I don’t want to brag, but I had a lot of meetings this week. Some were via video calls, some face-to-face in real-life conference rooms.

You know where I didn’t have any? In the metaverse.

Ironically, some of those meetings were about metaverse meetings.

To be clear: I’m talking about the idea that we put on some sort of headset and hang out with remote virtual legless-avatar colleagues. (Check out my video here to better understand it all.)

On Monday, I interviewed Magic Leap CEO Peggy Johnson via video call for The Wall Street Journal’s upcoming Future of Everything special issue.

Magic Leap, the once-hyped augmented-reality company, recently announced its second-generation headset that’s focused on enterprise use. (Think healthcare, manufacturing and more.) When I asked Johnson what she thought would be the killer augmented-reality app to get consumers into AR headsets she said:

Read the whole Q+A here.

A few days later I attended a meeting with Greylock Partners venture capitalist and longtime entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, who also recently re-released his book “The Startup of You.” And yep, the metaverse came up:

Exactly! I’ve had a lot of experience hanging with avatars, and there some basic reasons I don’t do it often:

As you’ll read, Ms. Johnson compares this moment in headsets to the early days of smartphones. Like mobile devices, they’ll get thinner, lighter and cooler (both in temperature and looks). Yet I’m still not convinced that when that happens we’ll say, “Hey, this is awesome! Let’s have a work meeting!”

It’s May, which means it’s time for one of my favorite spring cleaning activities: subscription pruning.

If you’re some sort of hyper-organized monster with a spreadsheet of every subscription, then congrats! Visit those apps and services, and cancel the ones you don’t use.

The rest of us can start our lists by reviewing credit-card statements. I also check my iPhone’s subscriptions menu, which maintains a list of any services I’ve subscribed to through Apple’s App Store. (I try not to subscribe that way because of the cut Apple takes from developers, but sometimes it happens.)

Go to Settings, tap your name at the top, then select Subscriptions. Tap on the subscription you want to cancel, and Apple takes care of the rest. On Android, you can do the same. Go to Play Store, select your avatar in the upper right and then select Payments & subscriptions.

You can also use a subscription-tracking app like Truebill, which will sift through your credit-card and bank accounts for recurring costs and automatically track them for you. They’re helpful for seeing everything, and they’ll even try to cancel for you. But you have to be comfortable with sharing financial-account credentials with third parties.

 Scott Nugent from Glen Allen, Va.

 Sony Walkman WM-GX788

 My father purchased it when it was released in 2003. I received it after he passed away in 2018.

 I remember my dad’s favorite feature was called A-B Repeat. This is where you tell the player when to start and stop playing the tape. You could tag the beginning of a song (Point A) and then the end of a song (Point B) and the player would automatically rewind the tape and play the same song over and over. It was futuristic!

 I learned all about music from my dad. Growing up in Chicago, he was a huge blues fan. After he passed, he left a trove of cassette tapes. I use this device to listen to them in his absence.

 My dad kept everything in pristine condition. He still had the wired remote, the additional battery attachment, the manual and even the carrying case that came with it!

Got questions about your digital life? Reply to this email with them!

 When I read your piece on the Snap Pixy, I was wondering if you knew of a small digital camera that I could use to take video of the inside of our bluebird house. We are quite interested in seeing what goes on in there.—George Thomas de Lange from Roswell, Ga.

 Something I did not have on my wishlist before this question: a bluebird-size drone that can fly inside birdhouses to record the goings-ons of nestlings.

It turns out, there are all kinds of tiny cameras for this very purpose. The most popular options I’ve come across are from a company called Green Feathers. The $189 WiFi Bird Box Camera, specifically, connects to Wi-Fi so you can stream the 1080p footage and check in on the live birds right on your smartphone or computer. It’s also equipped with a wide-angle lens, night vision, motion detection and a built-in microphone so you can hear those chirps. If you don’t have Wi-Fi out by the bird house, it supports a MicroSD card to record video locally so you can watch it later.

I haven’t tested this since I don’t think the aggressive pigeons in my backyard would appreciate my surveillance, but let me know how it goes!

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User-submitted content has been edited for clarity and length. This week’s newsletter was curated and written by Joanna Stern and Cordilia James in New York.