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#39 March 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

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

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March 1st is St Davids Day / Dydd Gwyl Dewi, did you celebrate in an appropriate way?

Just 15 companies are responsible for three quarters of greenhouse gas emissions in New Zealand (and there’s no strategy to tackle this).

The boss of games platform Steam explains why NFTs are banned.

Got any little humans? Check out this child-friendly explainer on the Ukraine / Russia situation.

Read about Facebook’s African digital sweatshops.

A write-up on a NFT event here in New Zealand.

If you use Tik Tok you might want to read this.

Life would be very good without’ is the response from leaders in Europe when parent company of Instagram and Facebook threatened to shut down it’s operation in said continent.

WATCH

https://youtu.be/Qnxykf88sTk

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Play around with some happy, jumpy birds.

Driving around cities in the world whilst listening to local radio stations.

I Love PDF is where you can ‘merge, split, compress, convert, rotate, unlock and watermark PDFs with just a few clicks.’

An analysis and visualization tool to help readers better understand space situational awareness (SSA) data, with a focus on particularly interesting on-orbit activities, Satellite Dashboard.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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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.

WATCH

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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.
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#37 January 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Starting the year offering up a buffet of things I tweeted last month.

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A deconstruction of the negative things around the whole Web3 discourse.

My end-of-year-write-up on producing a unique, beautiful and independent video podcast.

Great piece about how most successful tech investments are not from the over-hyped ‘unicorns.’

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These LEGO inspired home products.

A chilled web experience of walking in different cities whilst listening to local radio (which you can turn off if you wish).

THX Deep Note is good for waking up kids, scaring the birds / cats & for general awesome creative things.

Create random AI art from words and styles.

Townscaper is a procedural town building online toy.

Image credit: Visualizing the Accumulation of Human-Made Mass on Earth.
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#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.

WATCH

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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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#35 November 2021 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

A heap of intriguing whatcha-ma-call-its to spend some time on.

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Trust the swedes to solve the mystery of the ‘slut’ scrawled on the original Grapes Of Wrath manuscript.

Again, the Swedish showing us how to live with a miraculous eco-town with a 20-storey wooden skyscraper.

About how in the UK schools are told not to use facial recognition to speed up lunch queue (bonkers).

Why the ‘Big Short’ guys think Bitcoin Is a bubble ready to burst.

With some cool science how a solar storm confirmed vikings settled in North America exactly 1,000 years ago.

WATCH

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Paste in some text here, then hit ‘submit’ to strip out everything but the punctuation!

Focalboard is an open source, self-hosted alternative to Trello, Notion, and Asana.

Design awesome landing page, mockup, social media post or presentation with 3dicons.

Check out this ‘ambient chaos‘ aural fun.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Image credit: Designing The Guardian’s new Saturday magazine
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#34 October 2021 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

At the dead of the night in came the Welsh Giant (1916), Arthur Rackham (English, 1867-1939)

Some things to enrich your meat sack of an existence.

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The guy behind the ZX Spectrum has died (here’s mine).

A piece here in NZ about how Welsh and te reo Māori have both been called dead languages, and yet they live on.

Scrapebook announces the launch of Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses with no privacy considerations (this is what it accesses if you use it & obviously those around have no way of giving permission or not to be recorded).

Solarpunk is radical in that it imagines a society where people and the planet are prioritized over the individual and profit.”

WATCH

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The 26th Annual Webby Awards is open for entries!

Gifrun is a free service that creates high-definition GIFs from YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo and many other sources.

Enter things in the boxes on this site, click the “Go!” button, and discover just how connected Wikipedia topics are.

Untools is a collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions and understand systems.

City Roads: just enter your city name and the tool renders a monochromatic map of all the streets in that city, without any names or labels.

OpenMoji is an open source emoji and icon project.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Image credit: At the dead of the night in came the Welsh Giant (1916), Arthur Rackham (English, 1867-1939)
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#33 September 2021 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Pick through this months fascinating collection of curated thingamajiggies from the interwebs.

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The 4000-page IPCC climate report summarised (have someone to hold after this).

We should all be getting our bike as it’s ten times more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities.

Those clever swedes are thinking beyond the “15 minute cityscape” and exploring the ‘hyper-local one minute city’ option.

How to stop Google knowing where you are 24/7.

How those nasty folks at Facebook disabled the personal accounts of a group of New York University researchers studying political ads on the social network.

Nice news: the whales in Alaska have been happier than usual.

A nice piece exploring why do we devote so much of our attention to online platforms making billions from your data.

Igniting cognitive ‘long-termism’ plus the benefits of embracing ‘deep time’.

WATCH

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Bookstack is a simple, self-hosted, easy-to-use platform for organising & storing information (free wiki app).

cchound.com is a curation of CC licensed music from various artists and genres for you to use, however you like with correct attribution, in your creative projects.

A collection of royalty free 3D Images.

Iconduck has a shed load of free open source icons & illustrations.

A simple but mightily effective free color picker app for the Mac.

A free online ‘Paint By Numbers’ platform (beware of big ad which pops-in).

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Image credit: Writing board, via The Met – “His many spelling mistakes have been corrected in red ink by the teacher.”
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#32 August 2021 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

All the things I tweeted this month curated for your delectation.

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After posting the 20th episode, a reflection piece on ‘Connecting Humans In A Beautiful Way‘ regarding Creative Welly.

This journal paper which says what it does on the tin (in bigger words): Survival of the Friendliest: Homo sapiens Evolved via Selection for Prosociality.

How all of Britain was put on Denmark’s red list – apart from Wales (the first time an EU country has differentiated between the UK’s four nations when specifying entry requirements).

A zero-carbon approach to heating homes by flooding old coal mines.

WATCH

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Template Maker is a bunch of free custom sized templates for paper craft & packaging for all creative occasions.

A place to find and copy special characters (for pasting) to your clipboard.

Sheety, which turns Google spreadsheets into powerful APIs to rapidly develop prototypes, websites, apps & more.

This open-source software license that developers can use to prohibit the use of their code by applications or companies that threaten to accelerate climate change through fossil fuel extraction.

RocketChat is an open-source Slack alternative.

A delicious free font called Inter.

Extract vocal and instrumental tracks from any audio using AI.

Image credit: Annibale Siconolfi – solarpunk visions.
All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#31 July 2021 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Go for a digital adventure by following some / all of the links below which I tweeted last month.

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Venezuela exodus reaches record levels: “More than 5.6 million have left the country since 2015, when it had a population of 30 million, escaping political, economic and social hardships.”

How in Argentina, cheap government-issued netbooks sparked a musical renaissance.

Be careful what you say to Baby Boomers, they are more sensitive than Millennials (study showed).

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Google / Android are making it harder to opt-out of targeted ads (tracking, basically) so here’s how to do it.

An all-in-one browser called Vivaldi.

Slide Ace Ventura is why the web was invented.

An illustration of how we grow around grief / trauma.

Two audio episodes which are delightful: On Being discussing the new Rainer Maria Rilke translation of Letters To A Young Poet and Monocle chatting with Sir Tom Jones about his new album ‘Surrounded By Time’.


Image credit: “Pontty ty praid – the New Bridge over the River Taaffe in Wales”, former owner: George III, King of Great Britain, 1738-1820.
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#30 June 2021 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Take a cyber-ramble around these jumble of things below.

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In a chilly foreshadowing of events to come, New Zealand’s foreign minister warns China ‘storm’ could be coming.

Greenland ice sheet on brink of major tipping point, shit!

How private is your Gmail, and should you switch? ANSWER: it’s not and yes (I use Fastmail).

WATCH

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This online Lofi streaming site coupled with the audio-based effects and rainy vibes for when you want to chill or for background music accompaniment.

So pretty, meteor showers as seen from space.

Simple and free, “do wtf you want with” pixel-perfect icons.

More for your ears, a generative music platform for ambient background audio whilst you work.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published