Back from the Alps: 5 finds + a faster brain 🌞 #69

Buonasera from the Alps!

Welcome to this week’s installment of what’s hot in brands and products.

Last day of summer break. School starts again tomorrow. Three months of leisure and gelato-fueled freedom—gone in a flash.

We bounced between Innsbruck, Mittenwald, and Merano this weekend. Fresh air. An Italo-Austro-Bavarian mix of late-summer dishes. Mountains and the sun doing their thing. And just tonight, the sky also wrapped it up with a lunar eclipse.

Kids back in class tomorrow; my desk never took a holiday.

Talking about work: I don’t chase every shiny productivity hack anymore (that was startup-era Berlin, five years ago).

But six weeks ago, I tried an app called Flow.

Speech-to-text. Sounds boring, right? I thought so too. Then… wow. Game changer. Notes, emails, prompts—done in seconds. The app’s stats say I’ve already dictated as many words as The Old Man and the Sea. Give me a few more weeks and I’ll be nipping at Tolkien’s heels (with significantly less literary value).

Two caveats:

• I don’t talk to my laptop in public—no one needs to hear me whispering my grocery list into a MacBook.

• And for half-baked ideas like these intros and my blog posts, I still prefer typing—it buys me time to think.

The free version’s already great if you want to try it.

If you’re new around here: Every week, I share 5 of the coolest products from Europe I’ve discovered in the past 7 days.

I scout, you explore. Let’s get to it!

With love 🌞
Jakob

P.S.: Missed the last edition? My favorite summer shorts (the ones I own in 7 colors) were the most clicked product. Hard to argue with that.

Catch me on Instagram between issues.

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Typotheque Sketchbook [🇳🇱]

Designed by Atelier Carvalho Bernau for Typotheque, this sketchbook is built for ideas that outgrow sticky notes: 192 smooth 100-g pages that don’t curl, bleed, or beg for mercy. Every 16th page is tinted so you can chunk a project without sticky flags. Linen spine, cold-glue binding, lies dead-flat (your wrist says grazie).

Find it here

reMarkable Paper Pro Move [🇳🇴]

If the Typotheque is your analog brain, the just-released Paper Pro Move is the digital twin. If you haven’t met its predecessors: reMarkable makes e-paper tablets with a stylus and screen that actually feel like paper. This one’s pocket-ish—a 7.3″ Canvas Color display, built-in reading light, battery life in days (not hours), and zero junk stealing your focus. (via Stefan)

Check it out here

Behold Cam-1 Wildlife Camera [🇩🇰]

A clever little garden cam that records wildlife—not people (no seriously, it filters out humans).

It auto-spots species (2,000+ across Europe & North America), shoots up to 2K/60fps with night vision, keeps clips on-device with 128GB storage, and ditches subscriptions (hallelujah). Industrial design with Pentagram (Jon Marshall), so it looks good even when it’s catching hedgehogs committing snack crimes.

Now live on Kickstarter—and already fully funded.

Back it here

Stromer Power Station by Njustudio [🇩🇪]

Back in the office? Park this “strom-pet” next to your desk: a birch-wood stand with three child-safe sockets and a ~3 m textile cable you can loop like a lasso around its handle. Designed, produced, and packed in Coburg, Franconia—regional, sturdy, and surprisingly charming.

Grab one here

Comandante C40 Mk4 [🇩🇪]

Coffee-guy confession: the Comandante coffee grinder is my daily driver. I’ve used a C40 for ~5 years and it’s still like new. Handmade near Munich, Nitro Blade® burrs, click-precise, travel-tough (I take it on every trip)—and comes in a warm Sunset finish. Costs more than some entry-level electrics, but I still reach for it every morning. Worth it.

See the Sunset version here