Useful Services

Libraries are wonderful places — beyond just checking out books, they often offer classes, are a hub for finding out about local offerings, legal support, etc. And they’re a place you can work without noise or an expectation to buy anything.

I have many library memberships from different communities and I can take advantage of varied online offerings ranging from audio books or e-books to digital collections of magazines (e.g. consumer reports) and academic journals. So whenever I move, I go check out my local branch and add a new membership to my collection.

(Also, even if your local branch is small, they will often have a program where you can request a book from anywhere within the system and they'll send you an email when it's ready and waiting for you at your branch).

(And also, some have a specific branch with household tools—a "Tool Lending Library" with shovels, drills, crowbars, etc. so you can tackle projects at home without needing to invest in tools that you might only need once!)

Update: one of my libraries has started stocking all sorts of fun things to borrow: sewing machines, photo scanners, dehydrators, kitchen aid attachments, camping gear, microscopes, Polaroid cameras, projectors, oversized party games, etc. And you can reserve them for specific dates rather than hoping they’re available when you need them.

Wirecutter has a list of other things some libraries offer:

This is where I send people to listen to

Hoopla is remarkable because there’s never any waitlist — if they have what you’re looking for in their collection, you can immediately borrow it. The only limitation is that you can only check ~6 items out per month.

Note: not every library offers hoopla, which is another reason to collect library cards along your life’s adventures.

(I almost always listen to audiobooks slowed down. Especially nice if you’re using them to fall asleep to. 🐌)

Libby has a fantastic format where you can have all of your library cards linked simultaneously, so that if one library doesn’t have an item in their collection, or has a long waitlist, you can see whether a different library has it immediately available or a shorter waitlist. Yet another reason to collect library cards!

(hoopla has been having technical difficulties with the search functions, so if you can’t access the right thing by clicking on a google link or a link on my website that opens in hoopla, try Libby for things like

(I almost always listen to audiobooks slowed down. Especially nice if you’re using them to fall asleep to. 🐌)

Goodreads also has a bit of a thing to recommend things based on how you rate the books you’ve read.

Can write emails with a particular tone, can debug complicated spreadsheet formula errors, do language translation, make lists of promising _____, etc. In some ways, like a pretty talented assistant.

(there’s also an app!)

I’m not really a power-user, but just from the results that pop up in my google searches, it feels like the most helpful place on the internet.

A recent replacement for what StumbleUpon was trying to do.

Add your number to the “Do Not Call Registry” by calling 1-888-382-1222 from the phone you want to register. You can also call this number to check if your number is already on the list (they will tell you the exact date you were added).

https://same.energy/

Google Analytics is the famous option. And probably the most fun. I really like watching the “realtime” view on the world map.

Google Console is perhaps less well known and centers less around what people are doing on your site and more around what brings them to your site in the first place (and how Google itself views your content). I suppose this is the service for all the people obsessed with SEO?

The Way Back Machine "Internet Archive"

It's a nonprofit dedicated to automatically archiving websites — you can use it to try to find content from an older version of a website that has subsequently changed or been removed.

This is a similar service:

(in theory, you could use this to discover what factory a particular company uses for manufacturing, and that might let you be more precise in identifying high-quality off-brand options)

I have a board with one of my besties and it’s been a really wonderful place for us to share longer-form content and handle threading and topic changes and photos and links to things in a way that was becoming pretty impossible with just text messaging.

Almost put this in coordination/teams because we use it all the time. The sad news is that they’re being acquired by Adobe, which often marks the end of innovation 😕

Essentially any music at the tip of your fingers. Surprisingly good "radio" playlists that start from a song you're into. Excellent curated playlists (e.g. "mood booster" or "chill vibes" or "dinner with friends").

You can have up to 6 accounts on a single household/family plan.

http://radio.garden/

You can navigate around the globe, listening in wherever strikes your fancy.

The Shazam app

Open the Google app on your phone, say “what's this song?” or click the “Search a song” button. Then start humming for 10-15 seconds. On Google Assistant, say “Hey Google, what’s this song?” and then hum the tune.

Cornell’s Merlin Bird ID

My insect expert friends call BugGuide “Probably the broadest online database for insect sightings and identification on the internet”

If you need to translate content in another language, google does a great job within your browser. If you have content from Slack or Whatsapp, you can open those apps via your browser and let Google Translate do its work!

For phrases: linguee.com maps bilingual newspaper articles to each other. You sometimes have to dig to find the option (maybe it’s that you have to scroll down past the suggested translation?). This is how a friend of mine finds weird science phrases when she needs them. They also show you the source articles so you can get at country specific things by checking if the newspapers are in the right region.

For more human translations, try phrasing your search in a way that might show up on discussion boards, e.g. “como se dice [phrase in spanish] en ingles”

Also: google translate on your phone can read text via the camera and translate e.g. a menu in real time

🤙 I’ve heard this is a good place to look up ASL signs: https://www.handspeak.com/

See also: AI assistants like ChatGPT

My friends analyzed voice-to-text transcription and found Otter to be the best.

Public libraries often have a bunch of their print books which are useful when you’re e.g. starting a nonprofit, but their online resources are also good.

Importantly, there’s both a critic score and an audience score (a few of my favorites are really low on the former and really high on the latter). And there are also convenient lists and filters for finding something good on a particular streaming service. (Though Reelgood is a better dedicated service for narrowing options to your particular streaming options—I just wish they had both of the rottentomatoes scores.)

Rottentomatoes.com

You can log what services you have so that it only shows stuff streaming for free.

You can also log which movies you you’ve already seen and what movies you want to see, or what TV shows you watch and what episodes you’ve already seen so that new episodes show up in your “watch next” queue.

e.g. the US 2020 presidential race:

https://emojipedia.org

(I used the apple iOS versions for for the icons on the

what3words is an app that has assigned a three word sequence to every 10’x10’ square in a grid that covers the whole world (available in a number of languages as well). I found out about it on the way to not-

Note: I had a hard time with it when there was no reception, but I don’t know how gps/my iPhone’s built in compass is meant to work without service.

5 free pages (and maybe 5 more if you join via a referral link?)

Gives you a chronological ordering of the tweets of everyone you follow.

I’ve seen people rave about Substack (as a better alternative to Patreon for paid subscribers)

During wildfire season, this is how I determine when to air out the house vs. lock things down and recirculate our relatively cleaner indoor air. (See my page on gas stoves for my favorite indoor CO2 monitor

Watch Duty will send you a notification for any wildfire in the county/counties of your choosing, and if it’s not something concerning, you can instantly toggle notifications off for that particular blaze, or continue to get updates as the fire/cleanup progresses.

Allows you to easily send or request $$ from your friends or housemates for splitting bills (I've heard of other services for this that my friends like, e.g. CashApp)

Low fees (true for Vanguard generally), automatically rebalances and gets less aggressive over time.

Consumer Reports is a nonprofit and is the most reputable company in the space — they care about reliability and safety and try to stay at arms length from manufacturers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Reports

They’re perhaps most well known for their thorough annual ratings of new and used cars (but they’re also the best for appliances). It’s almost unthinkable to buy a car without checking that year/make/model with CR. (Anecdote: I once bought a Honda Odyssey for a group I was working with; CR said that year had bad transmissions, but the seller had replaced the transmission just a year or two prior, so I went ahead and bought it anyway—within a year (which admittedly involved hauling a fair amount of drywall up into the Oakland hills 😬), the transmission failed again: my guess is that they replaced it with another one from that year. Moral of the story: trust Consumer Reports when they tell you that a particular year has a particular problem.)

You should be able to get access to a digital version of the product ratings that are published in their monthly magazine through your library membership (e.g. Ebscohost). Some libraries offer a subscription to their website as well (another reason to collect memberships!)

They also have some amount of free purchasing advice online, e.g. this guide for what month is best for buying particular products: https://www.consumerreports.org/shopping/best-time-to-buy-things/

This video of their garbage disposal testing setup gives you an idea of how seriously they approach their ratings.

Wirecutter (now owned by the NY Times and paid for via affiliate commissions when readers buy things + using a paywall for some content) isn't as reliable as Consumer Reports — they don't do as much testing and they seem to be less price sensitive (maybe in part because they are getting a % of the sale). But they're a good place to start when looking for objects you're interested in (they cover electronics, household furniture and kitchen supplies, even clothing and interesting toys and gifts; but for large appliances and car reliability ratings, you should definitely rely on Consumer Reports).

I also like their guides which can give you ideas for gifting or help you create a good emergency preparedness kit.

There are many different faces of America’s Test Kitchen: a quarterly magazine called “Cooks Illustrated,” a show called “Cooks Country” and a show/website/series of cookbooks under the “America’s Test Kitchen” brand. They’re like Consumer Reports, but for food and all related things.

Some portion of all of their offerings will contain product reviews of things like sous vide cookers or spatulas or knife sharpeners, “taste tests” of particular brands of things like black pepper or fish oil or chocolate chips, tips/techniques for frying taco shells or thinly slicing raw meat, and their main focus is the testing and development of foolproof recipes.

One thing that I really love about them is that they’re very explicit about what their target is, and they explain the ways that their experiments failed, such that if you actually would’ve preferred the crispier version of their chocolate chip cookies, you can follow that path instead of the one that led to the ones that were soft on the inside with a cracked outer layer that they were aiming for.

They try all sorts of things so that you don’t have to: vodka in their pie crust, mashed potatoes in their pizza crust, browned butter in their cookie dough. And they’re thorough enough that I can pretty much rely on them without needing to find something similar on the internet with a bunch of stars to make sure I’m on the right track.

Even for something as unique as homemade kimchi, their instructions led to fantastic results (though I think they might’ve made a salt conversion error when they copied the recipe from their Foolproof Preserving to their Cooking for Gut Health book because the original had the recipe denominated in Morton’s pickling salt which is much denser than the two main brands of kosher salt — I have the correct amounts on my

I used to gift the red three-ring binder version of the “America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook” which has now been out of print for a long time (you’ll probably find it at most of my friend’s houses). It might still be the best combination of format and content, but there are newer ones that might be more relevant at this point. This is the original source of my

I also have the tome that is The New Best Recipes from Cooks Illustrated (a little bit more like an encyclopedia — less accessible, but more thorough in the explanations of what worked and didn’t and with drawings instead of glossy photos).

And since I started needing to make specialized food, I’ve been really getting a lot of value out of the

Unfortunately, while the advent of online user reviews have made making purchasing decisions easier, they are also being exploited by unscrupulous companies who can pay for good reviews. ReviewMeta is a free tool that sifts through the reviews and outputs a report to help you determine the true score of any given product listed on Amazon.

camelcamelcamel shows you graphs of a product's price history over time and can give you a sense of whether you're overpaying for a product because the regular vendor is out of stock at the moment or whatever.

But you can also use it to ping you via email when a specific item you're interested in drops in price.

This is the best place to check before buying an Apple product — it will tell you when each product was released and whether an update is expected soon.

They produce their own prepared foods (fresh, frozen, canned, dried, etc) and they’re generally delicious, healthy, and reasonably priced, even for fancy things like exotic cheeses, cut flowers, or organic meats. Even their sweet treats are better than what you can find almost anywhere else.

If I could only shop at one grocery store, this would be it. (Their workers are friendly and well-treated, which is a bonus.)

See also: TJ’s section of as well as my actual TJ’s shopping list.

A global import store with all sorts of things, from wall art and furniture, to dishes and toys, to (maybe my favorite) sweet and savory snacks from around the world. I sometimes daydream about having a party where we all just go and pick out dozens of exotic foods to try.

If you have a foreign friend living in the US, you might be able to surprise them with a favorite treat from home, and if you come home from a trip abroad and didn’t have enough room in your luggage to bring everyone foreign treats, you can sometimes fake it with a quick trip to Cost Plus World Market (which is a little bit sad, but still probably a good feature of the world).

I have a few particular items I source from there, especially around the holidays

A Swedish furniture company with modern designs at very reasonable prices. Most things require assembly at home, but they also have lovely textiles (duvet covers, curtains, rugs) as well as dishware and home decor including art and lamps and plants.

Materials can vary and I would assume durability varies with it—when possible, I tend to avoid furniture made out of ~particle board. (But for a dorm room, it’s probably fine.)

Walking around their floor of sample display “rooms” is a pretty fun activity.

If you don’t have an IKEA nearby, you can still take advantage because most of their items ship (in 2024 they’re testing out shipping small orders over $50 for free), but once you hit a certain weight or size, the shipping cost can jump from $10 or $25 to $250. It’s worth doing some investigating/experimentation to see if those curtains or that duvet would actually ship for a lot less than you’d pay for a similar product at a different store.

I’ve also recently learned that you can schedule a delivery over a month into the future, which is great for me and my nomadic lifestyle but might also be convenient for sending presents long before the relevant date. (Just know you might miss out on items which are out of stock on the actual shipping date.)

Oh, and bring a measuring tape with you! They have small paper ones in the store, but I keep a 10’ pocket-sized one in my

An impressive and secretive family-run Italian candy manufacturer (a real life Willy Wonka). They introduced the use of hazelnut as a cheaper alternative/additive to chocolate. They invented Nutella, Kinder surprise eggs (and the rest of the Kinder line), Raffaello coconut balls (particularly delicious stored in the freezer), Ferrero Rocher, Ferrero Küsschen, even Tic tacs! (In the last ~five years they’ve been on an acquisition spree that boggles the mind 😬)

Instead of paying for international shipping by sending a package directly, or by having a vendor in the US ship it for you, consider using a service in the country where the recipient is located. For sending things to Germany, for example, you can purchase through amazon.de or ravensburger.de. [see my email tip in

Often the selection will be different and sometimes the thing you want will not be available (or will be overpriced), but if the product is actually manufactured on that side of the world, there might be more options and better prices (Ravensburger puzzles is a perfect example — during the pandemic, there were zero puzzles available on the US website and only limited supply and high prices on amazon.com, but on the German equivalents, there was ample supply, low prices and often free shipping).

And if you don't speak the language of the country you're sending to, remember that Google Translate should be able to make the websites accessible to you anyway.

⚠️ If you are tempted to send a package from the US, or even from the UK to mainland Europe, keep in mind that there does not appear to be a way to pay import taxes for the recipient. This means that a postal worker may demand cash payment to hand over a package, or worse, your recipient may have to travel to a postal hub and wait in line to open the package in front of an official and pay based on their assessed value. To any govt that’s reading this: I’m fine paying your tax! just please give me a way of doing it that doesn’t cause so much trouble for someone I’m trying to do something thoughtful for 🙃 It seems very silly that I can’t send my sister some minute tapioca when she has a craving, for fear of how stressful it might end up being.

Another alternative is to save up gifts and bring them with you in a suitcase 🧳 Or find a friend who is en route to that part of the world and have them run a far away errand for you (I once had a small package go to Iceland and then get handed off to another friend headed home to Estonia and then finally mailed to my sister in Germany (who was very confused and pleased 😅))

This is where I find most of my gluten-free and low-FODMAP items. They have great prices on gf pastas (Jovial is my favorite) and Fody products (great salsa and marinara) and the best gluten free crackers: Schar (ritz, saltines, and chocolate covered graham crackers). Here’s a referral link for 40% off your first order.

My new favorite food producer. Tons of products available on Amazon. They seem to understand toxins better than any other company I’ve run into, so this is the place to get canned beans/lentils if you can’t avoid them like

Calendly (for allowing other people to book slots in your calendar based on what's available)

When2meet (for allowing people to input their availability manually)

I've never used Doodle, but I know other people use it and like it. Maybe it allows for preferences rather than just availability?

World Time Buddy for seeing how time zones overlap with working/waking hours

All our written communication/coordination happens here.

Task management

While it works just fine in a browser, I highly recommend downloading the desktop version.

(It’s also how I made this website—it’s good as basically a company wiki)

Database software, sort of a google sheets alternative where each row is more of a standalone entry, and you can use “views” to filter for the info you’re wanting to see.

It can also be populated via forms for e.g. gathering reimbursement requests.

This is basically how we handled the switch to fully remote work. We have “offices” for different parts of the project and that’s where we have meetings but also where we often spend large portions of our day, co-working or available to answer questions as they come up.

We exclusively use it for live communication, and we use slack for anything written.

We needed to get a license with the 500-person add-on for our all-hands meeting.

There’s also an easy option for auto-recording every all-hands meeting which is then stored in the cloud.

The presenter puts a QR code up on the screen and everyone joins the poll by scanning the code. No sign-in required, fully anonymous. You can see in real-time how many people have responded before switching to the results of the question and (depending on your purposes) eventually highlighting the correct answer. Can be used in other ways, but my team mostly uses it for multiple choice.

My primary work use for Dropbox is having a shared filing system where other people can instantly have access to anything I’ve put in the relevant folder.

My primary personal use is basically as extra storage for my laptop without losing any of my organizational systems. with a paid account, once you integrate Dropbox on your computer (rather than just using it via a browser), any folder or specific file in your Dropbox folder can be designated as “online only” or “available offline” and you can toggle between the two options in order to quickly (depending on your download speeds) take a rarely-used set of files from purely cloud storage (not taking up any space on your hard drive, while still being listed in the proper place and openable/downloadable) to being locally available like any other file on your computer. And once you’re done with a project that needed that archive or that set of files, you can move them right back to “online only” and free up that hard drive space.

Because it’s in the cloud, it’s also a handy way to give access across your devices. E.g. I have a scanning app on my phone that allows me to save to a Dropbox folder and so I can then easily grab that pdf and attach it to an email I’m writing on my laptop.

All my screenshots are saved to a folder that’s in my Dropbox as well, which allows easy access and also allows me to keep those files “online only” so they don’t take up space, since they’re usually just for reference.

Apart from sharing a folder or nested folder system with individuals via adding their email, any file or folder in Dropbox can be easily shared by right clicking to get “the Dropbox link.” This is a good option for larger files, since some messaging systems will degrade the quality when sending and some systems will have a file size limit and some people won’t have unlimited data for receiving and downloading something big on their mobile devices.

Note: when I’m looking for something that wasn’t filed (e.g. a particular screenshot), I usually use the trick of clicking on a file and using the space bar to quickly preview it and then using the arrows to sift through the files in the likely time period. This works much slower when the files are “online only” so it might be worth syncing that folder or likely set of files before starting your search. But if you know what doc you need and you’re using the space bar to just look something up quickly (I do this to check my company’s EIN as an example), I find it’s not necessary to download the file, it just takes an extra second or two for the preview to come up.

You create an LLC which invoices your client(s) for services, Opolis hires you as a W-2 employee (they become your EOR “employer of record”) and debits the account that receives your payment for services, does all the normal withholding for taxes and health insurance (which you purchase through them) and 401k contributions, and you get a W-2 at the end of the year.

This is a referral link that offers gift card rewards if you end up going with them.

I’m not even sure what their closest competitor is these days—they handle all the state and federal withholding and filings, make it easy to deduct properly for non-taxable medical benefits or taxable fringe benefits like gym memberships.

Maybe most importantly beyond those basics, they integrate smoothly with my accounting software, Xero, which makes an otherwise pretty complicated bookkeeping chore, a breeze.

One caution: their support, while friendly and potentially convenient (chat, email, and call-back options) if your issue is minor, has been taking a very long time to resolve issues over the past year or so. Weeks rather than days. Not a big problem for me, though it does mean I need to act as soon as I suspect something might be not-quite-right.

For convenience, you can also use them as your insurance broker, which I do for workers comp, but I find their one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t get me the best plans or rates for medical or dental (the best plan at the moment seems to be Humana which offers a no cap option for dental(!)), so I have a local and very responsive agent and I manually enter the withholding details when I make a new hire and again after open enrollment ends each year. They tried to have me integrate our policies in 2021 in a way that would’ve stolen the commissions from my agent, and have recently claimed to have an integration that won’t do that, but I haven’t had the time to check as carefully as I would need to (I’m pretty sure it will force me to pay higher fees).

I also use their 401k partnership with Guideline and it’s been smooth so far. The deduction % can be updated by employees whenever they want and it’s immediately reflected in their next paycheck contribution, there are low-fee funds available, e.g. Vanguard, and it doesn’t require any intervention on the admin side. The one catch is that it’s a % of all comp, including illiquid/intangible comp, so you may need to find a workaround if you have any significant amount of that.

I love Xero—cloud-based, intuitive, affordable, lots of reporting options.

(I have had one vote for adding Xero guides here, but in the meantime, feel free to ask me questions if you get started but have trouble figuring out where to look for what you need)

Re: alternatives: The accountant who argued against moving to Quick Books complained that QB has a ton of formatting in their csv exports that makes it much harder to quickly move to Excel for more data processing. I can’t verify anything about QB, but I do export data from Xero all the time (especially the detailed transaction report) and it works great.

I have a lot of crypto transactions to process, and it took me 3+ years to find an accountant/consultant who could advise me well enough to integrate those transactions into Xero (basically by creating a new account for each cryptocurrency), and it took another year before I discovered that while Xero doesn’t support sub accounts, it does have a toggle option in the new Balance Sheet report and a grouping option in the Income Statement report that allows you to consolidate arbitrary sets of accounts, and you can add -1 -2 -3 or whatever you want to your chart of account codes, so you can e.g. create a separate USDC account for every single wallet or exchange in order to be able to much more easily reconcile those accounts at the end of the month. Most accountants wanted me to create a clearing account for any exchange, with a MJE at the end of the month, and I think that’s because Xero might be unusual in being able to designate any account as a payable account. I can literally mark any invoice or bill as paid via any of my accounts, which works beautifully for stablecoins that don’t need any extra calculations for gains or losses.

(Word on the street is that as we get larger/have a more complex corporate structure, someone is going to convince us to switch to something much more expensive like NetSuite or possibly Sage, especially for filing consolidated returns, but I’m hoping there might just be an add-on for that.)

The basic idea here is that the old system of “moving” funds internationally from an account at a bank in the US involved many steps to get to a bank across the ocean and then ultimately into the recipient’s account.

My understanding is that by having bank accounts around the world with people wanting to move funds cross-border in many different directions, Wise could ~match sets of transactions so that when I request a UK transfer, they can take funds already in the UK and just deposit them domestically in the correct account. And they can keep my funds in the US to do the same for a UK customer who’s trying to get funds to someone in San Francisco.

Apparently all services have a referral link at this point 🙃. This one gives you a fee-free transfer.

They have evolved over time and now also offer multi-currency accounts to individuals which a lot of foreigners seem to use to e.g. receive USD in an almost PayPal-like way.

(note: when evaluating international currency transfers, don’t just look at fees—most companies make their profits on the spread, so when comparing two options, you really just need to look at how much comes out the other side if you put in identical sums in your originating currency.)

This is our new favorite “bank” (it’s actually more of a UI layer with banking partners hidden in the background). It’s a refreshing situation where you think of something you’d want to do and poof, Mercury offers it.

No fees on ACH or wires, physical and virtual debit cards, different permissions/the ability to set up transfers that are approved by someone else, now also offering credit cards (with varying daily or monthly limits), and a new Treasury option with decent interest rates using Vanguard money market mutual funds primarily in T-bills.

They even have great UI things where if you are filling something out and need to restart with a different user who has greater corporate powers, all the information is still there and they can just “approve” the application or submit the form.

Update: it’s keeps getting better! Now up to $5m FDIC insurance.

This is pretty niche, but it’s the best option I’ve found for making payments in USDT for people in Latin America who operate on TRON due to the low fees.

taxsummaries.pwc.com

(I haven’t used this long, but the DeFi features and UI are head and shoulders above Bitwave and their pricing is significantly better than Cryptio)

DeFi Saver also has a Chrome extension