A beautiful, simple habit and goal tracker for your iPhone. What I like: black and white design, fancy statistics and visualisations, but best of all: no ‘in-app purchases’.

A fantastic Chrome/Firefox extension: as you browse books and e-books online, the Library Extension can check your library’s online catalogue and display the availability of that item on the same page. (Works with lots of international libraries, including my local one here in Melbourne.)

Topicbox makes it possible to share one email address between many team members, which might come in handy for low-volume customer support comms or projects with internal and external stakeholders.

Do you frequently wrangle large amounts of data? This Mac/Windows app gives you powerful data processing features that require little to no technical knowledge: merge, clean, dedupe, and reformat data with a few clicks.

Ethical Design Handbook →

Practical ethics for digital design

A book with practical guidelines on how to make ethical decisions to influence positive change without hurting the bottom line. “People are increasingly getting fed up with being tracked, manipulated and downright tricked. There is a growing expectation of transparency, fairness and respect. And the failure to meet these expectations is punished by the law, the press and the people. So now is a good time to shift to ethical design.” [Pre-Release]

2020 Type Diary →

Elegant flatlay diary

A flatlay diary with bold sans typography, made in the Netherlands. “The binding is supreme, and the layout includes a unique hour by hour breakdown of each day. There is also a substantial notes section.”

Excellent read on how far we’ve come as a species and why that is a problem for our continued survival. Some ‘mildly optimistic’ thoughts towards the end. “The source of our progress has become the source of our downfall. Things are too good for us to change it all, yet too bad for us to leave anything as it is.”

Must read. I’m really interested in what shapes my/our consumer mentality. This article speaks to many of the well-paid tech workers that spend because they can. “As technologies and methods advanced, workers in all industries became able to produce much more value in a shorter amount of time. You’d think this would lead to shorter workdays. But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (...) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.”

Big tech’s machine learning capabilities help make oil exploration and extraction more efficient, potentially so much that fossil fuels may be able to compete with quickly falling renewable energy prices. “Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have been very vocal about their efforts to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels. But as The Wall Street Journal and Gizmodo have reported, these same companies are currently teaming up with fossil fuel industry to help them squeeze as much oil and gas out of the ground as possible.”