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Best Maker YouTube Channels
Most of my discretionary media time is spent watching YouTube. I derive immense pleasure in finding out how things work and how to make and repair things. Over several years of watching all kinds of video, lousy and great, I’ve collected a bunch of channels for dependable high-quality content. In a long post on our blog Cool Tools, I review the top 30 YouTube informational channels that I subscribe to. (#1 on my list is Cody’s Lab.) — KK

Automatic transcripts
When doing interviews, I like to have a transcript of the conversation. This is useful for fans of podcasts, and for journalism. The best transcripts are done by humans, but I can get very cheap, very fast transcripts that are 90-95% accurate done by AI. (Depends on quality of recording and accents.) Temi will give me a transcript for 10 cents per minute of audio ($6/hr), delivered in about an hour turn-around. The Word doc or PDF output will have time stamps on it, making it easy to go back to find the actual audio for correction if needed. The Temi transcript is accurate enough to find key passages; with one listen-through I can quickly clean it up for public consumption. — KK

Podcast search engine
One way to find new podcasts is a website called Listen Notes — a search engine for almost all podcasts around the world. You can search for topics or a specific person and find related episodes. Or set alerts for keyword mentions. I’m not a daily podcast listener but every once in a while I’ll want to hear what people are saying about a certain news story or random topic on my mind, and in those cases Listen Notes is very useful. — CD

Respirator subscription
Anytime I go into the attic or near dust of any kind, I put on one of these 3M Cool Flow respirator masks. They are comfortable and they really help me from having a sneezing fit. My daughter uses them for her art projects. Amazon sells a 10 pack for $15, but I use Amazon’s Subscribe and Save and get a 10 pack sent to me every six months for $14. — MF

Easy background removal
This new website became an instant hit, and for good reason. Just upload any photo of a person, animal, or things, and it will erase everything in the background, replacing them with transparent pixels. It even works well when the person in the foreground has wispy or curly hair. — MF

Death quotes
A while back I recommended WeCroak. These are a few of my favorite quotes from the death reminder app.

“The only thing that isn’t worthless: to live this life out truthfully and rightly. And be patient with those who don’t.” — Marcus Aurelius
“We waste our energy and exhaust ourselves with the insistence that life be otherwise.” — Frank Ostaseski

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?” — George Eliot

“At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.” — Toni Morrison

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” — Vladimir Nabokov

-- Kevin Kelly, Mark Frauenfelder, Claudia Dawson 01/6/19