I am a big advocate for talk therapy. Paying someone to listen me vent/ramble, who in return offers sound advice and clarity has improved every aspect of my life. Having shared that, Catherine Andrews, who I consider a self-care expert, has written a very thoughtful post on her favorite healing resources to help you move past talk therapy. I was excited to discover some tools I had never heard of before, like Embodiment, Future-Self Journaling, and Sound Baths. — CD

In our region we have a large green bin as part of our weekly trash pickup. All compostable kitchen and yard waste goes in it. But in the kitchen, the trash liner gets messy with wet food and scraps. Recycled paper bags are soggy, and you can’t toss in plastic bags. The solution is green compostable liners, like large doggy poo bags, so we can transfer the entire bag right into the compost bin. These compostable bags made from plant starch are so convenient, we use them for all trash now, to cut down plastic waste. There are a number of brands; we use Unni Tall Kitchen Trash, 50 bags. — KK

Right now the prettiest thing on my screen is an image I found on Visuals of Earth, which has a trove of dreamy and magical wallpapers that are free to download for your phone. The @visualsofearth Instagram also reposts and shares lovely images by digital artists. — CD  

My wife got me one of these tiny Teenage Engineering Pocket Operator PO-14 Sub Synthesizers for Christmas last year. It’s made by Teenage Engineering, creators of the amazing (and expensive!) OP-1 Synthesizer. This pocket model is only $50 but is a lot of fun to play and very versatile. Watch this video a feature rundown. — MF

This is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen. Yet nothing about its subject would suggest greatness. My Octopus Teacher is about a tired middle-age man who befriends a small octopus in a South African kelp reef. He visits the octopus every day for a year (while filming it), and what he learns from the octopus is oceanic. This tiny creature is otherworldly, a superhero alien from another galaxy, and her life connected to the particular reef expands until it fills the universe. Everything is divinely photographed. Must see. — KK

After our recent kitchen remodel, every appliance in our kitchen is now stainless steel and of course, easily smudged. My husband then added the Weiman Stainless Steel Cleaner to our cleaning supplies and honestly, I was surprised at how flawless it left every surface. Every home should have this. — CD

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