Claiming to be the all-in-one tool for small software companies, Fibery is a flexible web app suite that can help you write documents, create plans and roadmaps, and track work, marketing, and basic HR processes. The landing page is pretty unique: don’t miss the ‘I don’t get it, explain differently’ button on the bottom right. (And definitely don’t miss the ‘anxiety’ version.)

Hippo (iOS only) is another tool to help you manage and ‘get the most out’ of your contacts by associating events, to-dos or notes to each contact. Data stays on your phone and isn’t shared.

With more governments trying to use your social media history against you, treading more lightly with your public profiles is generally good advice. With TweetDelete you can automatically delete old tweets at certain time intervals. I just bought the premium pack (one-off $10 fee) which gives you great additional features, including deleting your entire Twitter history dating back to the first tweet.

Carbonalyser is a Firefox add-on and Google Android app that allows you to visualise the electricity consumption and greenhouse gases emissions of your internet browsing. It does this by measuring the quantity of data travelling through your browser, calculating the electricity consumption this traffic leads to, and then calculating the emissions of that electricity consumption, based on the selected location.

Hello World →

How to be Human in the Age of the Machine

“When it comes to artificial intelligence, we either hear of a paradise on earth or of our imminent extinction. It’s time we stand face-to-digital-face with the true powers and limitations of the algorithms that already automate important decisions in healthcare, transportation, crime, and commerce. Hello World is indispensable preparation for the moral quandaries of a world run by code, and with the unfailingly entertaining Hannah Fry as our guide, we’ll be discussing these issues long after the last page is turned.”

Kobo Aura 2 →

Kindle alternative

While I still prefer reading real books, I recently picked up a second-hand Kobo eReader on eBay, mostly to be able to take a few books on hikes and bike rides. I used to own a Kindle many years ago and its handling really frustrated me at the time. I’m sure the Kindle got better since, but this time I decided to opt for the underdog and I haven’t regretted it so far. The last book I finished was City of Thieves. Currently reading The Overstory.

The criticism in this article definitely applies to me. Having said that, the urgent and existential threat of climate change makes showing empathy to those that oppose strong action that much harder. “Reason is easy. Being clever is easy. Humiliating someone in the wrong is easy too. But putting yourself in their shoes, kindly nudging them to where they need to be, understanding that they have emotional and irrational beliefs just like you have emotional and irrational beliefs – that’s all much harder. So is not writing off other people. ”

Tech has moved too fast for our monkey brains to make sense of it and a quote in this article sums it up perfectly: “A decade ago, Edward O. Wilson (...) was asked whether humans would be able to solve the crises that would confront them over the next 100 years. ‘Yes, if we are honest and smart,’ he replied. ‘The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.’” [Possible paywall]

Ignore the badly worded title and the poor narration of this short video; the message is an important one: digital data consumption, especially high-res streaming services like Netflix, YouTube and p0rn, consume huge amounts of energy, making up almost 7% of the world’s CO2 emissions by 2025.