who doesn’t like talking on the phone or picking up unless I absolutely have to. Let me see what someone wants before I pick up the phone.

Autofill passwords from mail. Auto-fill from messages is already one of the greatest features of macOS/iPhOS/iPadOS. Seeing it come to Mail just improves upon it.

Check-in is going to be great for those times when we’re leaving family’s house and traveling back home. I always tell them I’ll text them when we get home, but I always forget to do so. I have set up geofence reminders in the past, but this is more elegant.

AirDrop improvements are nice. AirDrop is one of my favorite Apple ecosystem features and the new tap-to-drop feature will be a nice improvement, particularly when sharing photos and videos of the kids with family.

I’m more of a paper journaler, but I’m inconsistent and don’t always take the time to document my days (quite frequently, unfortunately). My hope is the Journal app will be able to let me at least get down a few key notes of each day alongside any photos and other data to refresh my mind should I want to come back and document a particular day.

Safari Profiles look nice. Curious to see how they feel when using them on a regular basis. Seems like Apple is taking a little nod from Arc Browser on this one.

Love the iPad Lockscreen upgrades as well. I would’ve liked to see Apple introduce a proper media center-like mode to turn old iPads into Home Hubs of sorts like many Android Smart Displays, but I guess we’ll have to wait for that.

Interactive widgets will be a nice addition as well. As always, the usefulness of these will likely come down quite a bit to developer creativity. I have no doubt many will create impressive little widgets. And I’m sure many more will make apps that are designed to almost be invisible, designed only to be used in the form of a widget.

Bringing proper Preview-like PDF support and editing to iPad is so long overdue it’s not even worth praising. This should’ve happened the day the Apple Pencil came out.

Apple says (supported) iPads will soon be able to ‘Use the built-in camera in your external display for FaceTime and conference calls.’ Apple doesn’t specify whether or not this is only for the Pro Display XDR and/or Studio Display, but that seems to be the case. I’d love to see Apple include third-party webcam support.

As for hardware, the 15" MacBook Air is a great addition to the lineup and will sell like hotcakes. Especially starting at $1199. Mac Studio and Mac Pro are both nice pieces of hardware but are so far out of anything I would need it’s not worth my commenting on them at all.

Apple Vision Pro is an intriguing proposition. I’ve used both the Nreal Air and Rokid glasses, and while neat, real-world use was less than impressive. These are far better made, but the value proposition seems to be more or less the same, which isn’t compelling.

Maybe new apps and better integrations could change that, but as it stands, I can’t imagine myself getting this first-gen version. At $2499, I might consider forgoing my next iPhone or iPad for it and shelling out. But at its MSRP? Not happening, barring a lottery win.

This list may or may not be updated in the future.

My four-year-old son calls “convertible” cars “carnivores,” and I’m not sure I’m prepared for the day when he corrects his mistake. It’s too damn cute.

After three years of trying other daily planners, I’m back on the Hobonichi Techo bandwagon.

I finally ended up pulling the trigger on a standing desk. Until recently I didn’t have the space for one, but now I do and figured it was a good time. Ended up going with the Moss Green Ply Jarvis desk from Fully with an ErgoDriven Topo standing mat (the Moss Green color is almost identical to the wall color I painted my office, so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity for making it a match).