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Digital Recomendo book
Every week for the past 4 years we’ve recommended 6 things. We went through all those, selected the best 1,000, grouped them by subject, and created a book. That book, Recomendo: The Expanded Edition came out in paper, but is now available as a full color PDF. Each recommendation has active hyperlinks and a QR code. The PDF book is easily searchable and very browseable. Recomendo: The Expanded Edition PDF costs $2.99. It’s a no brainer if you like this stuff. — KK

Visual style replicator
The coolest thing I’ve seen in many years is Same Energy. This is a beta-version of a visual search machine. You give it an image and it returns more images that feel exactly like the one you started with. Some images may be the same subject, some may be the same lighting and coloring, or some have the same visual style. It works uncannily well. I can start with a piece of furniture, or a fabric design, or an album cover, or an Instagram travel photo, and I’ll get an endless mosaic of images with the same energy. Like Pinterest, I can select one of the offerings and then get more images similar to that one, and so on. Unlike Pinterest, I can also create a collection of images and use that to train an AI to find images that share qualities of the whole set. I find I could spend hours watching the endless results recreationally, like staring into ocean waves or a campfire. It’s also a brilliant design research tool, a stunning creative prompt, and a total inspiration. — KK

Brown Girl Therapy
I am the daughter of two Mexican immigrants and when I was younger I had a lot of shame around my last name, the way that I looked, how poor we were, etc. When I found Brown Girl Therapy on Instagram I finally felt understood. Brown Girl Therapy is an online mental health community for children of immigrants founded by Sahaj Kohli, a mental health therapist in training. Her posts are like mini-therapy sessions for me. Here is a reminder from Sahaj that really hits home: “You can love and be grateful for your immigrant parents’ journey & make different choices than they’d want. You can love and be grateful for your immigrant parents & need time away from them. You can love and be grateful for your immigrant parents & protect your mental health.” Here are a few others: Growth work and White girl ponytail. — CD

No-stick baking
I use parchment paper on a cookie sheet to bake cookies and bread. There’s no need to grease the cookie sheet, and the cookies and bread come right off the parchment paper with zero residue. I can reuse the parchment paper. Even at 450 F, it doesn’t burn. — MF

Instant web pages
Notion is a simple-to-use wiki for making instant web pages. I didn’t need to learn how to use it. I just started typing on a blank page. It’s so much better than dealing with HTML and CSS! I use the free version, which has everything I need for now. I used it to create this recipe page for almond flour bread. — MF

Unsuck it
I am getting a kick out of Unsuck-it.com where you can find “unsucked” definitions for corporate speak, or as its called on the website “douchey jargon.” What a great explanation of brain dump: Everything an individual knows about a topic, shared via cerebral defecation. — CD

-- Kevin Kelly, Mark Frauenfelder, Claudia Dawson 02/21/21