Cool Tools
Reviews
Finds
- Timeline: A Visual History of Our World Peter Goes's black-ink history of everything, one oversized spread per era
- The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip George Saunders's fable of orange pests, illustrated by Lane Smith
- NRS 1.5-Inch Heavy Duty Cam Straps River-guide tie-downs that barely stretch, even wet
- Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Dinosaurs A pop-up book twelve pages long and two and a half inches thick
- Puddle & Pile An iPhone app that learns your puppy's rhythm and barks before an accident
- Wild Delight Sizzle N' Heat Chili-spiked bird seed: squirrels taste the heat, birds don't
- Inside the Artist's Studio Joe Fig tours 24 artists’ studios, then makes a new work about each one
- Couchers.org Couch surfing rebuilt as a non-profit that has promised never to charge
- Weird Love 160 pages of dead-serious romance comics from the 1950s to the early '70s
- Wild Soundscapes: Discovering the Voice of the Natural World A field guide to recording the sounds nature doesn't advertise
- Intellectual Things Stanley Kunitz's 1930 debut, just entered the public domain
- Exactly A history of engineering told in orders of magnitude
- 3D-Printed NPT Thread Checker Five minutes of printing instead of calipers and a lookup table
- CCCP Cook Book Sixty Soviet recipes, most of them aspirational
- Paint by Sticker Twelve low-poly paintings, one numbered sticker at a time
- Infrastructure A field guide to everything that isn't nature
- Babelio White Noise Machine A golf ball that fixes hotel-room silence
- Baba Yaga's Assistant Answer the want ad, brave the wood, make dinner for the witch
- Make: Fun! Forty projects from a man who designed toys at Mattel for a living
- Sandcastles Made Simple A four-foot sand tower with no bucket, no form and no plastic castle mould
- Everyday Genius A memory champion's techniques, reduced to things you can do this afternoon
- Radiooooo Pick a country and a decade, hear what was playing
- Uni-ball Signo Bit 0.18mm The world's thinnest ballpoint line, gel ink included
- Countdown: Days Since & Until Counts up from the last one and down to the next
- The Mind's I Twenty-seven essays and stories on the self, each one argued with by its editors
- Patterns in Nature Why a giraffe's spots look like cracked mud
- iLive Clear Truly Wireless Open Ear Clip Earbuds Clip-on earbuds that never plug your ear canal
- Thermos Shuttle Chef A cooking pot that finishes dinner with no power and no flame
- Zojirushi Micom Water Boiler & Warmer CD-NAC40/50 The power cord pops off on a tug, decades before MagSafe
- Endel Ambient sound generated from your body's own data
- Icebug Boda BUGrip Steel-studded winter boots that grip black ice without the crampon bulk
- iSi Gourmet Whip A refillable steel siphon that replaces disposable whipped-cream cans
- AudioPen Voice notes rewritten in your own writing style, not a generic one
- The Nature of the Physical World Arthur Eddington's 1928 lectures on why the solid table under your hand is mostly empty space
- Anchor Optics Edmund Optics' clearance arm — Fresnel lenses, mirrors, prisms, and laser parts sold as cosmetic seconds
- ChicoBag Water Bottle Sling A crossbody bottle sling that packs into its own built-in pouch
- How to Make a Journal of Your Life Dan Price's hand-lettered chapbook guide to visual journaling
- Parapack P-CAP A sun cap that folds into its own pouch
- The Pharos Gate The 7th Griffin & Sabine book, read by unfolding glued-in letters
- Altra Lone Peak The zero-drop, wide-toe trail shoe a Camino pilgrim is on her fourth pair of
- Free Run Leash A climbing-grade leash that converts into a harness on the trail
- LectroFan Alpha A 4-ounce rechargeable noise machine with non-looping sounds
- Belomo 10x Triplet Loupe A pocket lens good enough to carry every day
- Klein 11-in-1 Screwdriver The multi-bit driver a Repair Cafe volunteer calls a magic key
- The New World Champion Paper Airplane Book Aeronautically tested folds, including a 226-foot record design
- Retractable Cable Luggage Lock A pull-out steel cable that locks through any zipper or handle
- Nightstick Rechargeable Floodlight 600-lumen magnetic work light that charges via AC or DC
- Pilgrim — Mindful Walking iOS walking companion with location-stamped voice notes and cairns
- Tolstoy's Guide to Daily Wisdom Tolstoy's last project — a year of daily readings from world philosophy
- Peopleware DeMarco and Lister's classic on why software teams really succeed or fail
- Manga Kamishibai Eric Nash's book on the Japanese paper theater that preceded anime
- Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind Shunryū Suzuki's 1970 Zen primer, still the recommended one
- Anna's Archive Offshore shadow library with 95 million scholarly articles
- Circle to Search Trace a finger around anything on screen to search it — image, text, product
- Embassy of the Free Mind Amsterdam museum and rare-book library for Hermetic and occult manuscripts