Every week Kevin Kelly, Claudia Lamar and I send out a newsletter of six things we personally recommend. Want to get the next Recomendo newsletter a week early in your inbox? Sign up for the Sunday newsletter here
HACK: I hacked up a death countdown clock to show me how many days I have left to live. I went to the actuarial tables for life expectancy to determine how old a typical person my age will live to, and then input that date into the Date Countdown website. It shows me that I have an estimated 6,300 days to live. Each day that small sum really focuses me. (BTW, your longevity increases over time because of science, so every few years you need to adjust your due date.) — KK
CONSUMABLES: Powder City sells bulk powder nutrients for a fraction of the cost of pills. I buy L-Theanine, which I take when I drink tea and coffee to keep me from feeling jittery. I have also tried Phenibut HCL, a tranquilizer developed by Russia in the 1960s for their astronaut program. It works for insomnia, but I stopped because I don’t want to get addicted. They also sell lots of nootropics (aka “smart drugs”), which I have not tried. To use these powders, you’ll need a sensitive scale, like this one. — MF
APP: I needed to make a cartoon thumbnail portrait of myself so I used a free app for iOS and Android to render my photo into artwork. Prisma uses artificial intelligence to “redraw” any photo on your phone into a painting done in 20 different artistic styles, including cartoony ones. (It’s similar to a previous app Prizmo, but renders the art almost instantly.) — KK
TOOLS: Two of my favorite bookmarked sites for quick formatting fixes are StripHTML and Convert Case. StripHTML strips all formatting from text, and Convert Case transforms text to lower case, all caps, sentence case, title case, etc. — CL
TIP: I made a 30-second video that shows how to wrap cables so that they stay wrapped, don’t get tangled, and are very easy to unwrap. — MF
ENTERTAINMENT: A new podcast I am enjoying is Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History. You get typical Gladwellian reporting, voiced by Gladwell himself. His theme is the re-telling of things “everyone knows,“ so that these “official” stories are inverted, reversed, undermined, or in some way seen new. It’s contrarian by design. If you like his books, you’ll like his podcast and vice versa. — KK
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