Daybridge (in beta) changes your standard calendar layout by incorporating ‘smart cards’ that provide relevant info and functionality to calendar events. It also structures and organises your timeline based on various personal info.

Describing itself as “a social network for signal over noise”, Column gathers people in “sensibility-specific rooms” that can be public or private. By incentivising “high-quality information and respectful interaction” Column tries to keep things civil (although there’s little information on how exactly they are doing that).

Want to become better at making Twitter more accessible? Here’s a browser extension (Chrome & Firefox) that replaces the ‘Tweet’ button on Twitter with an ‘Add Alt Text’ button until you add a description of the image you’re sharing.

Oh, how I wish this was part of every curriculum, job training, and therapy session: Geoffrey Roberts’ Feel Wheel (a bit more background here, giving credit to Dr. Gloria Willcox) can help us extend our emotional vocabulary. Not-for-profit use is encouraged. Share it far and wide!

Mistrust →

Regaining confidence in ‘the system’

Ethan Zuckerman explores our collective mistrust towards ‘the system’. “This loss of faith has spread beyond government to infect a broad swath of institutions – the press, corporations, digital platforms – none of which seem capable of holding us together. Mistrust introduces a set of ‘levers’ – law, markets, code, and norms – that all provide ways to move the world.”

Framework →

The upgradeable, repairable laptop

Like the Fairphone, the soon-to-launch Framework laptop attempts to offer a more accessible indie alternative to mainstream proprietary hardware. I doubt it’ll attract more than a small group of geeky individualists. But still, I think projects like this are a public demonstration of better informed consumers and will help send a signal about longevity and sustainability to big hardware manufacturers.

Gosh, there are so many beautiful observations about science, (geo)politics, racism, space exploration and more in this piece – I didn’t want it to end. Bravo! “The plans for extraterrestrial expeditions that receive the most publicity are designed by power and for power. They are either supported by national governments to gain geopolitical advantage, or championed by the wealthiest individuals as a personal indulgence. I cannot see in their visions a safe, equitable place for someone like me, if there’s a place at all. I am too politically unruly for the Chinese program, too foreign for another country’s, too poor and female to expect entry on a billionaire’s ship with my dignity intact.”

We love to make lists of big goals we want to achieve in life. Arthur Brooks explains why ticking off boxes of ‘things achieved’ might work against us: “We have every evolutionary reason to want to keep score in life – passing on genes is a competitive business, after all. But there is no evidence that Mother Nature gives two hoots whether we are happy or not. And, in fact, this kind of scorekeeping is a happiness error for two reasons: It makes us dependent on external rewards, and it sets us up for dissatisfaction.”

A fascinating deep-dive into content moderation on Facebook and its new Oversight Board which is supposed to act like a supreme court of the ‘world’s biggest nation’. “Missteps by Facebook in this area have fueled everything from a genocide in Myanmar to viral disinformation surrounding politics and the coronavirus.”