Podcast

Creative Good Founder and CEO Mark Hurst

Mark Hurst - Cool Tools Show #4

CEO and Founder of Creative Good, Mark Hurst brings a laundry list of Cool Tools to our show this week. Our highly productive discussion yields tips on how to properly rinse your text, type most efficiently and how you might casually pick up Mandarin Chinese in your spare time.

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Show Notes:

Mark’s Website

Mark’s Book, Customers Included

Twitter: @MarkHurst

Here are Mark’s tool picks, with quotes from the show:

Default Folder X: $35

“You know how when you save a file it brings up that little popup dialogue box and it shows the file hierarchy? If you wanna save that file in a particular folder, generally you have to click through this morass of folders… Default Folder makes that process much easier by letting you set hot keys to go to your most commonly accessed folders with one keystroke.”

TextWrangler: Free

“How often do you go to a webpage and you copy some text and you place it in wherever you’re gonna place it, in Word or somewhere else, and suddenly it has the crazy font and italics and the blue color that the original source had an you go, “No, no, no, no! All I want was the text!” And there’s no easy way to remove all that stylistic data. What you do is just paste it in a Text Wrangler file and then copy and paste it out of Text Wrangler to wherever you’re going to put it. I think of it as rinsing off the text until you’re left with the pure ASCII.”

 

Instapaper: $10

“It’s clever enough to save if an article is broken up into three or four click-throughs. It’ll pick up all of those pages’ content and put it in one long scrolling list and it does a text rinse…and displays it without all of the cruft that comes up in a lot of the content sites. One of the best things on my iPhone, bar none is Instapaper.”

Pinboard.in: $10

“With one keystroke. I can tag that URL and get back to it anytime later. All the bookmarks are saved in the cloud. Really simple elegant design. I just love the service. ”

Ask MetaFilter: $5

“Every time I go on somebody’s saying, ‘Does anybody remember that movie? The guy looks to the left and then a watermelon hits the sidewalk.’ And in three minutes someone gives a link to the YouTube clip of that happening. ”

KTdict+ C-E: $4

“If you’re an English speaker learning Chinese, you have three things to memorize, the Chinese character, the definition and then the Pinyin, which is the phonetic pronunciation, including the tone. Most flashcards will give you two sides to the card, but this one actually does three sides…”

 

eStroke: $7

“What it does that the dictionary app does not do is it will show an animation of a character being drawn, and that’s indispensable. ”

Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection by John E. Sarno: $7

“I was sitting down to breakfast with a friend of mine who said, “Oh, you have back pain? No problem! You just need to read the book!” and [I said] “What book? I don’t wanna read a book!” But he convinced me to read this book and I read it from front to back. The book is very clear: you just need to read the entire book. A few weeks later my back pain disappeared and it really hasn’t come back.”

06/26/14

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