Topic
tools
- Muse Prompts For Journaling
Sometimes in a journaling session it’s hard to get yourself writing. You need a kickstart, an idea to latch onto and get your brain moving. I know I do when it’s 5:30am and I sit down to write. So I built a simple too…
- Muse, a tool for journaling prompts
So far this year I've gone headlong into what's possible with AI development, specifically using Cursor. I've been using it to write code, write blogs, and even write this post. The potential for "personal software" i…
- gpt-researcher
GPT Researcher is an autonomous agent designed for comprehensive online research on a variety of tasks. The agent can produce detailed, factual and unbiased research reports, with customization options for focusing on…
- Tools
Great book, incredible illustrations.
- Nick Pedulla's Roubo Workbench
The novelty, design, craftsmanship, execution, cinematography, all unmatched. Absolutely incredible work. He took a centuries-old, classic bench design and added function to support his specific workflow needs. I have…
- Cuttle.xyz
I recently was getting our Silhouette vinyl cutter back out, since Colette hasn't used it in a while. The software for the thing is still ancient and janky — hard to believe anyone uses it at all. But I found this new…
- Excel Never Dies
All the cool conversation is on no-code tools these days, but the OG no-code platform has been around for 35 years: Microsoft Excel. Even from its early days, it had all the hallmarks of today's no-code tools: a combo…
- Weekend Reading: Liberal Science, Roam42, and JTBD Examples
🧠In Defense of Being Offensive Jonathan Rauch on pluralism and the necessity of disagreement in the search for truth. His book Kindly Inquisitors was first published in 1993, but is as relevant today as ever. The bo…
- Twemex
As little as Twitter has moved as a product in the last several years, the amount of time I spend on it clearly demonstrates that there's gold there that no other product can replace. If you curate your following list…
- Readwise, Books, and Spaced Repetition
In his piece "Why Books Don't Work," Andy Matuschak made a strong case that books are a poor medium for knowledge transfer. Even with the most advanced book experiences today (like digital ebook downloads to a Kindle)…
- Roam's Future
Roam Research already has a deep community of users coalescing around it, building extensions, custom styles, and poking at the edges of how it could be extended. In this post, David Crandall outlines some possibiliti…
- Annotating the Web with Memex
I linked a few weeks ago to a new tool called Memex, a browser extension that touts itself as bookmarking for "power users of the web." Its primary unique differentiator is how they approach the privacy angle. I'm a c…
- Memex
Not that we needed another bookmarking utility, but Memex looks like an interesting take. It’s a browser extension focused on history, bookmarking, and annotation, but all stored in a local database. It has an end-to-…
- Roam Tools
The roamcult has been on a streak of creating tools to extend and improve Roam Research. Here are a few that I've been using lately. Better Roam Research This one is a simple Chrome extension that reskins Roam with a…
- Concepts
I just installed this iPad app for sketching, which intrigued me for a few of its features. I've tried dozens of apps, but they tend to fall too far into the art camp or the note-taking camp, without very many that se…
- Weekend Reading: American Production, On Bikeshedding, and Glyphfinder
đźŹď¸Ź Why America Can Make Semiconductors But Not Swabs Dan Wang on American industrial production: Learning to build again will take more than a resurgence of will, as Andreessen would have it. And the U.S. should thin…
- Knowledge Synthesis in Roam
What does it mean to "synthesize" knowledge? Joel Chan, author of this post and professor of human-computer interaction, describes it as "creating a new whole out of components." In reading, digesting material, and ta…
- Weekend Reading: Beastie Boys, Links, and Screencasting
🎥 Beastie Boys Story We watched this a couple nights ago. It's hard to tell how objectively good it was, but I loved the heck out of it as a decades-long fan. 🔗 Linkrot I'll have to try out this tool that Tom built…
- Getting Comfortable with Roam
Roam Research has been making the rounds on the internet in the last couple months. I've written a little bit here about it, but promised this longer overview of how it's working for me so far. What is it? Roam is a t…
- awesome-roam
A sign your tool, library, community, or science has made it is when it gets the awesome lists treatment. I've got an upcoming post in the works on my experiences with Roam so far. Lots of the resources listed here ar…
- Raindrop for Bookmarks
I found and started testing out Raindrop.io for managing bookmarks. Pinboard has been my go-to for this for years, to which I've added the resurrected Instapaper for anything like articles (to support Readwise flow).…
- Roam: A Tool for Metacognition
I'm deeper these days into Roam for info storage and notes. It empowers a looser, free-form version of writing (or as Roam describes it "networked thought") that's hard to do in a linear note document. I've been worki…
- Readwise and Instapaper
Discovering Readwise a few months ago caused me to resurrect my long-dormant Instapaper account. Instapaper was my go-to "read later" service, but I also used it as a general bookmark archive. After a while I'd fallen…
- Kindle for Mac
Periodically I want to read on my computer, particularly when sitting at my desk. Amazon publishes a web app called Cloud Reader for reading Kindle books, which emulates pretty closely what their mobile apps look and…
- Alfred Emoji Pack
As a keyboard shortcut user, I'm always on the hunt for ways to keep my hands on the keoard. Shortcut snippet tools like TextExpander are also catnip for speeding up typing. I've gotten used to many of the emoji short…
- Checking In On Tool Restoration YouTube
I’ve been home the past couple days to attend to some projects — getting an aluminum patio cover installed and having shutters put in on most of the windows. My time’s been occupied by holiday season preparation, gene…
- bookish.tech
This is a handy tool for searching book metadata, built by Tom MacWright. It’s a “universal converter” for book IDs in various services, like Goodreads, OpenLibrary, and WorldCat. It’s open source and also has an API.…
- Day One Templates
Day One is an excellent app for iOS and macOS for personal journaling. I've had it for a number of years, but have always been fairly irregular in my usage. Most of what I log there is photos of the kids and other kid…
- Weekend Reading: Iceland, the Use of Knowledge, and CLI Search
⚖️ The Use of Knowledge in Society I've been reading some of Hayek's famous articles this week. This one is all about what he probably considered one of the most important concepts, since these basic ideas form a cent…
- Weekend Reading: nvUltra, Progress, and Comma.ai
📝 nvULTRA This is a new notes app from Brett Terpstra (creator of nvALT) and Fletcher Penney (creator of MultiMarkdown). I used nvALT for years for note taking on my Mac. This new version looks like a slick reboot of…
- Pinboard
I was a big del.icio.us "Delicious") user back in the day, pre- and post-Yahoo. For anyone unfamiliar, it was one of the first tools (before Twitter) for sharing web links and making bookmarks social. I signed up for…