Literary inspiration

My favorite newsletter right now is from actress Emma Roberts’ female-focused, book of the month club called Belletrist. Weekly emails include interviews with women authors who share their favorite books and articles, among other things. Here’s a link to their archive to check out. I’m also loving the Belletrist Spotify playlists featuring songs that inspired authors while writing their books. — CD

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Make 100 things

The crowdfunding platform Kickstarter has become so successful that it’s also become a big deal to succeed by it. Big projects, big production to launch, and big sums raised. To scale back things, Kickstarter launched the “Make 100” campaign to encourage makers to simply make one hundred of something. A multitude of makers have responded with limited editions of low budget cool things, without a lot of fuss. I’ve backed a handful of them. It has also inspired me to make my own 100 of something. – KK

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Futurism

I follow a lot of blogs on Feedly, the RSS reader. A favorite blog that reads well in RSS is Futurism — it’s a steady stream of new ideas, inventions, and experiments from a wide range of sciences and technology. Their headlines are long and descriptive (often sufficient) rather than click-baity.— KK

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3D animation treats

One of my favorite Instagram follows is Esteban Diácono. He’s a motion graphics designer who posts spellbinding “animation experiments” of humanoid dancing figures made of feathers, metal plates, outrageously long fur, and vegetation. They look real and impossible at the same time. — MF

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Gallery of magazine covers

I don’t read many paper magazines nowadays, but I appreciate good magazine covers. I’ve been working for magazines for decades and have learned that coming up with eye-grabbing, meaningful covers is the most challenging aspect of publishing. CoverJunkie collects the best covers from magazines all over the world. They have an Instagram account, which is the best way to browse the gallery. — MF

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Kottke

Not enough people know about Jason Kottke’s blog, Kottke. Jason’s official full time job is to surf around the web looking for truly interesting stuff, which he posts along with a paragraph of why he found it remarkable. He creates a handful daily, and has for 18 unbelievable years! No clickbait, no barrage of ads and no soap box. Just old-school blogging about neat things. — KK

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LiarTown USA

Designer Sean Tejaratchi’s website LiarTownUSA contains Sean’s profoundly absurd (and occasionally R-rated) parody book covers, TV show credits, collectible plates, store signs, and advertising ephemera. He’s a genius. — MF

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Only in Asia

I get my LOLs by following the “Only in Asia” twitter feed. They pass along all the weird and crazy stuff from Asia. Clips from Japanese game shows, web cams from China, funniest phone videos from Indonesia. You can’t make this stuff up. — KK

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Japanese trends

The curiously named blog “Spoon & Tamago” is the best way to keep up with the latest art, design, fads, and lifestyle innovations from Japan. They also offer a nice feature: curated “guides” to Tokyo via interesting long-term residents. Well crafted well-designed site, as might be expected. Add ‘em to your RSS feed. — KK

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Kindle hack

I often want to read a long PDF someone sends me on my Kindle. Here is the hack to get it loaded. Use your Kindle account name to create a Kindle email as yourname@free.kindle.com. In the subject line of an email message put < convert >. Enclose the PDF and hit send. Amazon will convert the PDF to their Kindle format and it will show up in your library. Then you can select it to download to your device. The PDF on a Kindle is clunky but readable. — KK

Further refinements on the Kindle hack by two readers:

I was trying to read Ellul’s Propaganda. I downloaded it from archive.org (which is now crucial to my PDF kindle hack, including old Arthur Koestler books and other hard to find titles) Sadly it was 30MB, and the emailed file couldn’t upload. For days I sat there frustrated. Then I realized the hack: I split the PDF into two files of 15MB each and named them Propaganda Part I and Propaganda Part II. Wham, solves it. — Bryan Campen

There is an even easier way to transfer a PDF to Kindle. If you download the Kindle app for Mac or PC you can drag a PDF to the app icon (which I keep in my dock on the Mac). You can configure the app to convert to Kindle format or keep the file as a PDF. You can also choose which of your Kindle /Fire devices you want it sent to. — Len Edgerly (The Kindle Chronicles Podcast)

ReadableClaudia Dawson
Your Kindle highlights

As you read a Kindle you can, with some effort, highlight a passage. The best way to extract those passages so that you can cut and paste them later, or so you can insert the text into an article, or otherwise use a highlight as text, is to go to this page and login with your Amazon credentials. You’ll see your highlights book by book. There you select texts and copy them. Or on that page use Bookcision, a browser bookmarklet, that will download each book’s passages as a text file. — KK

ReadableClaudia Dawson
Read first pages of novels

When you go to Recommend Me a Book you are presented with the first page of a novel, but you are not told the name of the book or the author. If you don’t like what you’ve read, click “Next Book.” If you do like it, click “Reveal Title & Author,” and buy it from Amazon. I wish it let you buy a book without finding out who wrote it, so it was a surprise when it arrived in the mail. — MF

ReadableClaudia Dawson
Read first pages of novels

When you go to Recommend Me a Book you are presented with the first page of a novel, but you are not told the name of the book or the author. If you don’t like what you’ve read, click “Next Book.” If you do like it, click “Reveal Title & Author,” and buy it from Amazon. I wish it let you buy a book without finding out who wrote it, so it was a surprise when it arrived in the mail. — MF

Claudia Dawson