I’ve been using Jumpcut as a free, open-source clipboard manager for many years now. I work mostly with text and I like how it strips all formatting, pasting in plain text only. Maccy looks like a better designed, lightweight alternative, though no plain-text posting, it seems.

About once every 12–18 months I install a bunch of alternative browsers to see which one I currently like most. I’ve been using Firefox for the last month and quite enjoy it (though I miss blocking filters that I can adjust on a site-by-site basis). Up next is Brave, often touted as one of the fastest, most secure and private browsers out there.

ClickUp sells itself as the ‘all-in-one’ workspace for digital collaboration. The feature list is long and includes things like spreadsheets, chat, project management, to-do lists, time tracking, events, and more.

Ever get a recommendation for a movie or a book or a podcast and don’t know where to save it? Anygood (iOS only) is that place: an app for personal recommendations. It throws in some of its own suggestions, too.

White Fragility →

Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism

I’m only about sixty pages in, but it’s already profoundly changed my thinking on racism. “Anger. Fear. Guilt. Denial. Silence. These are the ways in which ordinary white people react when it is pointed out to them that they have done or said something that has – unintentionally – caused racial offence or hurt. After, all, a racist is the worst thing a person can be, right? But these reactions only serve to silence people of colour, who cannot give honest feedback to ‘liberal’ white people lest they provoke a dangerous emotional reaction.”

Indie Magonomics →

A guide to indie magazine making

A bit of ‘self-promo’: a few years back I wrote a long article on all the things I learned about publishing an independent print magazine. Together with my printer and shipper, we decided to create an updated version of this post in a printed format. The Indie Magonomics booklet is a 64-page guide on indie publishing printed on 8 different paper types. It’s available for free as a download, though you should get the real thing for a €5 shipping fee.

This excellent interview with author Dr. Robin DiAngelo made me buy her book: “Most white people believe that a racist is: 1) an individual, 2) one who holds conscious and aware dislike of people based on race, and 3) intentionally seeks to be mean to them. Individual, conscious, intentional. And by that definition, virtually all white people are exempt from racism. We do not understand that this is a system that is infused across all institutions, traditions, politics, practices, language, norms. (...) What white people need to do is start from the premise that you have been shaped by the forces of racism. ”

A truly thought-provoking presentation by Nate Hagens in which he covers the state of the economy, environment and human society. I highly recommend you watch the whole thing! There is a focus on economics at the beginning but the outlook he provides towards the second half is profoundly inspiring. “What our organisations and institutions do will follow from who its people are, not the other way around. This will be the decade which tests the human potential for destruction against the human potential for greatness. And human potential comes from intrinsic motivation, not from extrinsic validation.”

I feel this very much, especially during iso days: “Instead of manifesting ourselves concretely in the world [through physical making], we endlessly pass digital messages back and forth, taking breaks only to talk to each other about these messages over cramped video conference screens. (...) There’s something uniquely misery-making about days spent in a Makework Matrix of ceaseless digital communication that doesn’t seem to generate much beyond additional digital communication – we’re simply not wired for this as a species.”