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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.

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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.”

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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’.

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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.

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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.
All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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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).

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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.
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#29 May 2021 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Delight in some random things I tweeted from the world wide web.

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The knicker throwing started in the Copacabana in New York in 1968’ via Tom.

Google is testing out its controversial new ad targeting tech on millions of Chrome users, sighs, check here if you’re worried.

Another whistleblower personal account & another reason to leave Facebook whilst you can.

If you’re in Ireland, thousands are urged to sue Facebook in mass action over leaked data.

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A site to see a satellite tonight.

A growing list of those being brought to justice for the ‘Capital Breach’ of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C, on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021.

This guessing game pops you into the ambience of a random city and you have to guess where you are.

BONUS PICS

Image credit: Soon She Was Lost to Sight, Arthur Rackham via Old Book Illustrations.
All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#28 April 2021 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Lets your digits do the clicking with some curated niceties.

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TEDxWellington 2021 cancelled (ouch).

How Kenya is harnessing the immense heat from the Earth, seriously.

How the Prime Minister of the Faroe Islands thinks they got rid of COVID19 by competence and luck.

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Keep Being Human poster.

Listen to ambient sounds inspired by movies & TV.

Here’s an infinitely-zooming in or out painting.

A tool to explore the view of Earth’s globe from 750 millions ago until today.

The whole of the Louvre collection is now available online.

Image credit / check out Olga’s other colourisation work.
All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#27 March 2021 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

A gathering of things found which has surprised and delighted.

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Fears over DNA privacy as 23andMe goes public in deal with Richard Branson.

Bebo reveals plan to take on Facebook & Twitter.

Facebook asks users to opt into activity tracking ahead of iOS 14 changes.

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Check out this massive amount of ZX Spectrum games online.

GutenSearch: Looks inside the books of Project Gutenberg.

This jungle wilderness simulator for relaxing, sleeping or working.

Comprehensive list of templates for Paper Mechanisms.

There’s a new hugging emoji (Unicode PDF details) 🫂.

Image credit: that’s a photo of the first roundabout under the Atlantic Ocean / read more about it here.
All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#26 February 2021 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Time to explore the wonderful offerings online to learn and delight the human condition.

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Singapore reveals COVID19 privacy data to the police.

Life without COVID19: the nations that have sidestepped the pandemic so far—feeling so grateful to be living in a country talked about here.

The Celtic Tree Calendar is fun stuff to read and smile at how humans were hungry to figure out the world through nature.

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Join the cosmic star gazing community and look at what the Hubble Telescope is looking at right now.

Take some time and mix your own electronic music just by clicking a few buttons.

AI Powered Automatic Colorization for line drawings.

Finally made the switch from Dropbox to Sync after doing some privacy research & here’s a referral link if you’re interested.

A single-purpose site to create an emdash.

Image credit from my visit to Queenstown.
All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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