Mother American Night/CloudMounter/DonorsChoose
Barlow’s stories
When I took LSD, I got it from John Perry Barlow. Barlow was a famous internet pioneer and a veteran hippy. Barlow was also a semi-politician, pundit, writer, and a most remarkable story teller. He died recently but left an amazing fast-paced memoir behind, which I thoroughly enjoyed. He may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I found moments of profundity in his autobiography Mother American Night, a series of tales which I will happily re-read. — KK
Use cloud storage like a local drive
I use several cloud storage services. The easiest way to access them is with CloudMounter, a $49 Mac utility that mounts OneDrive, Google Drive, Amazon S3, Dropbox, and others as local hard drives on my desktop. Setup was painless and it works flawlessly. — MF
Equipping students
Few things in life are as satisfying as getting handwritten thank-you notes from school kids for helping them learn. DonorsChoose is a non-profit that features thousands of public school teachers seeking basic school supplies, or extra gear for special projects (rocket kits for science!). The teachers post their pitch. You choose a project. When it gets fully funded they post verification pictures of the kids using the resource which your funds provided, and later they’ll send you a fistful of amazingly detailed (and endearing) letters from the students themselves. You’ll want to do this. — KK
Motorized corner desk
I am very happy with my IKEA standing desk. I bought it because I needed an affordable corner desk for my small home office and the BEKANT sit/stand desk ($529) was half the price of other adjustable height corner desks on the market. There’s different sizes and color combos you can choose from and the desk comes with a 10-year limited warranty. — CD
Bamboo gardening gloves
I bought these $7 gardening gloves for pulling up roots in my yard. They have a textured, latex grip that kept the roots from sliding out of my hand. They’ve held up well after many hours of hard work. — MF
Keep your hair in place while sleeping
I use my satin pillowcase ($10) on nights before “no-wash” hair days. The silky pillowcase prevents my hair from getting tangled up or matted so that I barely have to brush it or style it. Beauty blogs claim that these pillowcases also prevent face wrinkles while you’re sleeping, which would be an added bonus if true! I just like how it makes my hair look and how cool and soft it feels. — CD
— Kevin Kelly, Mark Frauenfelder, Claudia Dawson