Notabli provides an ad-free space where you can add photos, videos, quotes, notes, and audio clips of your kids and then share them securely with family or close friends. All the media added is automatically organised, making it easy to find them later by kid, date, and location. Connected family members get email updates and can comment or like items you post. There is also the option of printing your favourite photos.

This browser extension (Chrome, Firefox, Edge) makes your new tab screens pretty and more functional: choose between background photos or colours, then add weather conditions, a clock, quotes, quick links and more.

This little MacOS app lives in the menu bar and allows remote teams to send asynchronous voice or video messages. Larger teams would need an app with more bells and whistles but for small teams or even a just a couple of people working from different locations, Minutes would come in handy.

There are tons of apps offering ‘sleep sounds’ – music or sounds that can help you fall asleep. This app connects a sound catalogue with your Apple Health data to find the sounds that yield the best sleep results. (I’m as intrigued by it as I am sceptical. Ha!)

The Age of Magical Overthinking →

Notes on modern irrationality

Writer and linguist Amanda Montell argues that in the modern information age, our brain’s coping mechanisms have been overloaded, and our irrationality turned up to an eleven. This leads to ‘magical thinking’ – cognitive biases that attempt to restore agency amid chaos. “Think of the conviction that one can manifest their way out of poverty, stave off cancer with positive vibes, thwart the apocalypse by learning to can their own peaches, or transform an unhealthy relationship to a glorious one with loyalty alone.”

Blockchain Radicals →

How capitalism ruined crypto & how to fix it

I’m one of the many people that find the potential of crypto and the blockchain appealing on a theoretical level. In practice, both have become synonymous with unbridled capitalism. This book attempts to show us how crypto can be used beyond individual profit and towards collective autonomy. “Covering everything from how Bitcoin saved WikiLeaks to decentralised finance, worker cooperatives, the environmental impact of Bitcoin and NFTs, and the crypto commons, it shows how these new tools can be used to challenge capitalism and build a better world for all of us.”

A great complementary read to the piece on ‘wintering‘ I mention in the intro: psychiatrist Neel Burton argues that the pursuit of happiness is misguided. Instead, Burton suggests that accepting the inevitability of pain and suffering in life and learning to navigate life’s challenges can lead to a greater sense of contentment. “The difficulty with conceptualising happiness is made worse by the simple fact that each of us knows very little about the miseries of others – oftentimes even if they are close others – because it is unpleasant and impolite to talk about horrible stuff in most social situations, and because disclosing failures and humiliations can seem to threaten one’s social image. This distorts the perception of what constitutes an average level of happiness. The advent of social media, with all its shallow fun and joyful narcissism, seems to have exaggerated this distortion.”

I really appreciate this short post by Tom Greenwood (who runs a creative agency) on the idea of self-sufficiency and how entrepreneurship fits into this concept. I specifically loved this paragraph: “Perhaps then the red herring in self-sufficiency is the term ‘self’. What we should be aspiring towards is not to be truly independent and live alone in the woods, but to develop personal capability and community sufficiency, in which we contribute to a shared effort to build resilient, caring communities whose focus is on production to meet needs, rather than consumption to meet wants.”

While studies on the effects of the ‘four-day workweek’ show pretty impressive results, this piece makes a great point: these benefits still don’t change the power dynamics between employees and employers. “The deeper issue is that convincing companies to adopt four-day weeks does little to change the balance of power between workers and employers. Left unchanged, the negotiation over how many hours should constitute ‘full-time’ would continue being held in the boardroom, where workers and their interests are largely without representation, and given today’s hampered labor movement, without much influence. ... Without more bargaining power, leisure will always have to justify itself in terms of productivity, placing a cap on how far the leisure agenda might go. With more power, leisure could break free from the hold of economic logic, expanding people’s freedom to lead a wider variety of lives.”