Jellyfin lets you self-host and stream your entire media collection – movies, shows, music, live TV, books and photos – from a server you control, with apps across all your devices and no subscriptions or tracking. After remote streaming became a paid feature in Plex, Jellyfin can be a free (albeit more complicated) alternative.

Grila is a lean, keyboard-first calendar app for macOS that pops up via hotkey and lets you navigate dates, reminders and events entirely from the keyboard. I assume (but haven’t found any info) that it works/syncs with the existing calendars you have set up.

CoMaps lets you plan hiking, biking or driving routes that work completely offline without worrying about being tracked or draining your battery. Built by a community of contributors on open-source maps, it prioritises privacy by not collecting any data about where you go.

A simple but quite effective book recommendation engine: input at least 2–3 books you’ve read/liked and receive recommendations on what to read next. Caveat: only books that meet a certain popularity threshold are included in the search results and generated recommendations.

In this transcription of a recent talk, designer Frank Chimero reframes generative AI as an instrument that can help us cultivate outputs through our own skills and judgement rather than passively consume what the system produces. Drawing on examples from Brian Eno’s music practice to Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (where the spirit No Face consumes endlessly but remains unsatisfied until given modest, meaningful work), Chimero advocates for deliberately ambiguous prompts that push AI toward its strange edges. “What surprised me wasn’t the AI hype, though, but the lack of solidarity that came with it. Faced with the story of AI labor displacement, our first instinct as technology workers wasn’t to protect one another, but to search for ways to use the tools to replace our collaborators.”

Tim Ferris shares some of Scott Galloway’s advice here on being a mentor to young men. While his methods seems quite simplistic, there is some practical value worth taking on board. Most important take-away: you don’t need to have impressive credentials to be a respectable leadership figure for young men. I like Galloway’s basic approach of focusing on the big four: fitness, nutrition, money, work. “Along with fitness and work, I also ask young men to place themselves in an unfamiliar situation in the company of strangers three times a week in the agency of something bigger – a writing or cooking class, a nonprofit, church, a sports league. The only rule is that within the month, they have to introduce themselves to everyone there.”

When a powerful volcanic eruption in 2022 severed Tonga’s undersea internet cable, the outage showed how deeply modern life depends on a few fragile, remote cables. Repairing the damage took weeks and left Tongans to figure out how to operate their daily life offline. “Commerce broke down. ... The ATMs went dead, because banks couldn’t check how much money their customers had in their accounts – and that, in an economy still accustomed to cash, immediately put livelihoods in danger. Owners of fisheries and farms of squash and breadfruit were unable to fill out the compliance and quarantine forms needed to export their produce. Tongans living overseas couldn’t wire funds home to help their families – and at the time, foreign remittances made up 44% of the country’s GDP.”