Flume/24 Meetings/Hunter
Must listen:
A fantastic two-part podcast episode from Reply All (Russian Passenger, Part 1 + Beware All, Part 2) delves very deep into the mystery of how producer Alex Blumberg had his Uber account hacked by Russians. Could it be malware, phishing, man-in-the-middle exploits, or what? To arrive at a solution required the participation of the full technical teams of Google, Uber, and independent security experts over several weeks, and still the final aha was surprising. Along the way, it’s an entertaining detective story, dishing out a serious but still understandable education in global cyber security. The bottom line: You need a password manager right now. My family and I use 1Password, which has been great. — KK
Handy photo app:
I’m old school: I take photos with a camera that I process on my Mac. That makes it difficult to post to Instagram — the new home for photographers — because Instagram insists you upload photos only from a phone. Flume Pro is a $10 app for Macs that let you drag and drop photos from your desktop directly into your Instagram stream. (The free version is a handy Instagram stream manager.) Works for me. — KK
Hay fever relief:
I’ve been taking nettles leaf capsules for over 20 years to deal with my allergies to dust and pollen. My wife and daughter use it too. Every one of my dubious friends who try it also become true believers. I buy the 100-capsule bottles of Nature’s Way and take 4-6 every few hours during allergy season. — MF
Time zone aid:
I have difficulty with time zones. It’s easy enough to use the world clock on my smartphone to find out what time it is in another country right now, but I don’t trust myself to count forward or backward to figure out what time it will be in Edinburgh when it's 10am in Los Angeles, for example. I have 24 Meetings bookmarked to do the math for me. A simple slider lets me see what time it will be in different cities. — MF
Fast email finder:
Hunter lets you quickly find personal and support email addresses from any company website. I have the chrome extension and it’s great for when I have a customer service or billing issue and want a response as soon as possible. I cc: all the relevant generic email addresses for the company and so far have gotten a response and issue resolved within hours. — CD
Quotable:
“What ever you cling to, it is not that,” is my new mantra to remind me to not get attached to the stories I create, or my own perspective. It’s kind of like a gentle kick in the butt. I heard it while listening to Pema Chödrön, Coming Closer to Ourselves: Making Everything the Path of Awakening. — CD
— Kevin Kelly, Mark Frauenfelder, Claudia Dawson