Best gift guide/Franz/Ghostery
Recomendo: issue no. 71
Best holiday gift guide
For my tastes, the best holiday gift guide is the annual catalog of cool books, games, toys, and diy tools put together by The Kid Should See This website. Ordinarily the site hosts the best video clips your kids should see, but during the holidays they compile this long and annotated list of cool stuff that is aimed at active kids, but also works for adults with young minds. — KK
One app for all your messages
I use a lot of different messaging services. It was a hassle to open them all and switch from app to app. I’m glad I found Franz, which consolidates all your chat & messaging services into one application. I use it for Hangouts, Slack, Skype, Facebook Messenger, LinkedIn, and Telegram. It’s free. — MF
Block website tracking
Ghostery chrome extension shows me what’s being tracked when I visit a website and blocks it. I don’t know what it all means, but it makes web pages load faster and less cluttered and I like it. — CD
My primary travel luggage
I travel a lot, mostly overseas, often for many weeks at a time, and sometimes in very remote parts of the world. I pack everything I need for 3 weeks or more of adventuring and business speeches into one carry-on size luggage. My bag of choice is the Travel Pro Crew, also highly recommended by the intense researchers at the Wirecutter. At 20-inches in length it fits easily overhead, has plenty of storage, pockets and recessed wheelies. Fully packed it won’t tip over. This is slightly lighter, cheaper (and shorter) than Travel Pro’s Magna 22-inch model, but since I carry on rather than check it, it’s held up fine. — KK
Comfortable driving pillow
This car pillow makes long drives, slow traffic and neck pain more tolerable. The material is so soft and it’s so nice to lean my head back on this after work. When my husband drives he can easily adjust it to his height. — CD
Interested in Bitcoin? You need a hardware wallet
I wrote a story for Wired about forgetting my password on a small USB device that stored my bitcoin keys and how I hired a hacker to help me unlock it. Despite my experience, I’m still using the same hardware wallet (the manufacturer updated the firmware to address the exploit) because it’s still the best way to keep hackers away from your cryptocurrency. It’s called a Trezor and it costs about $85. If you have more the $1000 in bitcoin, ether, bitcoin cash, or other cryptocurrency, I recommend getting one. — MF
Get the Recomendo weekly newsletter a week early by email.
12/3/17
