Kevin Kelly's Blog, page 3

Aaron Lammer, Longform Co-founder

Our guest this week is Aaron Lammer. Aaron is the co-host of the Longform Podcast, which has interviewed non-fiction writers weekly for over half a decade. He has been writing songs with the music project Francis and the Lights since college and lives in Brooklyn.

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Audio Hijack Mac Application (Free Trial or $59 License)

Audio Hijack is like a router for audio inside your computer. You can record just about about any application’s audio output, or just record the system audio itself. If I want to grab some audio from a Youtube video I’ll just hit record and then hit play. It makes audio — not just what you have as files but any audio you can even play — available with a copy paste workflow.

Dyson V7 Cordless Vacuum Cleaner ($241)

I bought this vacuum last year and it’s the first consumer product since the iPhone that I’ve felt was so essential that I’d pay basically whatever they asked for it. Also, it wall mounts very securely in a way that I wished everything I hang up daily just clipped into place.

Apple TV ($180)

I use Airplay constantly. It really appeals to me as a technology and Apple TV is at the center of my living room. I’ve maintained a big stash of mp3s and movies for a long period of my life and have gone through a gazillion ways of playing them back, Apple TV is where I landed. I also like the app Beamer for sending movies to Apple TV. I’ve been sending my Apple TV sound to my Airpods recently after my family goes to sleep.

iFixIt Essential Electronics Toolkit ($20)

I was going to list this little synthesizer I have called the OP-1 but they’re not selling them right, so when mine broke I had to open it up and put in a replacement headphone jack. I bought this little toolkit from iFixIt that had the part and a handful of tools, the most useful of which is the “spudger.” I’ve ended up using this kit several times since then, including repairing a Minidisc player last week in order to get one audio file off a decade old Minidisc.

Also mentioned:

Coin Talk podcast

Come ride the crypto rollercoaster with hosts Aaron Lammer and Jay Kang (and guests) as they laugh their way through the week in Bitcoin and beyond.

Stoner podcast

A podcast where creative people talk about their experiences with marijuana.

We have hired professional editors to help create our weekly podcasts and video reviews. So far, Cool Tools listeners have pledged $394 a month. Please consider supporting us on Patreon. We have great rewards for people who contribute! If you would like to make a one-time donation, you can do so using this link: https://paypal.me/cooltools.– MF

The 100 Best Business Books of All Time

There are ten thousand business books published each year and way over a hundred thousand in print. Most business books are worthless drivel, some are a good article fluffed out into a thin book, and maybe 100 out of those hundred thousand are worth reading. Out of those 100 best, only 10 might have something to say to you.

But how to find those few? Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten, two guys who sell biz books, seem to have read all of the ones in print, and they have done the world a favor by selecting the 100 best business books ever, and then packing summaries of them all into one meta-book. If all you want is their list, you can go to their website and check it out.

But their book is much better than a simple list, and their list is better than most. The two have reviewed, abstracted, and compared all the best 100 in the context of thousands of similar books, unlike say your average Amazon reviewer who may have only read one other business book in his or her life. You get context instead of content. Reading Covert and Sattersten’s summaries of these classics is often better than reading the book itself, and the review is always useful in pointing you to the few books or authors you might actually want to read in full.

In addition to including the expected gems like Good to Great, The Effective Executive, and Purple Cow, the 100 Best list also includes many lesser-known titles, some of them oldies-but-goodies, like Up the Organization, The Innovator’s Dilemma, and Flow. Not everything is new in business; the wisdom of the past is often surprisingly relevant.

Finally, this book itself is one of the best business books, and can be read alone as a pretty good education in business in its broadest sense, even if you don’t read any of the references.

A couple of caveats. One, the authors has included one of my books (Out of Control) in their list, which tickles me greatly but might have warped my perspective. Two, they sell business books (at 800CeoRead) and so their book can be seen as a sales tool. On the other hand, the authors have great incentive to sell and include only the best, and so their list is pretty persuasive. Three, in a slip of bad design each of the 100 books featured on their website does not appear with the review as found in their book, but is featured with the standard publisher verbiage; the author’s fantastic summaries and analysis are only found in their printed book. (They sell books, see?)

All in all, this is a great business resource at a modest price. If you took their list and read all 100 books you’d get a better MBA than any university would give you, at a fraction of the cost.

Perplexus

This is a cool 3-dimensional maze that is easy to get started and hard to finish. You need to steer a small metal ball along an ingenious obstacle course by rotating the clear plastic globe. There are 100 stations along the way, including some difficult topsy-turvy turns. All ages can get into it. We’ve found the puzzle to be extremely addictive to anyone who gets started. Because it’s like a 3D video game without the electronics, the very physical nature of playing — turning it this way and that — is very satisfying. In addition, the maze is like a sculpture, the design of the route is geekily brilliant, and the elegance of the eternal return of the steel ball within the sphere is a stroke of genius. Perplexus has the glow of a work of art. It makes me happy just to pick it up.

The Art of Game Design

This is by far the best guide ever written for designing games. All kinds of games, simple and traditional, but of course video games, too. This fat book is packed with practical, comprehensive, imaginative, deep, and broad lessons. Every page contained amazing insights for me. The more I read and re-read, the more important I ranked this work. I now view it as not just about designing games, but one of the best guides for designing anything that demands complex interaction. My 13-year-old son, who, like most 13-year-olds, dreams of designing games, has been devouring its 470 pages, telling me, “You’ve got to read this, Dad!” It’s that kind of book: You begin to imagine your life as a game, and how you might tweak its design. Author Jesse Schell offers 100 “lenses” through which you can view your game, and each one is a useful maxim for any assignment.

TheReviewIndex/Workflow music/Muscle map

Summarize Amazon reviews

TheReviewIndex finds recurring patterns in Amazon Reviews and then makes sense of it for you. It displays positive/negative ratings for things like “ease of use,” “quality,” “reliability,” and much more depending on the item. You can click through further to see snippets from user reviews pertaining to one particular aspect of the product. Right now the website only supports Electronics, Gadgets and Appliances. Worth bookmarking to make your shopping decisions a little easier. — CD

Workable flow music

When I am in the flow for work, headphones on, I like to put on any of the annual 2-hour tracks recorded by the DJ Tycho at Burning Man sunrise. Each set is upbeat, trancy, mellow. If you like this year’s Waypoint 2018 sunrise set, Tycho’s previous years are also available on his Soundcloud site. — KK

Muscle map

As a casual exerciser, I really appreciate this muscle chart from the DAREBEE website. It’s straightforward and I think, “hey, I can do that.” The website has other cool posters and printables to inspire you to workout. — CD

The best can opener

I bought the Kuhn Rikon can opener ($20) in 2011 and I still get excited every time I use it. It opens cans without leaving sharp edges. After opening hundreds of cans with it, it still never ceases to amaze me. — MF

End text formatting problems (OS X)

Here’s a beautiful life-changing tip for Mac users. Once you set these preferences, pasted text will be formatted like the destination, not the source. Why isn’t this the default setting? — MF

Geological modern art

Some of the best modern art on my walls are geological maps. These graphics are bright and cheerful while boasting scientific integrity. Geology from around the world can be used, but I favor geologically extreme places like this sample from Utah. For maximum of both art and science I highly recommend the Geologic Atlas of the Moon maps. Last printed in 1977, these Pop Art gems are now available as downloadable PDFs. (Crop and save as a jpeg.) I print mine on a 20 x 30 inch Costco poster board for $25. — KK

Recomendo Announcement

Every week for the past two years we briefly recommend 6 things to our friends. Sometimes we suggest tools, but most items aren’t tools. Rather we recommend stuff such as our favorite places to visit, things to watch or listen to, favorite stuff to eat, as well as tips for work or home, and techniques we’ve learned, quotes we like to remember, and so on. We email these 6 brief reviews in a free newsletter called Recomendo, and by now this one-pager is sent out every Sunday morning to almost 20,000 subscribers. If you want to get a feel for what we recommend, all the back issues are available here.

This autumn we collected, filtered and organized 550 of the best recommendations and put them into a book, called naturally enough, Recomendo. The book is 95 jam-packed pages. We’ve categorized the recommendations, grouping like with like. Having all the workflow tips, or household suggestions, or workshop tools, or travel recommendations all in one place is super handy. There’s an index and subject guide. Many of the items have an illustration. To make up for the fact that a book can’t have links, we’ve added QR codes, so you can instantly get a link with your phone. Everyone who has picked the book up has found something cool for them on the first page and they keep turning the pages for more. I think it’s the happiest book I’ve ever worked on.

Recomendo is available now from Amazon, for $9.99, with two-day Prime shipping. We will have a PDF version later for international fans. I genuinely believe it will make a great inexpensive gift for most people. It’s what I’m giving to friends this year. Order one for yourself and see if you agree.

The Book of Genesis Illustrated

As literature, the biblical book of Genesis has it all: sex, violence, angels, war, murder, heroes, incest, world-wide disasters, spooky mystery, and a timeless story. All it needed was illustrations by the comic genius R. Crumb and you’d have a underground manga hit. And that’s what this book is. Crumb brilliantly did not alter or omit any words from the scriptural text, and even toned down his drawings to a PG-13 rating. But man, is this strong drink. It will burn your eyelashes. Like it must have done 2,000 years ago. Now you have absolutely no excuse not to read the first book of the Bible.

Spider And Web/Cheap new tools/Better Reddit browsing

Mysterious text adventure

I used to love the old Infocom text adventure games. They were interactive stories where you affected the outcome by making decisions and doing things as you moved around a world described in words only. A friend told me about a free web-based text adventure called Spider And Web and I am enthralled by it.  I don’t want to say anything about the plot. Just give it a try. — MF

Cheap new tools

It is easy to mock the importer Harbor Freight for their insanely cheap Chinese-made tools, but in fact I’ve had great success with the tools I’ve bought from them. I may only use them a few times a year, and for that frequency their quality is more than sufficient, and their self-proclaimed “ridiculously low prices” are in fact a tremendous bargain. Over the years I’ve bought a welder, a larger sanding wheel, a buffer, and recently a new compound miter saw for less than $100. – KK

Customize your Reddit feeds

The Reddit app allows me to switch between accounts pretty easily, so I created a few different usernames to group subreddits by themes. It makes browsing less overwhelming when I can focus on one thing I’m trying to accomplish. I have an account for all the subreddits that make me laugh (CrazyIdeas, AnimalsBeingJerks, CrappyDesign), one for learning new things (explainlikeimfive, whatisthisthing, todayilearned), and one for inspiration (Crafts, Miniworlds, onegoodsentence). I actually have a total of five accounts, it’s almost getting out of control, but still this method keeps me sane. — CD

Sampling books

Several power users of the Kindle turned me on to a great tip: load up your Kindle, or phone, with free sample chapters of any and all books you are interested in. Read the sample (usually the first) chapter and then decide if you want to buy the book. In fact, don’t buy any book until you’ve read the sample chapter. The “Send free sample” button is under the “Buy Now” button on the book’s Amazon page. — KK

Prevent hand pain

I can’t handwrite for long periods of time without some discomfort. These pencil grips are designed for kids and adults with arthritis, but they help me out a lot too. I bought a 6-pack for $11. — CD

Ultralight kneeling cushion

This cushion ($8) protects my knees anytime I have to work on anything close to the floor or the ground. I’ve had it since 2011 and am grateful to have it every time I use it. — MF

Forschner Victorinox Chef’s Knife

A really great chef’s knife is insanely sharp, yet retains its edge easily and feels well-balanced and welcoming in your hand. These days, a decent high-grade chef’s knife can cost $100-$200. Several cooking publications, including Cook’s Illustrated, recently tested a bargain $30 chef’s knife that rated just about as good as the $100-plus knives. It’s the Victorinox Chef’s Knife; the one we use.

The Victorinox is a hybrid of a thin Japanese blade with a 15-degree edge (western knives have a 20-degree edge), but with the longer, broader blade of European knives. It is lightweight, nicely-balanced, and lethally-sharp. It has a comfortable, grippy handle that won’t slip even when wet. There are five cooks in our household. This is the knife they all grab first. It may not be quite as super great as some of the other previously-reviewed chef’s knives, but considering the price, it can’t be beat.

Elan Lee, Co-creator of Exploding Kittens

Our guest this week is Elan Lee. Elan is a professional game designer. He is a co-creator of Exploding Kittens, the most backed crowdfunded project in history. And before that, he was Chief Design Officer for Microsoft’s Xbox.

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