Misc Tools
Borrowing & Books
Libraries are wonderful places — beyond just checking out books, they often offer classes, children’s programs, legal support, etc. and they serve as a hub for finding out about local offerings. They’re a place you can work without noise or an expectation to buy anything, and in the winter and summer, they offer a climate controlled place to warm up or cool down.
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 👫Brené Brown’s lectures.
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 has a shorter waitlist. Yet another reason to collect library cards! (Whenever I get a new card and add it to Libby, the first thing I do is check the updated list of available Terry Pratchett audiobooks and put new ones on my wishlist ✨)
(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 👫Brené Brown’s lectures)
(I almost always listen to audiobooks slowed down. Especially nice if you’re using them to fall asleep to. 🐌 See 🛌Ways to help you get sleepy & stay asleep)
Goodreads also has a bit of a thing to recommend things based on how you rate the books you’ve read.
Music
You can navigate around the globe, listening in wherever strikes your fancy.
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 “peaceful piano” or "dinner with friends"or something moodier like "chill mix").
You can have up to 6 accounts on a single household/family plan.
Apple Music is similar, but I haven’t tried it myself.
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.
Or, on Google Assistant, say “Hey Google, what’s this song?” and then hum the tune.
“Entertainment”
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.)
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.
Learning
(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. It’s like the forums from the early days of the world wide web.
Research/Looking stuff up
Can write emails with a particular tone, can debug complicated spreadsheet formula errors, do language translation, figure out what something is (e.g. from a photo), explain something you’re curious about, make lists of promising _____, etc. In some ways, like a pretty talented assistant.
My bestie uses it almost exclusively for learning using the voice interface on ChatGPT—it’s like the “why” comedy routine, but it takes a lot longer to run out of answers 😅
I’ve heard from a computer engineer friend that Claude 3 is many times better that ChatGPT for technical tasks.
I’ve also heard that Claude is significantly better to interact with, not in terms of the UI, but sort of personality-wise.
(There’s a 👩🏫Masterclass on how to best make use of an ai assistant that I found pretty useful as an introduction to the new technology, though I don’t know how long it will remain relevant 😅😬)
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:
PlantNet is fantastic. If you’re looking for a second app, I’ve also heard good things about “Picture This.” That one is apparently just as accurate, but doesn’t offer alternatives to its best guess, which is something I value a lot about PlantNet.
My insect expert friends call BugGuide “Probably the broadest online database for insect sightings and identification on the internet”
(I haven’t quite figured out how to use it yet)
You can also use the Google app on your phone to take a picture and search that way.
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.
- 🏥Cochrane
- See also 📒Other health services/guides
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.
They include updates from twitter, journalists, and links to evacuation maps and other useful sources of information.
They’re also a 501(c)3.
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 🤔Advice: Open a window whenever you use a gas stove.) By looking at the smoke plume overlay, it will usually show me what fire is causing the smoke I smell—sometimes something local, but often it will blow in from a long way away.
(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)
(This can be a useful tool for emergency planning when you’re evaluating backup power sources.)
(I haven’t looked deeply at this, but it seems like an example of citizen science!)
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-🏜️Burning Man 2021 when people were giving advice on finding your way on the playa without any of the regular landmarks. The idea is that if you know that your car is parked at “scaffold.despite.november” you’ll have a better chance of making your way back to that spot. Same with having your friends find you in Central Park.
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.
WikiHow often has helpful instructions and diagrams for doing things such as building a retaining wall.
MakeupAlley
A product of the 2000s, genuine reviews of all sorts of things: shampoo, lip gloss, brushes, etc. And a surprising amount of community.
Ages ago my sister sent me a fantastic book about perfume and the authors explicitly thanked the MUA contributors.
Update: it was sold in 2017 and shut down in 2025 :/
(but leaving this here in case it’s a useful breadcrumb)
Leaning in the direction of optimism, but using actual facts.
Google Analytics is the famous option. And probably the most fun. I really like watching the “realtime” view on the world map.
The data is certainly imperfect, but in theory, you can see what pages users visit, how long they stay, whether they scroll, what cities they’re visiting from, what source brought them to you, whether they’re new users or repeat visitors, whether they’re on phones or regular computers, etc.
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?
I’m personally not trying to optimize anything at the moment, so I mostly just check to see what search terms people are using and which ones cause clicks and how that shifts over time.
Note: as far as I can tell, it only starts tracking this data once you enable Google Console, so if you’ve just set up your site and you’re not really diving into any sort of metrics yet, you should still consider getting this set up from the get-go so you can look back at the data later on.
Also, because I’m not trying to do anything in this space, I actually haven’t read much about what’s even going on here, so these are just my vague impressions:
There are strategies for having your content be more likely to be viewed as relevant by Google’s search algorithm, and it can take time to cause changes in Google’s view of your site because it seems like you’re at the mercy of somewhat random allocation of Google’s crawling/recrawling capacity over weeks and months.
If you already have high quality content that you think will be viewed favorably by the crawlers (and that your pages have the right sort of metadata), then making sure that Google has a sitemap with all your pages is perhaps the next step. (You can see how many of your pages are being included or excluded, which have been crawled, etc.)
(One thing that seems a little odd is that clicks will happen on pages that don’t really seem to be coming up in search results (not getting “impressions”) — not sure what that means about what’s typically happening. One thought I’ve had is that Chrome sometimes guesses at what you’re looking for without you needing to complete the official google search (maybe I’m thinking of cases where you have the site in your browser history?), so maybe those queries don’t end up counting?)
A recent replacement for what StumbleUpon was trying to do.
🖥️Tech Tips e.g. Adobe Scan
5 free pages (and maybe 5 more if you join via a referral link?)
I almost never need to fax something, but when I do (almost always for some sort of bureaucratic task), I’m so thankful that the world invented a digital option. This used to be called HelloFax, but apparently it was acquired by Dropbox.
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).
If some random person or business texts you, reply STOP and they should remove you from their automated list (you’ll usually get a text message confirming that you’ve been unsubscribed from ______). I found this much more effective during election season than clicking the “report junk” option that my phone offers when it doesn’t recognize a number from my contacts.
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)
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 😕
Even in their free version, you can add shadows that are appropriate for your location any time of year — useful for determining where to plant what.
I’ve also seen that the Canadian YouTube builder
used it for his tiny house.
I generally have trouble finding the free site from their main site, so after you sign up with “Trimble” go here:
Spoiler: Google Veo 3 seems to be better than Sora 2 at everything except placing yourself in videos.
(also good for reading before bed when they might nod off and need a recap, or where they can’t start when you do, but can see that you’ve begun reading and can hurry up and join in).
I got started because my family is often on different continents and it worked well for free international texting. It supports group chats with photos and video and easy “reply” to specific messages. I love seeing updates from my scattered family members trickle in as people see beautiful sunsets or eat delicious foods or catch their dog doing something adorable. (Bonus: they now feature end-to-end encryption)
Update: my family switched to Messages because we now all have iphones, there was some concern about whatsapp’s connection to fb, and the live photos are clutch for my dad’s obsession with birds 🐦
Niche usage for managing teams when doing construction or otherwise needing to show people things irl.
(for overcoming the auto system volume lowering on a Mac during facetime calls)
Really great way to keep things moving when schedules don’t align and also great for content that you might want to share with others down the road. I’ve had friends use them for explaining complicated spreadsheets that are usually a pain to revisit months or years down the line, or for recording a demo in a meeting that’s relevant for someone who couldn’t make it.
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 and Claude
My friends analyzed voice-to-text transcription and found Otter to be the best.
Wirecutter votes for Microsoft Word.
(I used the apple iOS versions for for the icons on the 🧞Wish List of Innovations page. To see the various options across platforms and through time, click on the “Emoji Designs” tab after you’ve made your selection.)
At larger sizes, you should expect some warping.
(pro tip: they have 25% off sales every couple months and they make great gifts)
The only thing I would change is the amount of glare from the protective coating.
They let you include multiple designs in each order, so it’s not difficult to meet the 25 minimum to give it a try. I’ve seen people use them for Save the Dates too.
We’re used to seeing photos on screens, which are lit from within. So generally, a photo on your phone or laptop screen will turn out surprisingly dark printed on paper. The professionals should know how to adjust the print to look more like you’re expecting.
Les Schwab is head and shoulders above the rest. I’ve had issues with tires that other folks have put on and every time I pull into a Les Schwab they diagnose the issue (once fixing an improper balancing) and they’ve never accepted my money.
(Consumer Reports agrees with me based on surveying their user base, with misc independent shops coming in second—mentioning it because Les Schwab is a bit of a regional option.)
This is kind of like citizen science, but maybe more directly useful to you and your neighbors. I have property in rural CA and often when the power goes out, the power company doesn’t automatically find out. So I can go check their website and prompt them to run a remote check and then add it to their to-do list (if they hadn’t known). I expect that things like this will be available in other regions as well, but here’s the link for PG&E.
e.g. this is useful in my war against YST: 🌻Best resource for dealing with yellow starthistle (and also a version of citizen science)
In particular, you can check to see what polish doesn’t contain chemicals you’re avoiding, like PVB:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1n-xVwhHyuQd29e-Wjq_JwsPG5kiSC5_LcdXFHFYbljI/
(haven’t actually used these, so this is more of a placeholder for when I deal with this massive family photo archival project of prints, slides and 35mm film negatives):
Besfile archival binder with rings:
Budget pick: Vue-all archival safe-t-binder:
For storage pages for slides and prints, I hear good things about “print file”
Finances 🚧
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.
Purchasing
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 🥬Fermented Kimchi: easy, healthy, delicious page.)
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 🌮Tacos recipe before I adapted it to be low fodmap.)
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 📕Best Gut Health Cookbook which is also from them—it has far fewer recipes than the other books I own, but the photos actually do a better job of actually compelling me to make a dish than anything I’ve experienced before and I find the variations listed on most recipes to actually give me a surprising amount of choice.
And it’s also where I get all my sous vide recipes.
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. Fakespot, ReviewMeta etc. are free tools that sift through the reviews and output a report to help you determine the true score of any given product.
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.
![6 Effective Ways to Track Changes on a Website [+ Best Tracking Tools]](https://images.spr.so/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/j42No7y-dcokJuNgXeA0ig/d143c231-609e-4a7e-a78b-a7060157912d/track-changes-website/w=1920,quality=90,fit=scale-down)
If you put something in your Amazon cart, whether you leave it there or save it for later, if you come back the next day and an item in your cart has dropped $32 in price, Amazon will show you an alert. This is probably not a very efficient method for looking for sales, but you could e.g. put your Christmas wish list in your cart and then periodically check in during Black Friday or Amazon prime day, scouting for big price drops.
See above 🔝
They’ll let you set a price for an item you’re interested in, which will email you anytime the price on Amazon drops below that price.
🗃️Useful Services - 📈 CamelCamelCamel (Amazon price history & monitoring/alerts)
If you know where you actually shop, getting gift cards at a discount is like getting all of that year’s purchases at a discount.
Target tends to have a day or two in the window prior to Christmas where you can buy gift cards at a 20% discount.
In 2023 Ikea had a couple waves of also selling gift cards 20% off (i.e. $50 gift card for $40, up to $2,000 total in gift cards).
Ace Hardware has a deal where you get $25 for buying a $100 gift card.
Kohl’s has a great sale starting prior to Thanksgiving on the 🐨Softest throw blanket (that’s also big enough!) and the blanket versions.
World Market has a great Black Friday sale on mugs (usually 50% off)
IKEA starts clearing out their holiday decor and winter items a few days before Christmas, adding them to their “winter sale” which runs from around Black Friday through the first week in January.
If you like 👩🌾Gardening, but don’t have the budget for everything on your wishlist, take advantage of sales right before your first fall frost. In my area, there are 50% off sales for almost every type of plant, and annuals (even cold hardy ones or perennial kitchen herbs) are sometimes $1/pack. Same thing with bulbs—as winter approaches, the local nursery marks down their stock by 50%, and there’s often 50% off fountains and outdoor containers as well.
There’s an outdoor gear shop near me (that works on consignment) and all their winter stock (skis, jackets, etc. is 50% off starting March 1.
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 🛒Shopping List of Things I Recommend by Vendor - Trader Joes 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 🛒Shopping List of Things I Recommend by Vendor - Cost Plus World Market
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 🤔Advice: Car bin for longer trips for just this kind of shopping.
There’s typically a winter sale that runs from around Black Friday through the first week in January.
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 🖥️Tech Tips for creating a new login]
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 😅))
Two tips for the SFMoMA:
- If the item is out of your price range, use it as inspiration and look for something similar at other vendors.
- The international terminal of SFO has a brick and mortar store for in-person browsing.
Also, MoMA:
Etsy
Etsy is a marketplace for individuals to sell their handmade wares (as well as resell antiques and other things). Some of the things are really lovely and the odds are much better that you’ll be able to find something unique or even something you can personalize.
I sometimes browse their stuff just to remind myself that there exists a world beyond Amazon.com. I have some really fun journaling/calendar/list-making stamps from there.
Mobiles/Kinetic Art
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 🛒Shopping List of Things I Recommend by Vendor - Cost Plus World Market
I use two primary methods of coming up with gifts:
- Practical life improvements:
- I pay attention to the person’s routines and look for places that they could be improved. If they have trouble sleeping, if they drink coffee, if they dislike shaving, if they have a commute, if they sit at their workstation all day, if they take a lot of calls, if they walk their dog, if they travel a lot, if they don’t have time for X (cooking, cleaning, shopping for clothes, fixing something in their house, setting up nice lighting, etc.), if they live in a place with harsh winters or hot summers, etc.
- Tons of things come up once I visit them in person (so you might want to take notes if you’re wanting to stick to the traditional gifting moments throughout the year); it can be hard to know what’s missing from afar.
- Things that spark joy:
- I look for things that spark joy for them as we interact over time.
- Maybe this is a particular hobby, maybe a love of animals, maybe a favorite movie or character from a book, maybe it’s an activity or a set of people to visit with or maybe something that communicates a type of care or affection. Sentimental things might fit here, e.g. as reminders (my favorite photo gifts are little square fridge magnets).
- If you haven’t already, figure out their love language — if the relationship is important, take the time to have them really reflect and figure out what resonates for them. (For one of my besties, her love language is definitely “flowers” 💐 🤷♀️ 🤗)
- I look for the things that spark joy for me that they might also enjoy.
- This is sometimes drawn from more universal practical life improvements, e.g. my 🚽Rainbow motion-activated toilet nightlight, from a food that I really love, sometimes something that I might be able to share with them, e.g. 🐙Tide Pooling, or a luxury item that they might not splurge for themselves like the Ember mug (see ☕Thermal mugs) or a subscription to 👩🏫Masterclass. Some people are very clear in their admiration and desire for a thing I have, which makes it easy :)
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 🍱Perfect Health Diet wants you to. I also trust them for tamari because I generally think soy is bad but not as bad as wheat.
Coordination/Teams 🚧
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 and update it in real-time—it’s good as basically a company wiki.)
If using it for a website, and wanting to use your own domain, you can use a service that handles that layer like Super.
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.
Note: some people struggle with sound quality in a persistent/confusing/frustrating way.
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.
Really great way to keep things moving when schedules don’t align and also great for content that you might want to share with others down the road. I’ve had friends use them for explaining complicated spreadsheets that are usually a pain to revisit months or years down the line, or for recording a demo in a meeting that’s relevant for someone who couldn’t make it.
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.
Business 🚧
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.
Update: it sounds like they want you to tax yourself as an S-corp and that might introduce a level of complexity that outweighs the other benefits.
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—Rippling maybe?—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.
taxsummaries.pwc.com
Poddster—currently in Singapore, Dubai, & Abu Dhabi, but I can only vouch for Singapore
Crypto-specific:
Generally accepted to be better than MetaMask in the crypto world at this point. Always make sure you’re accessing it from a reputable source, e.g. via their Twitter, rather than by googling.
(I haven’t used Tres long, but the DeFi features and UI are head and shoulders above Bitwave and their pricing is significantly better than Cryptio, but I’d say the space is new enough that the top option is still getting a C- in my view)
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.
DeFi Saver also has a Chrome extension
Niural looks pretty good if your token is listed on Coinbase — they can do PEO or EOR for W2 employees and automate token comp, including liquidating a % of their token to pay estimated tax withholding. If your token isn’t listed on Coinbase, it probably doesn’t make sense to think of them as better than any other EOR, but if it is, it might be cool.
If your token is not on Coinbase, you might consider Toku.