Happy Shiny People!
I guess I’m doing another one of these. Before I knew it, I’d accumulated another stack of links I thought you-all might like, and it seems a damn shame to keep those all to myself, so… I’m sharing. It’s what friends do for each other, right? If you’re down, share this with someone- pass it on to anyone who might find this sort of thing useful/wonderful/interesting/hillarious. Make someone’s day a little brighter. We can all use that.
Onward!
Ethical Alternatives
I was going to write separate entries in this newsletter about PixelFed and Mastodon, but this listing of all sorts of related services came up, and that seemed better. So: if you’re growing increasingly uncomfortable with providing so much of your data/content/production to a small number of platforms owned by an even smaller number of companies, this list might be for you. It provides open sources, publically run, fully federated alternatives to most of the popular social media platforms. The internet is a big place, and there’s all sorts of neat things happening out there- but Facebook and twitter and Google would just assume you never need leave their services. But alternatives aboud, and some are pretty good.
Remove.bg
If you need to remove the background out of a picture of a person and don’t want to deal with… anything, really- this is the tool. All you do is hand it a picture, and it does it’s thing, giving you back a png file of just the person (and all the pesky background removed). It’s not perfect, but it’s easy, fast, and reasonable. If the point of what you’re doing isn’t to learn how to remove a background (but rather to get the thing done with as little fuss as possible), this might be a useful tool. I used it just the other day to mimic a tricky still photo animation effect with very little trouble.
Notebooks
https://www.jamierubin.net/2018/12/13/bullet-journal-one-book-to-rule-them-all
Let me be the first to say: analog and paper can have some serious advantages over digital. It’s more permanent, more private, has better implications for memory, and is, I think, a far better choice for note taking than any digital option I’ve seen. I’m not saying the above method is the right one for you- I don’t personally use the Bullet Journal method myself much anymore, but it’s a wonderfully structured starting point to help you develop a method and system that does work for you. It it’s been a while, maybe start with this and give it a try- you might find the notes you take more productive and useful than those you’ve taken on a laptop.
Xoxo
Tim