Benjamin Lannon

Weeknotes #100 (October 03, 2026)

Benjamin Lannon — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Things I found, read, did, and produced this past week.

Things I worked on

Node Schedule is a new tool I came up with to make an "AWS Lambda at home" as I wanted to try minimizing the time from having an idea for a nodejs script to having it scheduled.

Things I consumed

GPT-6.1 Sol is out only a week after GPT-6 Sol was released. It still has GPT-esque quirks and I still have to steer the model when working with it, but I do find it good that the pricing for a given task is getting cheaper over time as these newer models come out.
The 2026 Kindle Lineup of the base Kindle, Paperwhite, and Colorsoft were unveiled. The main thing is the signature lines have an aluminum casing rather than the plastic of the originals, but they are all more expensive across the board between $149 all the way up to $319. I got the 2024 paperwhite on sale that year, so I'm not really in the market for a new kindle.

Weeknotes #99 (September 26, 2026)

Benjamin Lannon — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Things I found, read, did, and produced this past week.

Things I consumed

OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and Luna which has made major price cuts. People have commented that Sol is now more similar quality to the previous 5.6 Terra, but that is the model I usually used on my $20 plan, so I've jumped up to it.
Google announced the first models of what they're calling Googlebooks. A combination of an android device and chromebook with phone / computer handoff capabilites similar to what Apple has but now for the Android ecosystem. I don't currently own any android devices so this is really not for me, but the world shall see if this has legs or joins a bunch of other things in the Google Graveyard.
CONTROL Resonant has fully been released as a new game from Remedy Entertainment. I've been watching this game and do want to play this game down the road but I have other games I'm actively playing like Final Fantasy 13 and Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave, so I'll likely grab it at a later date.

Weeknotes #98 (September 19, 2026)

Benjamin Lannon — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Things I found, read, did, and produced this past week.

Things I consumed

Fire Emblem Fortune's Weave came out this week and it definitely has been fun so far. Mixture of the two previous games of good tactics mechanics from Engage with some of the social aspects from Three Houses. Also appreciate that the various routes unlike Three Houses are more unique and can be done in parallel rather than have to play the game over and over again.
Jev is a new model that launched this week with a focus on specifically decision making. Rather than nondetirministic output like LLMs, it returns stuff like enumeration choices, yes or no answers, among others. The first main usecase is much cheaper classficiation than a standard LLM. I've yet to try it out, but I may look into signing up for the beta and see if there is anything in my personal apps I could use it for.
the OS 27 updates for the various Apple devices are out and with it Siri AI has arrived fully after being unveiled 2 years ago and I'm likely to write up a post about my usage in a few weeks after using it more and more.

Weeknotes #97 (September 12, 2026)

Benjamin Lannon — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Things I found, read, did, and produced this past week.

Things I worked on

As part of my various projects (product-age, weeknotes-dashboard, and tcg-tracker), I have been starting to pin them to 1.0.0 version numbers with changelogs such that I can start properly versioning them. For TCG Tracker in particular which has a database that is more than just a json file, I felt it was good to finally start versioning the app so when I modify the database schema, people know when to run a migration.

Things I consumed

Puzzlez was the planned puzzle mode of Shapez 2 that is being spun out into its own game. Definitely enjoy the puzzles of the base Shapez 2's campaign but with this it is going to push things to much more condensed space that you can work in.
Churgle a bungus was a good youtube short I saw earlier this week that really hits at a good stance that not everything needs to be done for the purpose of making money or needs to be automated with generative AI.
Apple unveiled the iPhone Duo, a $2000 folding iPhone that expands to about the size of a iPad mini. For now I don't think it is a product in particular that I need as I have an iPhone and iPad mini and I don't see the need to merge them into a single device, but I still am interested to see how it evolves over the years and how its user experience influences both the standard iPhones as well as iPads.

Weeknotes #96 (September 05, 2026)

Benjamin Lannon — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Things I found, read, did, and produced this past week.

Things I consumed

I've started reading Dungeon Crawler Carl this week. A very out there book where it is a mixture of a RPG and Reality TV genres, but I am enjoying it so far.
GPT 6 Astra was unveiled by OpenAI. As the raw token price is comparable to Fable (but is more efficient in various benchmarks, so cheaper in practice), it is not something yet for me still with a $20 a month plan, but I'd like to see how this new model distills down into a GPT 6 Sol, Terra, and Luna.

Weeknotes #95 (August 29, 2026)

Benjamin Lannon — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Things I found, read, did, and produced this past week.

Things I worked on

Wrote a short blogpost on Discord webhooks and how it is a quick way for me to get from data on the web into scheduled alerts based on that data.
Related to such, I wrote one to aggregate Dependabot alerts from a select set of GitHub repos. I have over 200 repos so this lets me focus in on the particular ones I care about at the moment and surface those alerts to me.

Things I consumed

Apple released the M6 Mac Mini. This generation is pushing more and more on local AI with faster memory bandwidth and more neural engine cores, but we shall have to see in the coming months if Apple's push is what users actually want. Also, my M1 Mac Mini is still kicking along over 5 years since I bought it and I am likely to hold off one or two more generations before upgrading it.
In some good news, Panic, creators of the Playdate handheld, is paying back their tariff refunds back to customers

Discord Webhooks for getting data

Benjamin Lannon — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Often I decide I want to run some small node script to grab some data, and then the results over to Discord. Discord itself allows you to do such extremely quickly via a Discord webhook. Discord has an Intro to Webhooks support page to go fetch the url to throw it against GitHub, but you can just use this endpoint with an HTTP post request. For example, this is all needed:

const discordWebhookUrl = "https://discord.com/...";

fetch(discordWebhookUrl, {
  method: "POST",
  headers: {
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({ content: "Hello world!" }),
});

And then I could first fetch some data from some other API above, and then point a cronjob and the automation is done.

Some examples I've done with this:

Check if any access tokens from various sites are expired and send a post if they have.
Check trading card prices.
Check when was the last time I posted onto my blog.

Discord has a lot better app capabilities, but if I just want a simple pipeline from some data into Discord, using a webhook is straightforward.

References

Discord Webhook Reference

Weeknotes #94 (August 22, 2026)

Benjamin Lannon — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Things I found, read, did, and produced this past week.

Things I consumed

Kagi is adding functionality to remove paywalled sites from web searches. Although I do think paying for news and journalism is good, this I feel is still good as I feel for the sites I do pay to access their content, I go to them directly rather than via a web search.
Framework announced the 2nd generation Framework Laptop 12 with Intel Core Series 3 chips and the same reparability and modularity of the first generation. The Framework Desktop I've been using for the past month has been really solid so I am happy to see Framework continue to upgrade their lineup even with the memory and storage crisis.

Weeknotes #93 (August 15, 2026)

Benjamin Lannon — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Things I found, read, did, and produced this past week.

Things I consumed

My friends and I got to the credits of Big Walk which I mentioned last week and it is definitely a gem in the "friendslop" genre. If you have a group of friends that like puzzle / adventure games with proximity chat, you need to play this.
James Simonson's been working on a city builder and been posting videos of the various systems onto YouTube. Part 3 came out earlier this week.
I've been delving more into using T3 Code for my agentic development with Codex as the backing tool. Specifically I've been trying out the mobile app which is a companion and hooks into any of your running desktop instances that I can use remotely given my phone and computers are all hooked up via Tailscale. I'm trying to see how the experience of "developing" software via coding agents on the go is, and it definitely is different as the experience of swap between a more traditional code editor and a chat interface is not really available when working off of a phone. I will have to continue testing and see what scenarios using the mobile app works vs when I want to be sitting in front of a laptop or desktop instead.

Weeknotes #92 (August 08, 2026)

Benjamin Lannon — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Things I found, read, did, and produced this past week.

Things I consumed

Big Walk by the creators of Untitled Goose Game came out this week and it has quickly ramped up to one of my favorites of this year so far. It's a co-op game where you're going around solving puzzles in a large world and if you have friends that would like this as well, I would say don't look too much into the game and just experience it for yourself.