🗃️

Useful Services

🚧

This page is under-construction, but I've found that if you know something exists, you're much more likely to find it/figure it out, so I didn't want to remove that value while we wait for me to have time to post all the details.

Misc Tools

Borrowing & Books

‣

Library cards/Libraries

‣

Hoopla for digital library books (audio books in particular)

‣

Libby for digital library books

‣

Curated modern book recommender

Music

‣

A way to listen to radio stations all over the world

‣

A map of zillions of musical genres that you can sample

‣

Spotify

‣

A way to identify a song you hear

‣

A way to identify a song you hum

“Entertainment”

‣

Rotten tomatoes for the best movie ratings

‣

Reelgood app and website for tracking what’s streaming where

Learning

‣

Wikipedia

‣

See AI assistants below

Research/Looking stuff up

‣

AI assistants? ChatGPT and similar things like Claude

‣

2 ways to look up old versions of websites

‣

A way to identify a bird you hear (or see)

‣

A way to identify plants

‣

A way to identify bugs

‣

NOLO legal guides

‣

Cochrane (evidence-based health recommendations)

‣

Be alerted to local wildfires

‣

Monitor outdoor air quality

‣

A guide to sustainable seafood choices

‣

Visual search engine

‣

Find out where stuff comes from

‣

General forecasting: The Good Judgement Project

‣

Best election forecasting: FiveThirtyEight

‣

Prediction market

‣

Economists perspectives: US and European Economic Experts Panels

‣

A map for estimating the elevation of any point on earth

‣

A way to figure out where to go/exactly where you are

‣

A good place to start for “how to”

‣

Tracking your website (this was originally under 🖥️Tech tips — there’s some overlap between these sections)

‣

Exploratory web surfing

‣

Apps for scanning docs

‣

Online fax service

‣

Blocking telemarketers

‣

Twitter feed mgmt tool

‣

Online publishing/blogging

‣

Photos (default Apple app for photo editing — surprisingly powerful)

‣

Miro (collaboration board)

‣

Figma (diagrams)

‣

SketchUp (3D modeling, e.g. of your garden)

‣

Communication tools (mostly asynchronous)

‣

Translation tools

‣

Transcription tools

‣

Emoji library

‣

Printing services (photos, fridge magnets, business cards, etc.)

Finances 🚧

‣

PayPal

‣

Vanguard Target Date Retirement Accounts (for your ROTH)

‣

Credit Karma (free credit score monitoring)

‣

See also the section on Finances on the Living Life Well page.

Purchasing

‣

Consumer Reports

‣

Wirecutter

‣

America's Test Kitchen (tested tools, techniques, recipes, food products)

‣

Amazon fake reviews analysis

‣

CamelCamelCamel (Amazon price history & monitoring/alerts)

‣

Sold out? Consider using a service to notify you of changes to the item’s webpage

‣

Deals

‣

MacRumors Buyer's Guide (for timing Apple purchases)

‣

Trader Joe’s

‣

Cost Plus World Market

‣

IKEA

‣

Ferrero

‣

International shipping/gifting

‣

Gifting (which you can also do for yourself!)

‣

Thrive (specialty food online store)

‣

Eden Foods

‣

🛒Shopping List of Things I Recommend by Vendor

Coordination/Teams 🚧

‣

Scheduling

‣

Google Drive

‣

Slack

‣

Asana

‣

Notion

‣

Airtable

‣

Discord

‣

Zoom (can do video calls with more people than Discord)

‣

Loom asynchronous video messaging

‣

Voxer (asynchronous walkie-talkie — great for running events)

‣

Slido live-polling for remote team meetings

‣

Polis - debate tool

‣

Dropbox (integrated file storage and sharing)

Business 🚧

‣

Opolis (freelancer tax withholding & benefits)

‣

Gusto (payroll)

‣

Xero (accounting/bookkeeping)

‣

Wise (formerly Transferwise) (fast and cheap international transfers)

‣

Mercury (banking with virtual debit cards and different levels of permissions)

‣

Worldwide tax summaries

‣

Moo (business cards)

Crypto-specific:

‣

Rabby (best MetaMask alternative)

‣

[I’m more skeptical of this recommendation at the moment, but don’t have something obviously better to offer; Cryptio is maybe in the top slot, but expensive and involved, kind of like jumping from Xero to NetSuite] Tres (DeFi crypto accounting/bookkeeping)

‣

SafePal (cross-chain crypto: USDT on TRON)

‣

Ways to track ethereum gas prices (e.g. for being more strategic while defi minting)

‣

Payroll outsourcing if you need/want to include tokens.