As someone who makes things, I am very interested in new materials, cool ways to hack off-the-shelf products, and innovative techniques for constructing stuff. All these subjects are covered in an occasional free newsletter, Wheelhouse, written for nerdy makers. Wheelhouse also hosts a Discord community whose discussions generate content for the newsletter. — KK

In my workshop and studio, I label boxes, shelves, drawers, cases, bins, and parts with a very dense white “ink” which is really white correction fluid in a stubby pen. White is usually much more legible than black, but white ink is much more difficult to apply heavy enough to cover any surface. These Pentel Presto Jumbo Correction Pens do a fantastic job applying thick non-drippy white paint via a fine point tip, and are small enough to carry in my workshop apron. They draw perfectly opaque white on any surface, instantly, even vertical surfaces. I have not found anything else that will do that. — KK

If you’re in the newsletter business, Really Good Emails has a huge database of marketing emails and newsletters that you can search for inspiration. You can “collect” designs that you like, view code, and see examples of how it looks across different email clients and devices. I was not surprised to see Food52 emails on there, because I always feel compelled to click (and sometimes buy) whatever they send me. — CD 

One of my favorite things about Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was listening to clips of 93 KHJ, a radio station that pioneered the “boss radio” sound in the 1960s. The DJs were all vocal virtuosos, and the most talented of the bunch was a guy by the name of “The Real Don Steele.” Almost all of these broadcasts have been lost to time, but fortunately, some people recorded KHJ on their tape recorders in the 1960s, and the recordings found their way to the Internet. The Internet Archive has a couple of recordings from the 1960s of Steele’s show on KHJ. Here’s another, and another (with other KHJ DJs, too). If this kind of thing interests you, you can dig up more by searching “khj airchecks.” — MF 

I recommended Dictanote a few weeks ago. It’s a Chrome-based application that converts speech to text. It’s faster and less buggy than my Mac’s built-in dictation. Recently, Dictanote released a Google Chrome extension that lets you use Dictanote within almost any website. Now I’m using it to answer emails in Gmail, which has been a big time saver. It doesn’t work with Google Docs, which is unfortunate, but for longer form speech-to-text writing I use Dictanote’s notebook and copy and paste the text (in fact, I’m using the notebook to write this recommendation). It’s $19, and because I’m such a terrible typist, it paid for itself within the first day or two. — MF

This cool website, Drive & Listen, pulls dashboard cam videos from YouTube and pairs them up with local music channels so that you can feel like you’re cruising around in a foreign city, blasting the radio, all while sitting at your desk. — CD 

If you are an Amazon Prime member, you are entitled to two free Kindle ebooks per month from a selection of 9 popular bestselling books chosen by Amazon that month. This same program, called First Reads, also gives you access to free short stories and Audible readings for listening, commissioned as Amazon originals. I can usually find at least one book I am interested in each month, and since it is free, why not? —KK

We replaced our old, space-consuming dish rack for this $7 Norpro Microfiber Drying Mat. It’s extremely absorbent and dries super fast. When I’m done with it, I just fold it up and put it in a drawer. It’s also machine washable. I love it. — CD 

It’s incredibly fun to use the Luminar photo editing application to bring my photos to life. (Here are some of my before-and-after photos.) It has tons of adjustable preset filters and a lot of specialized tools such as portrait enhancement, where you can make the subject’s eyes larger and face thinner. You can also easily add in new skies and even a sun with rays. I typically use the “AI” set of adjustment tools to change the brightness and contrast because it does a great job without a lot of fussing on my part. The developer also has lots of excellent videos that show you how to use all the features in Luminar. Here’s a 30-second video overview. — MF

GPT-2 is an application that produces novel text based on a text prompt (Here’s how to install it). Most of what it generates hovers on the border of sense and nonsense. Here are four pieces of advice it has given to me.  — MF

• “If we cannot make sense of the present, we cannot plan for the future.”

• “The more we change to meet the challenges in our lives, not to stay where we are, the more successful we will be.”

• “If it is an animal you have seen, do you think it will be like you, too? This is the first statement of my doctrine, that all things are one thing. Do you want me to prove it, or to let it pass?” —Philosopher Epicurus (384-399 A.D.)

• “Your gut tells you it’s not right to continue investing in some idea–it’s too risky, because its consequences are hard to understand. Your gut is right about one thing, though: there is no way of knowing it’s not wrong to spend your energy making the best decision for yourself and your goals.”

I’ve been using my Pocket extension less and this Link Drop Chrome extension more. If there is an article or webpage that I want to check out, this bookmark tool helps to ensure I get to it before the end of the day. Every link I save gets emailed back to me at 3PM that same day as a reminder. You can change the “drop time” to whatever works for you. — CD

Everyone knows Anthony Bourdain’s various travel/food series, but in 2015 Bourdain did his hanging-out thing with master craftsman and craftswomen, going to their shops, watching them work with their tools, and at times trying his own hand at their craft. I can watch masters work all day. Their obsession with details is astounding, and their extreme excellence is captured in 14 episodes of Raw Craft. The art ranges from hand-tailored suits to a traditional letter-press printer, all sponsored by a whiskey company, and available on YouTube. — KK

There are about 1,000 very classy fonts available for free on Google Fonts. These are fonts you would actually want to use in your book or on your website. Some are commissioned by Google and designed by world-class typographers, such as the font Roboto used in Google maps. Many of these fonts come as families with different weights, italic, bold, extra glyphs, etc. This set of open fonts is also offered by Adobe and Monotype; what Google Fonts offer is a very nifty web interface for navigating through the collection, including good search and filter. I particularly like their font “pairing” function, which suggests good combinations of fonts (like text and captions pairings). All the fonts are license-free. — KK

I found out about Webster’s 1913 Dictionary from David Perell’s excellent Friday Finds newsletter. Perell uses this 107 year old dictionary because he thinks “modern dictionaries have lazy definitions that focus too much on simplicity at the cost of precision.” I also love the extreme Simplicity of the interface. it’s worth bookmarking. — MF

I bought this DYMO Portable Label Maker ($23) because it was an Amazon best seller and I didn’t want to put that much research into it, but now it’s been almost a year that I’ve owned it and it’s still incredibly useful and has not let me down. It’s so intuitive that months have gone by between use and I don’t have to remind myself how to work it. I love that it’s so light. I can walk around with it, type on it, print and cut my label and put it back in one fell swoop. — CD

My second favorite activity in the kitchen (after eating good food) is to stowe leftovers in our trove of Snapware Glasslock containers with snap-on lids. Glass makes the leftovers clearly visible, and re-heatable in their container, and the snap lids with gaskets create a nearly vacuum seal, and their sturdy flat tops can be securely stacked in the refrigerator. They will never spill, and are superior to all the other systems we’ve tried in the past. Snapping them shut on all four sides makes me really happy. By now there are 10 different brands of glass with snap lids (including Amazon Basics), all with the same design, though they are not interchangeable. I have not tried other brands; we are still using the original Snapware/Glasslock ones from a decade ago and they seem to last forever. — KK

I’ve been using TextExpander for at least 10 years and it has saved me hundreds of hours of typing. It’s a global utility that converts short snippets of text into canned text. For instance, when I type “mf” it changes it to “Mark Frauenfelder.” When I type “adr” it changes it to my home address. “Bio” spits out my biography and a link to my headshot photos. I have a lot of canned boilerplate for email responses that save me a ton of time. It can also add anything that’s saved in my clipboard to a chunk of boilerplate. It also corrects frequently misspelled words. The Mac OS has snippet expansion but lacks many of the features and the snap of TextExpander. I can’t stand using other people’s computers to write or do email because not having TextExpander slows me way down. — MF

I binge listened to all 8 episodes of Boom/Bust: The Rise and Fall of HQ Trivia in one day. I was obsessed with the viral game back in 2017, but eventually lost interest and didn’t follow the demise of the trivia startup. This documentary podcast series gave me an insider glimpse into what really happened and helped me better understand the very fickle attention economy. — CD 

I’ve been making my own coiled cables thanks to a tip I learned from Gareth Branwyn’s Tips newsletter (which we co-publish). Gareth pointed me to a John Park’s YouTube tutorial on heat treating ordinary USB cables into expandable coiled cables, like the ones on old telephone handsets, or headphones. (Jump to the 23-minute mark.) The hack really works and results in much more manageable cables for audio, photography, and desktop gear. — KK

A lot of characters aren’t on your keyboard, but you might find them useful. For example, ♠, ♣, ♥, and ♦. An easy way to browse and use these hidden characters is by visiting Symbololology, a one-page site with about 500 non-keyboard characters. Symbololology,  where have you been all my life‽ — MF