What’s in my NOW? — Jim Lord

issue #214

I’m a father, husband, author, and a business professional that appreciates inspiration and isn’t afraid of perspiration to succeed. — Jim Lord

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PHYSICAL

• I’m addicted to these Bluetooth headphones built into a soft sleep-mask. I travel frequently on long flights and sleeping with air pods or traditional over-the-ear headphones is uncomfortable to say the least! These Bluetooth sleep masks are affordable and a lifesaver on long flights!
• I recently purchased a knife from Origin Handcrafted. These knives are hand crafted from antique sawmill blades that have historically high levels of carbon, making them the perfect hard steel for long-lasting knife blades. Each knife is unique and is a great addition to any home or workshop.
• I absolutely love listening to vinyl records on my Sonos turntable and speaker. It’s a bit pricey, but the craftsmanship and sound quality of Sonos are second-to-none. I’m listening to Simon and Garfunkel’s greatest hits while creating this post right now!

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DIGITAL

• Picstudio has been one of the best AI sites I’ve found to create amazing portraits and headshots with a huge variety of themes, helping with your social media profiles without having to hire a professional photographer. My family couldn’t tell my images were created by AI!
• When your kids go away to college, you’ll want to make sure you maintain power-of-attorney for medical decisions. We trusted Mama Bear Legal Forms to help secure multi-state legal documentation to protect our kids in the event of a medical emergency while being out-of-state and away from home.

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INVISIBLE

“Be patient, but don’t wait.”

My son and his best friend were having a discussion when his friend offered this simple yet profound piece of advice. I’m often amazed when someone cites and impressive quote or one-liner, but it’s even more profound when it comes from this younger generation! You can view it here.

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05/21/25

Little Blue Truck / We Found a Hat

Issue No. 67

LITTLE BLUE TRUCK CONJURES UP A HARVEST-TIME HALLOWEEN ATMOSPHERE FOR YOUNG READERS

Little Blue Truck
by Alice Schertle (author) and Jill McElmurry (illustrator)
HMH Books for Young Readers
2016, 16 pages, 9 x 8.1 x 0.7 inches (board book)

Buy on Amazon

Little Blue Truck, an antique pickup, and his best friend, top-hatted Toad, take a ride through an autumn countryside, as owls, ravens, and black cats wait by the road for a lift to a barn celebration. On the way, they meet animals dressed in Halloween garb. These holiday revelers join the duo as they travel through the dusk to the party. The pair meets a duck masquerading as a ballerina, a sheep as a harlequin, a pig as a witch, and a cow as a queen. Evening gradually approaches, and the truck’s headlights cut through the darkness. A golden fall moon, orange pumpkins, exotic fall plants, and burnt umber trees fill the rolling, rural landscape. They arrive at their brightly-lit, festively decorated destination. Within the barn, guests bob for apples and sip punch. Rollicking musicians with accordion and banjo play music for dancing, as everyone joins in the fun. Finally, one last party guest appears, dressed as a ghost. Who could it be?

Vintage-inspired paintings created with sponge and brush conjure a harvest-time atmosphere, complete with grinning jack-o’-lanterns, golden ripened fields, falling leaves, and animals attired in lovely, ornate disguises. The rhyming storyline describes each partygoer, and the flap on each page lifts to reveal the costumed characters’ identity. A charming, humorously-illustrated story that wouldn’t frighten even the youngest reader, Little Blue Truck’s Halloween is perfect for fall. – S. Deathrage

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WE FOUND A HAT IS FULL OF BRILLIANCE, AND TO BE FULLY APPRECIATED, IT HELPS TO KNOW THE TRILOGY

We Found a Hat
by Jon Klassen
Candlewick
2016, 56 pages, 8.2 x 11.3 x 0.4 inches (hardcover)

Buy on Amazon

It’s a classic problem: two turtles, one hat. Well, maybe not classic, but you get the idea. In the just-released and last book of his Hat series, Jon Klassen’s wit shines. Though his previous two Hat stories feature different characters, they both begin with a common problem – a stolen hat. We Found A Hat, however, is all about the moments before the grab.

There is so much brilliance in this book, and to be fully appreciated, it helps to know the series, as the pace and place of each differs subtly but smartly. In I Want My Hat Back, we clod through the forest with a bear, who slowly comes to the realization of who stole his hat at a pace not unlike that of one waking up from a long winter’s rest. In This Is Not My Hat, readers tail an underwater chase that is slow but necessarily suspenseful, with images and ending that, like vision under water, are clear enough, but not quite. We Found A Hat, perhaps fittingly for the last in the series, takes place in the desert. Who better than turtles to force the reader to slow down and savor the moral agony of friendship versus fashion? In this barren landscape, there are sounds in the pictures – the shape of the cacti echoes that of the newly found 10-gallon hat and the rocks echoes the turtles’ shells. The overall design of word and text calls back to each of the previous books.

The only thing that could make this book better is if Klassen partnered with a milliner to offer a box set complete with accompanying headwear. One could only hope. – Mk Smith Despres

Books That Belong On Paper first appeared on the web as Wink Books and was edited by Carla Sinclair. Sign up here to get the issues a week early in your inbox.

05/20/25

Tuners

Tools for Possibilities: issue no. 138

Best Clip-On Instrument Tuner

Snark SN-2

I’ve tried several clip-on guitar and banjo tuners over the years, and I finally found the best one: Snark SN-2. It’s fast, easy to use, and very accurate. Best of all, it’s cheap: $13. It’s optimized for all instruments. If you only need it for guitar, get the $10 Snark SN-1.

The build quality seems better than the previously reviewed Intellitouch, and the display is much nicer (glasses not required). And it’s really fast and responsive. Plus, it has a “tap tempo” thing so you can tap the button along with the tune and it will tell you the beats per minute. — John Walkenbach

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Tune up with an iPhone

Planet Waves Tune Up

I’ve been using this tuner on my iPhone for about a year now. It’s a great, accurate and very cheap guitar tuner. I’ve tried other tuner apps, but they were not as accurate as this one. The free Gibson Learn & Master-app, which includes a chromatic tuner, is not usable because it is far from being accurate. I also tried another free app called Acoustic Guitar which again doesn’t work because you have to rely on your ears to tune your guitar.

I’ve compared Tune Up to my standalone Boss TU12 guitar tuner. The iPhone’s builtin microphone is much more sensitive than the TU12’s built-in mic, so it much easier to tune up an unplugged electric guitar with the TuneUp app.

The biggest disadvantage of the TuneUpapp is that for unplugged electric guitars it is quite unusable in noisy environments as it will pickup too many surround sounds. This is one of the main reasons why I’m not selling my TU12 as I rely on the ability to plug in the electric guitar directly into the tuner. Also, for adjusting the bridge-saddles I still rely on the TU12, with the guitar directly plugged in the TU12. But that’s because I still have not adjusted a guitars bridge setup using the iPhone-app. Maybe I will in the near future… — Douwe Rijpstra

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Best guitar capo

G7th Capo

This is the best capo on Earth. The unique one-way cam lets you adjust tension in tiny increments with a squeeze. Unlike every other capo I’ve used, it can apply enough tension to cleanly fret the string without bending it sharp. Works on acoustic and electric instruments equally well. The build and finish quality are absolutely superb. The G7th capo is a brilliant piece of gear for the discerning guitarist. — David MacNeill

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Play a wind instrument only you can hear

Electronic Wind Instrument

As an amateur musician living in a small house, I can’t always pick up my saxophone or flute when I have the urge to make music. Nighttime is off limits, and even during the day I can’t always find a time when I won’t be disturbing the rest of the household. We have a digital piano that I can use with headphones or a computer, but as a wind player I find the keyboard too limiting.

About three years ago, I solved this problem by buying an Akai EWI USB electronic wind instrument. It lets me play quietly, or even silently, while providing more ways to make music than would be practical with real instruments. You hold it like a clarinet or saxophone, touching key pads placed in a similar arrangement to the keys of a real instrument, and blow into a mouthpiece that senses the pressure of your breath. It produces no sound of its own. Instead, you plug it into a computer and choose from dozens of wind, brass, and string instruments to mimic. Add a pair of headphones, and you have a self-contained music studio you can use any time of day or night. You can practice tunes and scales, play along with recordings, and even create your own compositions and arrangements using multiple instruments.

The instrument selection provided by the Akai software includes a full range of woodwinds, brass, and orchestral strings, along with some pitched percussion (like xylophone and glockenspiel) and an assortment of unique synthesizer sounds. The selection includes all the sizes of saxophones, clarinets, brass, double reeds, flutes, and viols. Part of the fun of the EWI is getting to play instruments that you’ve never touched in real life. For instance, I spend a lot of time using the violin sound, and noodling around on bass clarinet or tuba is a blast. The instrument sounds are quite good. The ability to control the volume with your breath adds a natural expressiveness that makes up for the synthetic timbre of some of the instruments. A casual listener might not realize she is hearing an electronic instrument, particularly the clarinets and violin/cello/bass voices.

The EWI’s controls strike a balance between simplicity and realism. Unlike a real instrument, it’s “keys” don’t move. Instead, they are raised metal pads that sense when you are touching them. The layout of the keys closely matches that of a saxophone, though you can configure it to use fingerings that are more similar to a flute, oboe, or even a trumpet. You control the octave using a set of four rollers under your left thumb that give the EWI a five-octave range. Another pair of sensors allows you to bend notes up or down with your left thumb. The mouthpiece, in addition to sensing your breath, also senses the pressure of your bite, providing a way to add vibrato to your tone.

The lack of moving parts makes it extremely reliable, but to your fingers it’s more like playing a keyless instrument like a recorder than a saxophone. It doesn’t take long to get used to once you’ve chosen a fingering configuration.

The real power of the EWI USB and the Akai software comes when you combine them with a music application like GarageBand. The Akai software can act as a plug-in to Garage Band and other software. You can record multiple tracks using different instrument voices. This has greatly expanded my musical capabilities, and I’m now experimenting with creating my own band arrangements.

The EWI USB is not without its flaws. While I’ve had no problems with the Akai software on Macintosh, I’ve seen some pretty severe complaints from Windows users. Users have posted their workarounds and solutions for the Windows problems on the web, but Windows users might want to buy from a retailer with a good reputation for support (like Patchman music). Though it’s a MIDI instrument, it doesn’t have a MIDI port; you have to plug it into a computer. Akai’s documentation is a bit sparse, and doesn’t provide much information on how to use the EWI with other software. Another problem is that some of the instrument voices sound a bit artificial. Even with breath control, the EWI can’t mimic the variety of sounds that a good player gets out of a real saxophone or trumpet.

Akai makes a somewhat more advanced version, the EWI4000S, that has a MIDI port and its own built-in sound generator. This might be a better option than the EWI USB if you want to use it in a live performance. Yamaha also makes an advanced wind controller that has moving keys and a mouthpiece that can more closely mimic reed instruments. Both these options are at least twice as expensive as the EWI USB, and may require additional hardware and software instrument “patches” (instrument voices) to match those provided with the EWI USB. — Tom Sackett

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Affordable guitar flight case

CaseXtreme Clam

Flying with a guitar that you care about can be a nerve-racking experience. Normal guitar cases don’t offer enough protection and the professional’s standard Calton cases are $600+ and heavy enough to make your arms lengthen.

Here’s a case designed for flying that is light, well designed and pretty much indestructible. It costs around $160-$200 and you can put your instrument in it by itself, in a soft and light gig bag or in your normal hard shell case. I like to put the guitar in a gig bag to use for light weight protection when I get to my destination.

The case also comes with well designed wheels that you attach with velcro and are stored in the case when not in use. — David M. Siegler

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Once a week we’ll send out a page from Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities. The tools might be outdated or obsolete, and the links to them may or may not work. We present these vintage recommendations as is because the possibilities they inspire are new. Sign up here to get Tools for Possibilities a week early in your inbox.

05/19/25

Google clean mode/Career Dreamer/Underrated Rituals

Recomendo - issue #462

Google’s hidden clean mode

By adding “udm=14” to your Google search URL, you can strip away all the AI summaries, knowledge panels, and ads that clutter the results. This doesn’t improve the actual search results, but it provides a cleaner, distraction-free interface reminiscent of Google’s early days. You can set this up as a custom search engine in most browsers, making it your default search experience. Or you can just go here. — MF

Exploring career possibilities

The challenging thing about finding a job these days is that most people, especially young ones, are not aware of their own marketable skills and are not aware of all the possible careers those skills can aid. Google has a new, free, AI-based, web-based service, Career Dreamer, that will assist you to clarify your marketable skills, match them with possible kinds of jobs you probably didn’t know about, provide you with current job openings of that type near you, and then help draft a resume aimed at those opportunities. Google calls it “a playful way to explore career possibilities with AI,” and it’s a great use of AI. — KK

Underrated Rituals

In the Simple Living subreddit, someone asked, “What’s a simple, underrated ritual that genuinely changed your life—and you wish you’d started earlier?” The top-voted comments included advice like reading books instead of screens before bed, washing dishes at night to feel “on top of things” in the morning, and taking regular 20-minute afternoon naps to reset internally. But the most surprising advice that seems useful to try was: if you work from home, turn on a desk lamp when you start work and turn it off when you finish—a simple light cue to mark the start and end of your day and help you switch modes. Another interesting tip is to incorporate a minute of silence in the car before heading out on the road to help shed the flurry of prep and loading, and to let your subconscious catch up before you drive off. — CD

Hand-crank grater

This hand-crank grater keeps your knuckles away from the blades while shredding cheese blocks and vegetables like carrots and zucchini. It sticks to the counter with suction cups and comes with three swappable grating drums. You’ll need to pre-cut larger items to fit the chute. Cleanup is simple since everything pops apart and goes in the dishwasher. Worth the counter space. — MF

Population around a point

This simple map tool will tell you the human population from any point in the world, for whatever radius you select. I’ll be visiting the Scottish Highlands soon, and it’s interesting to know that the village near where I’ll be staying has a population of less than 800 within a 20 km radius. — CD

New space frontier

I thoroughly enjoyed When The Heavens Went on Sale, a new book by Ashlee Vance that recounts in entertaining detail the creation of the new space frontier: scrappy startups inventing small, fast, cheap rockets and satellites, and against all odds, succeeding where NASA could not. The cast of misfits, bigger-than-life visionaries, genius jerks, and admirable old-school engineers is vast, and way beyond Elon Musk (who only appears in Ashlee Vance’s other book, a Musk biography). Vance spent many years hanging out on this frontier, attending endless test failures, hearing the intimate dreams of the makers, and via this deep immersion, he explains in thrilling detail the innovations and technology that has created this new industry. An excellent documentary was filmed in parallel with the book, Wild, Wild Space (HBO Max) and it gives you a great sense of the key characters in this new wild, wild west. — KK

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05/18/25

Real ID Day/Remote Worker Conferences/Maya Train

Nomadico issue #155

* Quick note from me: I’ll be having a live Q&A call on travel deals, living abroad, and the nomadic life for paid subscribers on May 20. If you’d like to upgrade and join us, please do so before then.

Real ID (for Real This Time)

After what feels like a decade of pushed-back warnings, the “Real ID” requirements are now a reality at US airports as of today. A passport works fine and all states are now compliant with new drivers’ licenses issued, but if your license is old enough, you may not have the little gold star in a corner showing you’re good to go. So that piece of plastic won’t cut it for domestic flights anymore. You’ll need to obtain a separate ID with better security or renew your license to update. See the details here.

Conferences for Remote Workers and Owners

I’m currently attending the Dynamite Circle Mexico conference in Playa del Carmen, a get-together for remote-first companies and entrepreneurs. They also run one in Bangkok each year and various regional ones organized by locals. I’m rubbing shoulders with quite a few millionaires at this one but there are more casual options filled with solopreneurs like the Bansko Nomad Fest in June that I’ve attended twice, the Nomad Cruise Summit at Sea, and Nomad Summit (next one in Chiang Mai in January).

South From Cancun by Train

To get to Playa del Carmen for this event I’m at, I got back on the Maya Train to ride a section of it that wasn’t open when I was in the area a year ago. There’s a free shuttle from the Cancun airport to the nearby train station, then a pleasant train ride of less than an hour that avoids the swarms of tourist and worker traffic on the main highway between the two places. The fare is around $12. The one big drawback is that the Playa del Carmen train station is way out of town and requires a bus ride (another 3 bucks) to get into the city itself. You can also only buy tickets a week out or sooner at the official website. The train continues on down to Tulum and Bacalar Lagoon.

Digital Nomad Visa Income Requirements

How much income do you need to show to qualify for a digital nomad visa? According to this rundown for Europe, you may need to prove as little as €1,220 per month in Finland, but €7,075 in Iceland. Most are €5K or less, based on some multiple of the local minimum wage, not actual living costs—it’ll cost you far more than that income requirement to live in Finland. The best combo of low requirements and low costs is Montenegro, included in my book about living abroad for less, but with a monthly requirement of €1,400. In bargain-priced Albania the requirement is only €9,800 per year.

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A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World’s Cheapest Destinations. See past editions here, where your like-minded friends can subscribe and join you.

05/15/25

What’s in my NOW? — Adele Gilani

issue #213

Adele Gilani is a painter, writer and former gallery owner. She has a free newsletter called Adele Delivers where you can see art from her favorite artists each week.

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PHYSICAL

• Green Tape – I picked up green tape like they use in The Bear to label everything in my fridge. Simple, effective, and cuts down on food waste.
• All Fours by Miranda July – I never pressure myself to finish a book, but this one? Obsessed—and I feel like I’m the last person I know to pick it up, but just in case, thought I’d mention it here. Miranda also has a wicked newsletter on substack.
• Thomas the Train Set – A friend gifted this to my son for his 4th birthday. Now, it’s the most beloved toy in the house. And if you don’t already. listen to the Thomas and Friends podcast with your kiddos, check that out too!

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DIGITAL

• David Lynch Free MasterClass – As a writer, this class completely shifted my approach to fiction.
• Twin Peaks – Speaking of David Lynch, we just finished the final episode, and I’m already tempted to start it from the top.

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INVISIBLE

Fermentation – Making Yogurt

Boil milk, cool it, add starter (yogurt of your choice), leave in the oven overnight on the bread proofing setting. Wake up to homemade yogurt. An invisible process with sweet results.

05/14/25

What’s in my NOW? — Jim Lord