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Tag: digital breadcrumbs

#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.

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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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#48 December 2022 + January 2023 | 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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Different things are now being considered about the cause of depression (beyond the low levels of serotonin in the brain).

Written in 1998 but nothing has changed: How to Kill Creativity.

This will make you rethink a few things: Don’t Treat Your Life as a Project.

My fav geoglyph is this one: Archaeologists Uncover Nearly 170 Nazca Lines Dating Back About 2,000 Years in Peru.

What has come into the Public Domain Day from 1st January 2023.

My Youtube earnings from the very popular ‘Brick Experiment Channel’ which is a superbly honest breakdown of monies / states / data from a very successful creator.

The Zuck is doubling-down on the failed / failing metaverse plan: Meta is facing the test of its lifetime + read also (& shudder): Meta faces $1.6bn lawsuit over Facebook posts inciting violence in Tigray war.

Urgh: Musk’s Neuralink faces federal inquiry after killing 1,500 animals in testing.

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Later is an open source Mac menu bar app that clears and restores your workspace with ease (great for presenters / workshop takers like me).

APITable an API-oriented, open source and easy-to-use visual database for everyone.

Remove noise from voice recordings with this speech enhancement tool from Adobe. Have tried. Is very cool.

This YouTube transcript creator.

If you need a Matrix web-based green code rain screen.

lightyear.fm show how radio broadcasts leave Earth at the speed of light. Scroll away from Earth and hear how far the biggest hits of the past have travelled. The farther away you get, the longer the waves take to travel there—and the older the music you’ll hear.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#47 November 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

fail whale rises from the depths

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

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Serious concerns about the environmental impact of major productions including Amazon’s Rings of Power where “the first season of the show, …had generated roughly 14,387 tonnes of carbon dioxide.”

Facebook owner Meta to sack 11,000 workers after revenue collapse by so thinking / hoping this is just a start as finally the data extraction business models are starting to fail.

It looks like the same platform has been hoovering up users financial information who use online tax-filling platforms.

Read with nodding head this article on The Hollow Core of Kevin Kelly’s “Thousand True Fans” Theory.

A new study shows on-screen meetings hinder creative collaboration whilst other research shows that real-time collaboration tends to stifle creativity and diverse perspectives.

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The livestream of The Pitch Drop experiment, the longest running lab experiment (established in 1927 to demonstrate how tar is the most viscous liquid, there’s been 9 drops have fallen in 95 years).

Whilst it still breathes, check out social.perma.cc which allows you to capture a thread from Twitter and archive it in sealed PDFs to attest to legitimacy.

Also, use this python code to convert all your tweets into Markdown whilst converting the shortened urls to the originals plus downloads all associated images (worked for me).

Plink, where you can create beats and jam out with strangers all over the world.

twitterisgoinggreat.com (self explanatory and just like web3isgoinggreat.com).

Listen to this episode of Team Human as it’s worth your time.

floor796.com, you’re welcome…

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Image credit: The Oatmeal.
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#46 October 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

I tweeted the above and someone added the reference to the research behind it.

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

READ

Facebook’s rebrand to Meta has basically meant a loss of US$650 billion in its market value.

$2 trillion has been wiped out in the NFT sham (down 97% since January).

The ‘orange one’ has been formally subpoenaed.

Another court has ruled AI can’t invent things and hold patents.

Check out this job in New Zealand protecting wildlife which they can’t fill.

Some Councillors in north Wales calls for abolition of title Prince of Wales (quite rightly).

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How to download your Twitter archive (before something silly happens).

Listen to forests from around the world.

runwayml.com good looking in-browser video editing software with a load of features which I’ve been testing out which you might like also.

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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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#43 June 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

The Remarkables / Kawarau (from this weeks trip)

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

READ

Did you know it takes ‘11,000 litres of water to make one litre of milk‘ in NZ and how it’s just not sustainable.

Read and listen to Yma o Hyd (the defiant Welsh folk song that’s been 1,600 years in the making).

Sheryl Sandberg has retired from BookFace (now meatr), what an awful legacy she has to take with her (like this: they banned accounts promoting disinformation, spam, or propaganda—and kept the money it made from ads).

The crypto industry is spending more on lobbying than the entire United States defense sector combined, don’t get involved in this corrupt space (if you do just be a watcher of the “hollow abstractions” from crypto advocates).

A cybersecurity researchers’ take on how Web3, NFTs, and cryptocurrency are dangerous to society and the planet.

In the USA, the federal government buys our cell phone location data, this is how.

In the UK here’s an overview of what’s happened in the six years since Brexit (spoiler: all bad).

An interesting take on the ‘pandemic’s social death‘ as it’s all become a little too quiet (as all the numbers keep climbing).

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Open Source Alternative to… are 300+ popular open source alternatives to your proprietary software.

Switching to Firefox as they recently rolled out ‘Total Cookie Protection’ by default to all users worldwide.

Go full screen (trust me) and spend time with the top 100 Hubble images.

The economic state of every OECD country (here’s Aotearoa / New Zealand).

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#42 May 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

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

READ

The MIT Review exploring how cryptomining is affecting this New York Town (it’s not good all thanks to the greedy, vacuous pyramid scheme).

They just keep finding new ways to be utterly evil, Facebook held ‘the Facebook pages of Australian hospitals, charities, and emergency services hostage as leverage amid discussions with the country’s government regarding contentious reform proposals last year’, read ans shudder but also realise there are better ways to keep in touch / connected with people.

A report on how some videoconferencing apps may listen even when mic is off.

Really simple breakdown of the 6 principles to form healthy habits.

Interview with senior staff researcher and lecturer in computer science at UC-Berkeley, who’s been studying cryptocurrency for years, Says All Cryptocurrency Should “Die in a Fire” (video of lecture below from same chap is well worth your time).

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A massive curated checklist of tips to protect your digital security and privacy.

bloouikit.com is an all in one open source wireframe kit for quick design and prototyping your idea, free for commercial and personal use under CC0 License.

pixabay.com has over 2.6 million+ high quality stock images, videos and music for your creative projects (under CC licenses).

Find purposeful work & community around the Sustainable Development Goals via sdg.careers.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#41 April 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

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

READ

This plain English argument against crypto you can share on to friends / family / colleagues.

‘Blockchain is Dangerous Nonsense,’ great summary of the issues by a computer studies student and then there’s this deconstruction of the argument against putting medical records on the blockchain.

Some scary first-hand insights from folk who worked at Facebook about how they don’t know what happens to the data it collects on its users.

Wikipedia community has decided to stop taking crypto donations due to environmental concerns which makes total sense.

A long read on how “social media has dissolved the mortar of our society & made America stupid” (found it hard to disagree and I used to make my living getting folks on to it all).

The recent news that there will be a return of the Auckland-Wellington Northern Explorer train shows how backwards the transport policy has been in these islands.

First Minister of Wales calls for the resignation of the Prime Minister of the UK, obviously.

For a hearing impaired human like me this is AMAZING: MIT Scientists Develop New Regenerative Drug That Reverses Hearing Loss!

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Try magiceraser.io to remove unwanted things from images in seconds.

Over 1950 free and open source icons for web design via tabler-icons.io.

An array of free converter tools for PDF, Video, Images etc via tinywow.com.

If you use a Mac check out clipy-app.com, an open source clipboard management app.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#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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