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Retro Recomendo: Followable

2026-03-29 17:03:32

Our subscriber base has grown so much since we first started nine years ago, that most of you have missed all our earliest recommendations. The best of these are still valid and useful, so we’re trying out something new — Retro Recomendo. Once every 6 weeks, we’ll send out a throwback issue of evergreen recommendations focused on one theme from the past 9 years.

Home DIY videos

How To Home is a YouTube channel with excellent videos that demonstrate how to complete common household repairs, such as wiring switches, fixing faucet leaks, and threading wire through walls and ceilings. Unlike many DIY videos, these feature high-quality audio, are well-lit, and aren’t blurry. — MF

Culinary curiosities from around the world

Gastro Obscura is an Instagram account with photos and descriptions of unusual foods from around the world. You’ll find Japanese cream puffs that look like kittens, fruit that looks like an exploding planet, fruit that tastes like chocolate pudding, and lots more. It gave me a greater appreciation for just how diverse the world’s culinary options can be. — MF

Laugh out loud caricatures

Watch these sidewalk artists in Waikiki draw extreme caricatures of customers, and their customers’ hysterical reactions. The drawings are much more exaggerated than typical caricatures, yet they look uncannily like the subjects. I was laughing along with the people who bravely sat for the drawings. A guaranteed mood lifter. — MF

Quick research explainers

Two Minute Papers is a YouTube channel featuring short videos (sometimes 5 minutes long) created by a professor who reviews new research papers in visual programming, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer graphics, simulations, and other state-of-the-art computer science. He explains the research’s significance, while running very cool graphics demo-ing the results. I find it a painless way to keep up in this fast-moving field. — KK

Strange images

The Instagram account Welcome.jpeg calls itself a digital museum. It’s kinda art, kinda meme, kinda kitsch, kinda weirdo. It collects oddball, strange, unorthodox, found images and delivers these misfits as little visual collections. It’s my guilty pleasure. — KK

Joyful social media

I’ve intentionally cut down on my social media time, but there’s one account I never scroll past because it always makes me smile: Official Stick Reviews on Instagram. It’s the internet’s go-to spot for stick reviews submitted from around the world. Initially, I thought it was satire, but I soon realized the enthusiasm for finding cool sticks is both genuine and contagious. Here’s a good example. — CD


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Recomendo is an authentic, hand-crafted, human-written weekly newsletter that is free, but not cheap. Consider supporting our work with a paid option, now at the low price of $45 per year. Paid subs enable us to keep making it free for others. Recomendo is published by Cool Tools Lab, a small company of three people. We also run the Cool Tools website, a YouTube channel and podcast, and other newsletters, including Gar’s Tips & Tools, Nomadico, What’s in my NOW?, Tools for Possibilities, Books That Belong On Paper and Book Freak.

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The Gentle Romance / Career Dreamer / Skull

2026-03-22 17:00:58

Rewarding sci-fi book

This collection of AI-related science-fiction short stories by Richard Ngo reminds me of the classic anthologies I read growing up during the golden age of science fiction. They are hard sci-fi, with technically plausible scenarios, played out many levels deep in very consistent worlds, explored by a very fertile imagination. I found more insights per page in Ngo’s The Gentle Romance than in any other book I’ve read for a long while. — KK

Career Dreamer career map

Google’s Career Dreamer tool has been around for a bit, but it’s recently been updated with more AI support and feels worth returning to if you’re in a career‑questioning season. It asks for your past roles, skills, and interests, and then reflects back possible career paths, related titles, and a “career identity statement” you can lift language from for your resume or LinkedIn. I like using it as a way to see how my existing experience could stretch into adjacent roles I hadn’t named yet. If you land on a path that involves freelancing or consulting, this hourly rate calculator is a good tool for discovering what people in similar roles are actually charging. — CD

Fun bluffing game

My daughter introduced me to Skull, a fun, fast-paced tabletop bluffing game for 3-6 people. Each player gets three rose cards and one skull card. Players take turns laying cards face down until one player announces they can turn over a specified number of flower cards from their own and the other players’ cards. Bidding continues until the others pass. If the high bidder turns over a skull, they lose the round; otherwise, they win. It takes about two minutes to learn, but the bluffing gets deviously deep. The coaster-like cardboard pieces feel great in your hands, and the artwork is beautiful. — MF

Other Mona Lisas

I like this fun list of what different places call “our Mona Lisa.” It’s not just museums or galleries. It includes single objects treated like sacred centerpieces by retail brands, jewelers, and more. I love the idea that any household can have its own Mona Lisa—something everything else seems to orbit around. — CD

Phone ring hack

Like many people I keep my phone ringer on vibrate, but I don’t usually carry my phone on me – I may leave it on a desk – so I often miss calls. I’ve greatly reduced missed calls by setting the phone to flash its flashlight and flash its screen while it vibrates. That flashing light is enough to notice from a distance. It is easy to program on the iPhone. Go Settings > Accessibility > Audio Visual > Flash for Alerts. For Android: Settings > Accessibility > Audio & Screen Text > Flash Notifications. — KK

Free encyclopedia of ancient design patterns

In 1930, pioneering archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie published Decorative Patterns of the Ancient World, cataloging over 3,000 ornamental motifs — spirals, animals, rosettes, braids, crosses, and more — drawn from ancient civilizations across Europe and the Near East up to about 1000 AD. The entire book is free to browse and download on the Internet Archive, making it an incredible reference for artists, designers, crafters, and anyone looking for authentic, copyright‑free historical patterns to use in their work. The simple black‑and‑white line drawings make the motifs easy to trace, digitize, or adapt. Used copies of an out-of-print Dover paperback are also available. — MF


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If you want to copy text on your computer that you can’t copy, such as error messages, screenshots, PDFs, or Kindle Cloud reader pages, get this $4 optical character recognition utility called TextSniper. It lets you grab uncopyable text that’s on your display and save it as plain text to the clipboard. (It also reads QR and barcodes.)


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Recomendo is an authentic, hand-crafted, human-written weekly newsletter that is free, but not cheap. Please consider supporting our work with a paid option, now at the low price of $45 per year. Paid subs enable us to keep making it free for others.

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Recomendo is published by Cool Tools Lab, a small company of three people. We also run the Cool Tools website, a YouTube channel and podcast, and other newsletters, including Recomendo Deals, Gar’s Tips & Tools, Nomadico, What’s in my NOW?, Tools for Possibilities, Books That Belong On Paper, Cool Tools Weekly Newsletter, and Book Freak.

Flighty / 23 learnings on community / Keep the Meter Running

2026-03-15 17:02:22

Best flight-tracking app

On a recent flight from LA to Portland, I used Flighty on my iPhone and was impressed by how much it knew about my trip. It let me know we’d be landing 30 minutes ahead of schedule, and even on the plane’s free texting-only Wi-Fi, it kept updating my flight status and showed me where my plane was on a map. You can share your trip with family so they get automatic landing alerts. The app is beautifully designed, and the “Where’s My Plane?” feature tracks your inbound aircraft up to 25 hours early, so you can see trouble coming. It also warns you about tight connections and tracks your lifetime flying stats on a nice passport-style map. Free for basics; Pro ($59/year or $299 lifetime) adds push alerts, weather radar, and calendar sync. iOS/Mac/Apple Watch only. — MF

23 learnings on building community

I am so grateful when someone who is truly adept in their field shares their learnings, and Patricia Mou’s essay is a decade’s worth of wisdom in community building and holding space. My own personal journey with community has been about repairing what went wrong in the church structures I grew up in, so I feel very lucky now to be a facilitator and spaceholder within a few small webs of community, both online and in person. This essay reaffirms that, when it’s done well, community can be both life-changing and world-changing. The learnings that resonate most for me are: You will become everyone’s mother and father whether you want to or not. / You cannot ask for transcendence from a nervous system that hasn’t yet landed. / Light structure is what makes deep emergence possible. / What your community doesn’t talk about shapes it as much as what it does. — CD

Uplifting social follow

A really great TikTok and Instagram follow is Keep the Meter Running. A guy waves down a taxi in New York City, jumps in and says “take me to your favorite place and keep the meter running.” The cabbie is then interviewed on their way to their favorite place, usually a very local ethnic restaurant. Without fail, each cabbie turns out to have a remarkable life story, summoned forth by the sensitive probing of the back seat passenger, comedian Kareem Rahma. This is the real America! A longer previous version of this routine ran on TV a few years ago, but at only a few minutes long, this show is brilliant. — KK

OXO Good Grips angled measuring cup

The markings on our Pyrex 2-cup measuring cup wore off after years of use, so I replaced it with the OXO Good Grips Angled Measuring Cup, made of non-BPA plastic. The clever part is the slanted surface inside the cup with measurement lines you can read by looking straight down — no more crouching to check at eye level. It’s lightweight and has a soft non-slip handle. Also available in 1-cup and 4-cup sizes. — MF

In Every Language

In Every Language is a Wikipedia search engine that lets you see how different regions of the world depict the same thing. It’s very cool to search a word and notice the subtle ways different cultures and collective psyches encode the same idea differently across languages. — CD

Best quick-release phone holder

Since my phone is now my camera, I needed an easy way to attach it to a tripod. The solution is this metal adapter that holds the phone with a circle of magnets. The Mosenvka Portable Phone Grip ($29) then screws into the tripod head. But once I had it, I started using this same rig to hold my phone on my desk for FaceTime and video sessions, at the perfect angle. Its base also has a second heavy-duty magnet so the whole thing can stick anywhere there is metal, useful for filming. The holder rotates in any direction at any angle with just the right balance of ease and stiffness, to keep the phone rock steady. The whole thing is machined metal instead of plastic, so it is very rigid and stable. If your phone supports it, a magnetic ring is by far the best quick-release hold system. — KK


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Recomendo is an authentic, hand-crafted, human-written weekly newsletter that is free, but not cheap. Please consider supporting our work with a paid option, now at the low price of $45 per year. Paid subs enable us to keep making it free for others.

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Recomendo is published by Cool Tools Lab, a small company of three people. We also run the Cool Tools website, a YouTube channel and podcast, and other newsletters, including Recomendo Deals, Gar’s Tips & Tools, Nomadico, What’s in my NOW?, Tools for Possibilities, Books That Belong On Paper, Cool Tools Weekly Newsletter, and Book Freak.

Articles of Interest / Still Here / Secret exec contacts

2026-03-08 18:03:03

Nerdy podcast on clothes

A podcast I am enjoying is Articles of Interest, which is a spinoff of the legendary 99% Invisible podcast. It has the same nerdy fascination with things we tend to take for granted. In this case, clothing. It dives deep into the origins, and meaning of common articles of clothing such as blue jeans, school uniforms, outdoor wear, even pockets, zippers, and clerical collars. Each episode is a delicious rabbit hole. It’s a blast. There’s a very satisfying archive of back episodes. — KK

Visualize your love in time and space

Still Here is a visualization tool for mapping your time and shared space with a loved one (animal or human) after they have passed. It was created by someone grieving the death of his dogs, and it feels very personal and tender. My fur baby is 7 years old now, and he has taught me so much about how grief and love are two sides of the same coin, so I am often thinking about his death. This feels like a kind of exposure therapy for my heart. — CD

Secret exec contacts for stubborn companies

When a company stonewalls you on a refund or dispute, head over to the Elliott Report’s Company Contacts database. Journalist Christopher Elliott has compiled direct phone numbers and email addresses for customer service executives at hundreds of companies — airlines, hotels, car rentals, banks, cable providers, and more. Skip the front-line customer service maze and go straight to someone with actual authority. The site also rates each company’s responsiveness to consumers. Free to use, no signup required. — MF

Portable board game

The tiniest portable board game I know about is Iota ($30 used). It fits into a small container the size of an AirPods case, and so can be slipped into any day bag, purse or pocket. It’s perfect for travels. To play you keep arranging its tiny little cards on a table into nesting sets, sort of like dominos, but with more dimensions. The game rewards pattern matching. Even small kids can play, and it is challenging enough for adults. Also no language is needed – another plus for travel. — KK

Book finding guides

This week I came across two book-finding tools worth sharing. NPR’s Books We Love is an interactive guide that lets you filter more than 4,000 staff and critic picks first by year and then by genre and other tags, like length or mood. If you prefer something not on a bestseller list, you can also try Whichbook, a search engine that lets you find books by emotion or by character, or click on a world map to find books set in specific countries. — CD

Wireless under-cabinet kitchen lights

I bought a 2-pack of these battery-powered MCGOR motion-sensor lights to use as kitchen counter lighting. They snap magnetically onto adhesive metal plates you stick under your cabinets. They turn on automatically when you get near; step away, and they shut off after 20 seconds. Five brightness levels let you dial in exactly the right amount of light. They are USB-C rechargeable, and one charge lasts days. — MF


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Recomendo is an authentic, hand-crafted, human-written weekly newsletter that is free, but not cheap. Please consider supporting our work with a paid option, now at the low price of $45 per year. Paid subs enable us to keep making it free for others.

Upgrade


Recomendo is published by Cool Tools Lab, a small company of three people. We also run the Cool Tools website, a YouTube channel and podcast, and other newsletters, including Recomendo Deals, Gar’s Tips & Tools, Nomadico, What’s in my NOW?, Tools for Possibilities, Books That Belong On Paper, Cool Tools Weekly Newsletter, and Book Freak.

Maverick tours / Protocol cards / Kitchen sponge

2026-03-01 18:02:31

Maverick tours

I’ve taken several tours with Young Pioneer Tours. Their motto is “leading group tours for people who hate group tours to destinations your mother would rather you stay away from and at budget prices.” They deliver all that, famously taking small tours to restricted places like North Korea, Turkmenistan, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, and to “Unrecognized Countries” in Africa. They just started offering a new tour to Least Visited Countries, which happen to mostly be Pacific island “countries” which are normally very hard or expensive to reach. While these tours may sound dangerous, they don’t go where it is actually dangerous. Rather they are contrarian, and an affordable travel adventure. — KK

Protocol cards for nervous system regulation

Protocolcards.com is a digital deck of evidence‑backed nervous system “protocols” you can pull up when you don’t know what to do with yourself. They’re not magic quick fixes, but if you follow the short guided practices and prompts, your system will start to feel more regulated over time. Cards are organized into five categories: Emergency (for when you need instant regulation), Focus (to upshift into more alertness), Recover (to downshift from activation or transition into more chill), Sleep (for evening wind‑down), and Feel (for when you want to be with and process your emotions), and you unlock the full library by signing up with your email. — CD

Best kitchen sponge

Scrub Daddy sponges have replaced every other sponge in our kitchen. They have a rough, grippy texture that removes stuck-on food, but they won’t scratch nonstick cookware. My favorite feature: you can squeeze nearly all the water out of them, so they dry fast and don’t develop that funky sponge smell. — MF

Shrinkable child car seat

Car seats keep kids safe, but are surely a pain to travel with. For kids 2-3 years old or older, there is a legitimate alternative, which is a DOT-approved vest that the child wears as a harness. The child + harness is then strapped into a regular seat belt. The pioneering safety vest is Ridesafer. It comes in different sizes, for larger kids too. When not worn, the vest shrinks to a small, easy to pack lump about the size of a folded jacket, fitting into your bag. This makes it perfect for taxis, ubers and rental cars. It also makes it perfect for grandparents, who may not want to keep their back seats perpetually occupied with car seats. We’ve found the Ridesafer easy enough to put on and off, and with some patience to buckle in – but still faster than loading a kid into a car seat. (I would lean toward getting a size larger, it will still work as well.) — KK

12 Home Library Ideas

There are two types of list articles I will always click on: best book cover roundups and bookshelf “shelfies.” This Zillow list of 12 home library ideas scratches my book‑voyeur itch, and now I have names for all the little libraries scattered around my house, most of which fall into the “strategic library” category, but the dream is still a library in every room. — CD

How well do you remember colors?

The free online game Color revealed how terrible I am at colors. It shows you a color for a few seconds, then asks you to recreate it from memory using sliding color and shade pickers. It sounds easy — it's not. I swore I nailed that shade of green, only to see my guess was way off. Play solo or challenge friends in multiplayer mode. — MF


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Handmade wool slip-ons from Kyrgyzstan. Bishkek Kicks are 100% natural, biodegradable, and synthetic-free. Breathable felted wool with natural rubber soles for indoor or outdoor wear. Fair-wage craftsmanship. Five colors, $99. Free shipping. Shop Kyrgies.


Deals on stuff that’s actually good. The Recomendo Deals daily newsletter tracks prices on products recommended by Recomendo & Cool Tools. We alert you when a trusted pick hits a great price — with 90-day price context so you know it’s real. Free newsletter.


Power Up Your Work With Setapp​, get 20% off. Get access to 250+ Mac & iOS apps with Setapp — work smarter and save time. Try free for 7 days. New users get 20% off the Annual plan.


Powerful Handheld Vacuum. Rechargeable car vacuum. 4-in-1 design includes vacuum, air blower & pump. 40-minute runtime, USB-C charging. Includes HEPA filter, 3 anti-static heads, storage bag. Perfect for cars/home/kitchen.


Declutter your inbox! The Meco newsletter reader app lets you organize and read newsletters in a dedicated space. Connect Gmail/Outlook. Features offline reading, topic grouping, highlights, saved links, and custom themes. Available on iOS, Android, web. Free version with premium features.


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Recomendo Unclassified Ads work! Reach over 124,000 subscribers for just $200.


Recomendo is an authentic, hand-crafted, human-written weekly newsletter that is free, but not cheap. Please consider supporting our work with a paid option, now at the low price of $45 per year. Paid subs enable us to keep making it free for others.

Upgrade


Recomendo is published by Cool Tools Lab, a small company of three people. We also run the Cool Tools website, a YouTube channel and podcast, and other newsletters, including Recomendo Deals, Gar’s Tips & Tools, Nomadico, What’s in my NOW?, Tools for Possibilities, Books That Belong On Paper, Cool Tools Weekly Newsletter, and Book Freak.

Free sports TV / Hot and cold face wand / Best pencil

2026-02-22 18:01:38

Free sports TV

I wanted to watch the Superbowl live and the Olympics but I don’t have cable and I don’t subscribe to Peacock. A friend tipped me off to the solution which is a $15 digital antenna. There are tons of no-name generic models. I used the URIIU Digital HDTV Antenna which is cucumber-sized stick with a long cable that plugs into my big LG screen. I now get all the over-the-air commercial-saturated channels for free, including NBC, which is streaming the sports. — KK

Hot and Cold Face Wand

I bought the Therabody TheraFace Depuffing Wand as a Christmas gift to myself. At first I thought of it as a fancy, possibly overpriced ice roller — battery-powered so that it stays consistently cold—but then I realized the real benefit for me is the heat function with its three temperature levels. I give my face a heat massage when my head hurts or I’m feeling anxious, and it helps relax my facial muscles and myself. I keep it at my work desk to soothe my tired eyes from too much screen time. — CD

My favorite mechanical pencil

I've tried dozens of mechanical pencils over the years, and my new favorite is the Staedtler Triplus Micro 0.5mm. The triangular barrel feels natural in your hand and doesn't roll off the table. The twist-up eraser is full-size, and the retractable tip means they won't stab everything when loose in a bag. Best of all, the lead stays tight in the barrel while writing or drawing. At about $3 each, they're an easy upgrade from whatever pencil you're using now. — MF

26 Useful Concepts for 2026

This list of 26 Useful Concepts for 2026 is offered as lenses or perspective shifts for staying afloat in this new age of “slop.” Each one has a short definition—some expose the invisible forces trying to hijack your attention or distort your perception of reality, while others help you stay aligned with your own truth and meaning. I especially loved Cammarata’s Razor: If you want more agency, ask yourself what you’d do if you had ten times more agency — then do it, and The Shower Test: “We’re socially conditioned to chase what we think everyone else wants. But your true heart’s desire can often be found in the thoughts you gravitate to while undistracted, such as in the shower. As Walt Whitman said, ‘If you want to know where your heart is, look to where your mind goes when it wanders.’” I wish I could remember where I first came across this to give credit, but it’s absolutely worth passing around. — CD

Prompt therapy

People can be helped meaningfully by reading books that know nothing about them. If you tell a reputable AI chatbot a lot about yourself, it can help you far more than a book or lecture can. In a 20-minute video Dan Pink crafted a dozen prompts that will enable an AI to give you helpful feedback of a type you may not get from your family and friends. It is a partner in honesty. This kind of prompt therapy is just a first step towards a whole new avenue of self-help that will only expand quickly from now on. I’ve done some of Dan’s prompts and they really will stir up something important in you and for you. — KK

Searchable Cool Tools and Recomendo

We built a companion page for Recomendo that tracks live Amazon prices on every product we’ve ever recommended since 2020 — over 2,500 items from both Recomendo and Cool Tools. Prices update nightly. Sort by biggest discount to find the best deals, filter by price range, or search for a specific product. Each listing links back to the original review. It’s like a permanent, always-updating clearance rack for our recommendations. Bookmark it and check back next time you are ready to buy. — MF


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Recomendo is an authentic, hand-crafted, human-written weekly newsletter that is free, but not cheap. Please consider supporting our work with a paid option, now at the low price of $45 per year. Paid subs enable us to keep making it free for others.

Upgrade


Recomendo is published by Cool Tools Lab, a small company of three people. We also run the Cool Tools website, a YouTube channel and podcast, and other newsletters, including Recomendo Deals, Gar’s Tips & Tools, Nomadico, What’s in my NOW?, Tools for Possibilities, Books That Belong On Paper, Cool Tools Weekly Newsletter, and Book Freak.