Cool Tools “Recommendo” Newsletter in Index Format

Make: pals Kevin Kelly and Mark Frauenfelder run the wonderful and highly recommended Cool Tools site. As part of their offerings, they publish a weekly newsletter, called Recommendo, which contains six tips, tricks, and product reviews from Kevin, Mark, and fellow CT editor Claudia Dawson.

To end the year, they’ve organized the year’s newsletter content into a hyperlinked index. There’s a lot of really useful and cool stuff in here. Here’s a tiny taste.

Solutions Search

When troubleshooting anything my first step is Google/YouTube. But when an initial query does not yield much, I simply add the suffix “solutions” to the query. The terms “problem X + solutions” is more likely to yield sources that have answers, not just the same problem I have. — KK

Save Text for Later

My current favorite Chrome extension is memomize, which lets you save text for later. Just highlight some text, right click > Add to memomize, and the next time you open a new tab, what ever you save will be there along with links to its original source. I save subject lines and text from emails and use it as my inbox to-do list. — CD

Download all Images from a Website

I have a massive “swipe file” of illustrations from online portfolios. I use them for inspiration when I design or draw something. Owidig is a website that can suck every image file from a website and save it to your computer. It’s easy to use once you get the hang of it, but here’s a good video to get your familiar with it. — MF

Texting Tip

When texting, at the end of sentence hit the space bar twice and it will easily put a period in the right place. — KK