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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.
Published

#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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#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

#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

#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)
Published

#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.
Published

Kiwi Iconograms | An Idea Needing A Home

A set of icons which ignite kiwi-centric interest and conversation.

A few months ago I came across a set of icons and a wonderful offering to the world:

EXPERIENCE JAPAN PICTOGRAMS were developed with the mission to help as many tourists as possible by providing functionally and aesthetically well-designed pictograms as part of the basic infrastructure for tourism in Japan. For this reason, all the materials are made available for free use, whether that be personal, business, commercial, or non-profit use, so long as the user complies with the Terms of Use. The PICTOGRAMS were designed as minimum tools to convey basic information about Japan, as well as its diverse aspects. Despite the deceivingly simple design, each symbol, for the most part, is provided with a text–a story that gives you a glimpse into the everyday life and history of Japan.

Imagine a similar available set of visual icons which provide pictoral micro-stories of Aotearoa; as the world is still going in and out of varying degrees of lockdown, this ‘graphical tourism’ is a way for these tales to permeate across borders (both digital and real).

Here’s what fell out of my brain regarding what could be included in the set for starters:

  • Places: The Beehive, Hobbiton, Mount Taranaki, Milford Sounds, Huka Falls, Moeraki Boulders, Milford Sound, Rotorua Hot Springs, Franz Josef Glacier, The Remarkables etc
  • People: Gandalph, Golem, Jacinda Ardern, Sir Peter Jackson, Sir Edmund Hillary, Lorde etc
  • Wildlife: Kiwi Bird, Kea, Little Penguin/Korora, Whales, Tuatara, Weta, Fern, Kauri etc
  • Sports: Sailing, Rugby, Skiing, Netball etc.
  • Culture: Marae, Whakairo, Raranga, Kapa Haka, Tā Moko, Poi, Tiki etc

So if you’re a designer or agency who wants to offer the world something distinct, feel free to take this idea, give it a home and action with the agreement that the set of iconograms created will be gifted to the global community for use under Creative Commons 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) license.

Will share on with the many other agencies and organisations I know once making this live. In the meantime, throwing it out to the cyber-world to see if it ignites some creative souls who want to take a crack. Let me know if you do take it on please.

Published

#20 August 2020 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Things found, then shared online, last month, now curated in one place.

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Facilitating Inspiration (aka Herding Cats) explores the components of effective facilitation & my reflections of the recent ‘Creative Ideation Workshop.’

From those clever duo at The Minimalists, a guide to start a blog in 2020.

If Facebook were a country it would be North Korea.

After someone posted about having cancer on Facebook their feed became full of ‘Alternative Care’ ads.

Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves (I want to believe).

WATCH

The above are the first three episodes of Creative Welly… subscribe here!

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Over 500 customizable free SVG icons.

Rave DJ allows you to mashup up to songs (or more) on YouTube (here’s my attempt).

Now’s your chance to apply to be a TED Fellow!

Image credit: Steve Cutts.
All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published