Claudia recommended Readwise a while back, but since then this powerful ebook and article highlighting app has added a lot of new useful features. You can highlight excerpts from Pocket and Instapaper, and even grab clips of podcasts, which are automatically transcribed into text (using the new airr podcast player). Best of all, I can browse and search all my ebook, article, and podcast highlights on the Readwise website or Evernote. It’s an indispensable tool. — MF

Pilot Frixion pens and highlighters have hard plastic erasers. Rub them over the ink and the writing vanishes. Unlike a pencil eraser that wears away the paper, a Frixion eraser creates heat, rendering the ink invisible. I use them for my paper to-do list, book highlighting, and tabletop gaming. — MF

This year I’ve watched more movies at home than I thought possible. When I finish a movie I enjoyed I always check the “more like this” tab to find related films to watch, and now as an alternative discovery engine, I’ve been searching Cinetrii, which pulls any mention of influences or inspiration from movie reviews to suggest films with similar moods. — CD 

I crave insider knowledge. This Reddit thread feeds my desire to hear what’s really going on in everyday businesses. It simply asks people “What’s an industry secret in the field you work in?” There’s a  couple hundred responses, like: Goodwill throws away most of what is given to them; in vodka, the bottle costs more to make than the vodka; it’s easy to get library fines waived; bouncers make up the rules; there is way more butter than you think in almost every dish at fancy restaurants; etc. — KK

Why don’t they just make spaghetti noodles half as long so you don’t have to messily break them to fit into the pot? Well, they do! Half-sized, or what they call “pot size”, noodles are available from brands such as Mueller’s and Barilla, and from big box stores and on Instacart. As far as I am concerned, this size should be the standard. — KK

The premise of this book, Time Off, is that you can’t maintain a great work ethic without having a great “rest ethic”. You have to take time off, vacation, go on sabbatical, pause, rest, sleep, slack, play, and goof off in order to be and do your best. I’ve long been a champion of slack time and mandatory time off, and I am delighted all the arguments and evidence for this take are presented in this hefty book. Includes examples of very productive people, and the latest scientific evidence. Time off is not only essential to a good life, it is something you can get better at. — KK

Almost any vegetable you can think of tastes better roasted, and this article by Emma Christensen, shows you how to do it. The key is cutting the vegetable into bite-size pieces to increase the surface-area-to-volume ratio, using enough oil, and spacing out the pieces in the roasting pan. — MF

Here is another free ambient sound website to add to our ever-growing list of musical streams we enjoy — myNoise.net. There are hundreds of different noise generators available for free listening that you can adjust to your sound comfort level. What I really like about myNoise is that once I calibrate the soundscape to my liking I can create a custom URL that I can save and go back to, like this “Chapel Voices” mix. — CD

My family watches an awful lot of anime. We also like horror and thriller movies, so we enjoyed Perfect Blue, a violent, disturbing, R-rated psychological thriller from 1997 about a former pop idol who loses her ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality. If you like the films of Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan) you’ll like Perfect Blue, because Aronofsky is a fan of the anime and even recreated a scene from it in Requiem for a Dream. — MF

I like to follow people who consistently surprise me. Tyler Cowen’s blog Marginal Revolution is a prime source of the unexpected. He collects surprisingly interesting papers and posts he unearths from different corners, plus trivial oddities, and profoundly insightful essays, and all of it thought provoking. He posts at least a handful of items per day. (I follow his blog via my RSS reader.) — KK

There’s really no excuse for food waste. On Save the Food you can find recipes to cook with your leftover scraps and food that’s “past its prime”. You can build a meal prep plan and create a shopping list based on the people in your household and how many days you are cooking for. They even have a storage guide with all the tips and tricks you need to keep your food fresh. — CD

Google’s .new domains are exclusively reserved for action-based shortcuts, like doc.new for creating a new Google Doc. And now there’s a growing list of companies who have created easy-to-remember shortcuts for things you might already do. Like “story.new” to create a new post on Medium or “sell.new” to create a new listing on eBay. For the up-to-date list check out this page. — CD

Ronnie Chieng makes me laugh. Might be because most of my relatives are Asian American, but I think his humor is much broader than that. You can catch him on Netflix’s stand-up special Ronnie Chieng: Asian Comedian Destroys America. — KK

I bought the original Fire TV stick when it first came out a few years ago. When the HD version with a voice-activated remote control came out a couple of years later, I bought that and I appreciated the extra speak and talk-to-search feature. Amazon recently released the Fire TV Stick 4K. The remote comes with volume controls and an on-off button for the TV so I don’t need to use the TV remote anymore. It’s also much faster than the previous versions of the Fire TV stick. It’s a worthy upgrade. — MF

Asknature.org is a free online tool where you can search thousands of nature’s solutions to various challenges. Like how a decentralized society helps ants to recover from a food shortage or how maple tree seeds twirl in a tornado-like vortex to increase the reach of where their seeds are planted. You can also discover nature-inspired ideas like this design for a thermos inspired by polar bear fur. Just ten minutes a day exploring this website will get you thinking differently. — CD

Permute is a Macintosh desktop app that converts video, audio, and image files from one format to another. It’s versatile and has not failed me yet. I was able to use it to convert a video that was terribly jittery that no other application could fix, but Permute converted it to an mp4 and it came out perfect. It costs $15 from the developer and it also comes with Setapp’s large library of applications available by subscription for $10 a month, which is how I found it. You can try Setapp for 7 days for free. — MF

I publish the same material on different social media platforms from my computer using a web-based app called Hootsuite.  With Hootsuite I can pre-schedule material ahead of time. I can post images from my camera on Instagram, which otherwise is hard to do. I get analytics, respond, and manage Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc, all from one dashboard. There is a limited free version but I pay for the basic $30/month small business version. — KK

I believe in “earning” any best-in-class tools; start out cheap and move up through use. Over my 50 years in photography I’ve used and owned many tripods, so I was ready — and willing to pay for — a world-class state-of-the art tripod. Last year on Kickstarter I sprung for what I consider the best portable travel tripod ever. It’s a carbon-fiber Peak Design Tripod. It’s ingeniously compact (full size folds into the diameter of a water bottle), feather lightweight, opens and closes rapidly easily, and is remarkably ridgid, even at 6 feet. Its head mount is fast, fluid, and agile. It fits into a daypack, or carry-on luggage, and is optimized for a tripod you have to carry a lot, but of course works in a studio as well. The Peak Tripod is a masterpiece of design and fabrication. I love using it. The aluminum version is $350, while the ultimate carbon fiber model is $600. — KK

My family is drinking a lot more coffee than we used to. We go through about a pound of whole espresso beans per week. On a whim, I bought Amazon’s brand, Go for the Bold, which comes in 2 lb bags. It’s better tasting than Starbucks, about the same as Pete’s, and costs quite a bit less. — MF

I like having The Measure of Things handy for those really random moments when I want to visualize the size of something, like how big or how much, in units I might understand better. For example 4 fluid ounces is about three-fourths as big as a tennis ball, and 500,000 acres is 1.075 times bigger than the size of Maui. — CD