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#60 January 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

(via The 1944 CIA guide to sabotaging meetings — Authentic Comms Strategic Consultancy)

A bunch of things (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

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“I can get through this.” / 2. “I’m not going to let myself be a victim.” / 3. “Life is hard.” / 4. “This, too, shall pass.” / 5. “What can I learn from this?” / 6. “I need some time.” / 7. “I still have things to be grateful for.” / 8. “It is what it is.” / 9. “I’m letting this go.”

Harvard psychologist: If you use any of these 9 phrases every day, ‘you’re more emotionally resilient than most’

“The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today unveiled its new Street Level Surveillance hub, a standalone website featuring expanded and updated content on various technologies that law enforcement agencies commonly use to invade Americans’ privacy.“

(via Street Level Surveillance)

“The possible consequences of a changing concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate, rates of photosynthesis, and rates of equilibration with carbonate of the oceans may ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization,” Epstein, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology (or Caltech), wrote to the group in November 1954.

Experts say the documents show the fossil fuel industry had intimate involvement in the inception of modern climate science, along with its warnings of the severe harm climate change will wreak, only to then publicly deny this science for decades and fund ongoing efforts to delay action on the climate crisis.”

‘Smoking gun proof’: fossil fuel industry knew of climate danger as early as 1954, documents show | Fossil fuels | The Guardian

“The act of entering an airport starts with the removal of personal sovereignty. If you linger at a curb, you will be ticketed. If your bag is overweight, you are screwed. Inside, you are scanned, told explicitly what you can and cannot take with you, and people must submit or be punished. Often surly people are yelling at you about your laptops, shoes, and belts. It is now also taken for granted that if you wish to consume anything at an airport, it will cost 2-3X what it does in the wild.”

The Oppressive Culture of Air Travel

“One significant anniversary in 2023 passed almost without mention. In May 1923, the Welsh women’s peace petition was initiated – a plea from the women of Wales to the women of the US, urging the US to take its place in the newly formed League of Nations and encouraging its full participation in the permanent court of international justice, which had come into being in 1922. The text refers to American-Welsh cooperation in the 19th century, and welcomes the steps taken after the first world war to control the arms trade and tackle what we now call human trafficking and the movement of illegal drugs.”

Remember the tenacity of 400,000 Welsh women a century ago. Then use your power to shape events today | Rowan Williams | The Guardian

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Watch YouTube without the ads via YewTu.be.

This list of 50 types of Science Fiction is interesting.

Nearly 300 (unicode) arrows. Which are your fav(s)…?

4131 free icons for your games & other creative projects via game-icons.net.

This open source app: GitHub – MrKai77/Loop: MacOS window management made elegant.

At templatemaker.nl, you can create and download custom sized papercraft and packaging templates for free!

Play around with this Text to Speech & AI Voice Generator – ElevenLabs to see how far this technology has come.

A specific problem which I’ve been having with my Mac solved with this open source app: Blue Snooze: Sleeping Mac = Bluetooth off.

At Techcopes, you can access a variety of font generator tools to customize and enhance your text in different styles for different social media platforms.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#55 August 2023 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

The original Wicker Man origin: an image from a set of 8 extra-illustrated volumes of A tour in Wales by Thomas Pennant (1726-1798) that chronicle the three journeys he made through Wales between 1773 and 1776 (via Wikipedia).

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

READ

Buyers of Bored Ape NFTs sue after digital apes turn out to be bad investment (insert-shocked-face-gif) -> if this is successful the floodgates will open…

…and hopefully more will follow for young people who are taking entitled boomers in leadership regarding the climate damage they continue to be the cause of to court: Judge rules in favor of Montana youths in landmark climate decision.

Meta’s Reality Labs (the metaverse tech dept) has now lost more than $21 billion since the beginning of last year: WOW & along with Musky it’s safe to say now that these ‘tech leaders’ don’t know what they are doing!

Why fidgeting is good for you, first paragraph bloody shocking as never thought this to be true, do people actually think that (asking for me as a fidgeter)?

Turning Empty Offices Into Vertical Farms (good for cities who are emptying due to working from homers and want to utilise their empty buildings but of course the great and good won’t contemplate that as that’s about doing something different and ah well sighs etc).

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This podcast with Topaz Adizes on ‘Can a Single Conversation Change Your Relationship Forever?‘, good for your ears / brain.

The Text FX project (from Google Labs) for some wicked fun ways to “expand the writing process by generating creative possibilities with text and language.”

I don’t pay much attention to web3 stuff as I used to although this newsletter (from Molly White) keeps me in touch in what’s happening in the silly crypto space.

Lunar Codex is an attempt to put an archive of 30,000+ creative artists from 157 countries on the Moon in 2026 as part of NASA Artemis program.

The NYC city government public Rat Information Portal.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#52 May 2023 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Via Julian Frost

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

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This Twitter thread detailing how Cuba has had almost zero Covid deaths in an entire year.

Here’s a wonderful newsletter collating the most salient of all crypto related news & things (BONUS LINK: a fantastic deconstruction of the hype machine still churning by the failing investment portfolios of folks who bet on lame horses).

An article making a case that the Metaverse is dead although more like end of the Zucks massively failed gamble, it will continue in much smaller iterations.

We’re getting a better idea of AI’s true carbon footprint, it’s not all jazz-hands & high-fives this stuff.

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The Gigabrain scans billions of discussions on Reddit & other online communities to find the most useful posts + comments for you.

This AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žiže.

A QArt Coder which makes QR codes with pixellated images which you upload.

Over 4100 pixel-perfect icons for web design via Tabler Icons, free and open source icons designed to make your website or app attractive, visually consistent and simply beautiful.

The Not By AI badge is created to encourage more humans to produce original content and help users identify human-generated content (although no information about the humans behind it).

Make It Big, an app to have full screen text message on your (iPhone) (I use it at events I’m facilitating to tell folks speaking what time they have left).

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#49 February 2023 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Dublin Dock sunrise
Dublin Dock sunrise on my recent trip there to deliver more of my ‘purposeful storytelling’ public speaking masterclasses.

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

READ

How to visit a Disney theme park and still keep your privacy.

There was a secret cross-party summit held to confront failings of Brexit by those who created it (licking wounds & admitting the failure but not in public).

An open source seeds project because “a 2012 Oxfam study found that four companies dominate more than 60 percent of the global trade with grains.”

Why Total Eclipse of the Heart is the most epic song ever written.

How the James Webb Space Telescope is creating awe.

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Scribble Diffusion: turn your sketch into a refined image using AI.

Peel.fm: a drum machine in your browser.

Openverse: An extensive library of free stock photos, images, & audio, available for free use from WordPress.

This page generates nonsense words based on a frequency list of phonemes as they occur in legitimate English words.

Poline: an enigmatic color palette generator.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#45 August & September 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

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Even though Facebook tried to brand its way out of its trouble: Meta is being sued for allegedly creating a tool for US hospitals which disclosed private patient information back to Facebook or Meta having to pay walkie-talkie app $174 million for infringing on its patents or Meta facing a new class action lawsuit that accuses it of tracking and collecting the personal data of iPhone users, despite features and policies made by Apple which are meant to stop that same type of tracking.

10 reasons why Brexit has been a pile of wank for the UK.

Why you should be worried about Amazon’s ‘surveillance purchase’ in buying Roomba.

How Tesla is also getting in on the ‘surveillance’ market when you own one of their cars.

Here’s the UN (two years ago) calling NZ’s housing conditions a “human rights crisis” (total agree, it’s a disgrace here and none of the local / national politicians do anything about it).

A tough read from a psychologist in the field who pulls apart their profession and their approaches.

Why a broken heart is the same as clinical pain.

How 100,000gk was removed from the great Pacific Garbage Patch “comparable to the size of Luxembourg or Rhode Island.”

About those doofuses who enabled Bitcoin to have a climate impact greater than gold mining.

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This House Does Not Exist, an AI powered website that generates a beautiful new house every time which is not real.

Some rail announcements in Scotland plus some ambient tunes.

52 places you can visit and be part of the solution.

Vector Express to convert your vector files for free.

Palette, a vibrant AI colorizer (free online) app.

Nightdrive, trust me.

Image credit: A Small Fiction.
All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#44 July 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

READ

What happens when someone looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects.

Amazing new apartment building in Amsterdam is new housing for wildlife, not just humans (easy to mandate for courageous councils / governments) plus Toronto has booted the silly data-grabbing Sidewalks Labs city concept to the curb for a more human-centred approach (tip: it’s not ‘smart’ to suck up peoples data and make money from it without them knowing or having the ability to opt out no matter what context).

Beta (ex-BookFace) is on the offensive again quoting studies to back it’s claims it doesn’t / didn’t have a negative effect on democracy although some journalists are having none of it.

Wonderfully presented and written piece about the rise of AI Created Fiction.

Great decision by Minecraft to not allow NFTs on its gaming platform.

There’s this “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs): Beyond the Hype” white paper from the World Economic Forum (check out the strengths / weaknesses table as it’s a great summariser).

Why climate damage caused by growing space tourism needs urgent mitigation.

Earlier this year, NASA announced the discovery of the most Earth-sized planets (SEVEN) found in the habitable zone of a single star, called TRAPPIST-1.

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Pixabay’s audio section for thousands of music and audio tracks, free for commercial and non-commercial use.

iColor Palette generates a color palette / swatches from image or image url.

Turn audio into amazing videos Astrofox.

All the ships in the sea.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#40 March 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Several things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

READ

This annotated critique of a cryptocurrency piece in the New York Times by fifteen researchers.

An overview of the current state of the NFT & Metaverse space (it’s on a serious wane).

A technical look at how Web3 is not centralised and the shortfalls of it all.

Another two articles about how countrywide adoption of cryptocurrencies in El Salvador & Kazakhstan has failed (not to mention the incredible amount of ewaste & carbon emissions created by the ventures).

A court ruled that Sussan Ley (environment minister for Australia) does not have duty of care to protect young from climate crisis.

Another stark piece covering ice shelf collapse in Antarctica related to climate change.

Inside Finland’s plan to end all waste by 2050 through education.

If you use LinkedIn you probably have noticed how bad the content is nowadays and how you never see stuff from those directly in your network⁠—check out this illustration of me scrolling for over a minute and not seeing anything from those in my network, then this post where you can show your support for change.

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A short audio piece from Radio 4 on Getting Better Acquainted with Words (featuring Ted Hughes, Virginia Woolf, Charles Bukowski).

Another amazing BBCRadio4 piece this time on “Welsh Identities.”

Use for free, Spoke, a way to create 3D social scenes for Hubs, where you can meet, share and collaborate together in private 3D virtual spaces.

A BUMPER a list of free software network services and web applications which can be hosted on your own server(s).

There’s Quodb if you’re ever struggling to find a quote from that movie you like OR find out where a specific quote came from.

A list of pricing psychology techniques.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Image credit.
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#38 February 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Trawl through this cyber-assortments.

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How there’s a new stackable artificial leaf uses less power than lightbulb to capture 100x more carbon than other systems.

That Facebook & partners stole over $9 million from users across the Global South they preyed on specifically because they are low income (but don’t worry as you only use to stay in touch with friends and family, oh and how it’s parent company Meta might be broken up very soon).

You probably been reading about this metaverse thingy – read this: “I can’t help but wonder if these giant companies are so intent on selling us & the markets on the idea of a virtual future in order to distract us all from what they are doing to the real one.

There’s also a salient deconstruction on how bad NFT’s are (why Mozilla has recently stopped using crypto plus some graphs on how bad the energy consumption bitcoins are).

How to claim your settlement from Zoom from it’s previous illegal data privacy operations (why I don’t use it and why others don’t plus why you shouldn’t).

There’s scientists who have made a new COVID19 vaccine and it’s patent free (which it should’ve been in the first place).

About HopePunk, an antidote we all need right now.

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Iconoir, one of the biggest open source libraries (no premium icons, no email sign-up, no newsletters).

Template Maker: download custom sized papercraft and packaging templates for free

Did you celebrate ‘Dydd Santes Dwynwen‘ (the Welsh version of Valentines Day).

FakeYou: Deep Fake platform to say stuff by your favorite characters.

Nitter: a great way to grab an RSS feed from a tweetmailer.

10 design principles which could save the world.

Looptap is fun although a tad addictive.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#36 December 2021 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Spend some time rambling through these digital assortments which I tweeted this month.

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It is currently possible to drive a mid-size electric car 1.8 million kilometres using the same energy it takes to mine one single Bitcoin.

We see crypto as a mob of misguided fools repeating the ecological disaster of Easter Island on a global scale for the sole purpose of selling man-child themed Neopets.

Ethical beauty brand co-founder shows courage by quitting Facebook which potentially means losing £10m.

Damn, investor calls for criminal charges and prison for Facebook execs.

Exploring the scary evidence which suggests social media is causing real damage to adolescents (especially teen girls).

A proposal in Scotland to ensure all new homes to be built to Passivhaus standard.

Satellites discover huge amounts of undeclared methane emissions.

Just 15 companies are responsible for three quarters of greenhouse gas emissions in New Zealand.

UN announces plan to adopt Welsh approach on Future Generations legislation.

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This website which presents a new icebreaker question every time you refresh.

Only works as a Chrome plugin but this online app helps you save time by automating repetitive tasks in your own browser or in the cloud.

A wonderful online tool where what you write triggers accompanying art.

DevTunesFM includes 18 stations and around 8k tracks to play in the background whilst you’re working.

Chosic is a fantastic resource to find royalty free music for your creative projects.

Excalidraw is a collaborative whiteboard / diagram maker which is fricking ace.

Unmodified complete collection of Mac Wallpapers (although will work on other laptops).

OUIGO Lets Play is a great online pinball game.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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