Cooltools by KKModify

2024-12-27 00:00:00

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.

Stocking Stuffers for Travelers

If you’ve got a budding traveler in the house you’ll be in this season, I’ve got a few suggestions for stocking stuffers that will actually be appreciated. The ideal item is something that’s small, easy to pack, and is generic enough that it isn’t impacted by the recipient’s personal style preferences. Some items we’ve covered that fit the bill are an indestructible spork, a retractable luggage lock, Sugru bonding fixer, or reusable gear ties from Nite Ize.

A New Nomad Cities Site

Add RoamRank to the list of sites crawling the web to get data on where digital nomads should go live. It only took me 20 seconds to spot some errors: the word “accrurate” when talking about their data sets and the “places where weed is legal” having several where it’s really not. But the costs of living are fairly close to the reality I’ve seen lately in Bangkok ($1,496 monthly), Barcelona ($2,026), and Prague ($1,707), though Budapest is definitely more expensive than Sofia, which they have about equal. – submitted by Mark F. of Recomendoz

Norse Atlantic Now on Kayak and Skyscanner

Budget airlines crossing an ocean are rare since few of them last, but Norse Atlantic is still hanging in there, flying between five cities in the USA and seven in Europe, plus a couple of routes to Bangkok and Cape Town. You wouldn’t discover any of that without going to their website before, but now they’re in the back-end booking system Sabre, which means they’ll show up in regular flight searches from now on, in places like Kayak and Skyscanner.

Travel Trends from 2024

Travel Pulse reported on a study from a travel insurance company with trends they saw this past year, based on data from all the policies purchased. Insurance claims were way up, first of all, with flight cancellations being the #1 culprit. Other notes: boomers took 39% of all trips, a third of travelers opted for a cruise, and “average trip cost for Americans in 2024 was $5,861, up 25% from 2023.” For an average vacation of 17 days though, which seems really long for Americans. It looks like the people buying travel insurance the most are the ones going on really long cruises…

2024-12-26 00:00:00

Martha Burzynski is a writer, photographer and full time nanny. She lives in Brooklyn.

PHYSICAL

• Zojirushi water bottle; a stainless steel thermos who keep hot liquids hot and cold liquids cold. It does exactly what it needs to do and looks great doing it.
• Kiehls lip balm #1; the original and just the best lip balm ever.
• Bonnie Cashin era vintage coach handbags. I just can’t get excited about new handbags after I found them; so beautiful and tough.

DIGITAL

• Theatr; a peer to peer buying and selling app for theater tickets, mostly in New York and last minute.
• Libby; the best way to access audiobooks is through your local library app!

INVISIBLE

I have a complicated relationship to Peloton and their influencer instructors; one instructor says repeatedly to “treat your body as if it belongs to someone you love.”

2024-12-25 00:00:00

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.

AN EPIC LOVE AFFAIR BETWEEN A GRACEFUL GAZELLE AND A CLUMSY, HAPLESS OX TOLD THROUGH HILARIOUSLY SWEET LETTERS

XO, OX: A Love Story
by Adam Rex, Scott Campbell (Illustrator)
Roaring Brook Press
2017, 40 pages, 8.5 x 11.0 inches, Hardcover

Buy on Amazon

XO, OX: A Love Story, is exactly that. Told entirely through letters between the adoring Ox and the glamorous Gazelle, Adam Rex and Scott Campbell have created a charming story for readers of all ages. The story is propelled by things we are often in too short supply of these days: passion, humanity, and honest to goodness mail.

Far from an oafish beast blindly in love that Gazelle imagines him to be, Ox is a deeply thoughtful creature, an undeterred optimist, propelled by love and pen. Like an envelope sealed with a kiss, the story is bookended in illustrated endpapers that bring the correspondence full circle.

Were this story told through Ox’s incessant emails to Gazelle, his tweets at her, his constant posting of Gazelle-themed memes, clearly, this story would be much less romantic. It would also be impossible. Ox’s emails would go straight to spam, his social media pleas blocked. Plus, it would be way too depressing to see him bask in Gazelle’s rejections in the sad light of a glowing screen.

It is a hard fact of life knowing that my daughter may never pass a note in class, but I still hold out hope that she will write, and receive, a bonafide letter, to be kept and carried close, folded and unfolded until whole sentences are creased (but not lost — they’ll be memorized, of course), and finally tucked into a favorite page in a favorite book.

This story makes me believe (again) that mail, and persistent goodness, can actually change hearts. This could be the book that our digital natives remember with anachronistic fondness, slip off the shelf, into an oversized envelope, and mail to their sweethearts. Who needs a boombox when you’ve got a hardcover?

– Mk Smith Despres

GET JIRO: BLOOD AND SUSHI — A COMIC FROM THE SICK, TWISTED, AND FOOD-OBSESSED MIND OF ANTHONY BOURDAIN

Get Jiro: Blood and Sushi
by Anthony Bourdain, Joel Rose
Vertigo
2015, 160 pages, 7 x 0.5 x 10.5 inches, Hardcover

Buy on Amazon

Like Sushi? Like hyper violent yakuza movies? Get Jiro: Blood and Sushi is a comic that could only have come from the sick, twisted, and food-obsessed mind of Anthony Bourdain. And I’m pretty sure he’d take the whole sick and twisted mind thing, as the compliment it was intended to be. The latest book, Blood and Sushi is a prequel to 2013’s Get Jiro!, this time we learn the backstory of how Jiro went from Yakuza enforcer to renowned LA sushi chef.

By day, Jiro helps run his father’s crime empire along with his maniacal half-brother, but by night Jiro trains to become a master Sushi Chef. Those two sides of him are on a collision course that plays out across Japan, and leaves a bloody wake. The artwork is incredible. Each frame balances the futuristic Japan, the beauty of the cuisine, and the grizzly katana-induced carnage.

This comic is full bore, unhinged, Bourdain madness. If you’re familiar with his travel shows, then you’ve probably gotten a taste of his dark humor, disdain for vegetarians, and obscure cinematic references — but the Jiro series takes it to a new level. It’s violent. It’s weird. I can’t get enough.

– JP LeRoux

2024-12-24 00:00:00

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.

Best guide for nomadic RV life

Boondock RVing

With a little bit of gumption you can liberate your RV from the leash of the RV parks. Run it untethered, off the grid. Camp in a wild place, or in a parking lot. Takes some advance planning, maybe some more gear, certainly a change of spirit. This book will help. While its technical specs are out of date by a few years, the general drift of the book’s advice is right on. Like in anything else off the grid, there’s much talk about batteries, inverters and cables. There is not much here about mail forwarding, etc, which is best covered by hanging out on the forums at Escapees, the watering hole website for full-time RVers.

Escapees is a membership club for full time RVers which offers a popular mail forwarding service. You can get your postal mail and packages forwarded in a hundred different ways and schedules. Since it is based in Texas, your official residence can then be located in a state without income tax. Its 35,000 members are eager to share their knowledge of the RV life with newbies.

Also, Workamper is a good online bookstore full of RV-related titles. Guides to: Finding work on the road, cooking, repairs, shopping guides for new rigs, directories of camp grounds, Rving in Mexico and Alaska, dealing with insurance, etc.. Also a book that lists what stores lie at each exit of the interstates! Most of the published lore focuses on snowbirding, and RV parking, rather than boondocking.

Overall, Boondocking RVing is the best book about the logistics of long-term nomadic RVing. — KK

• Additionally, the cost of staying in private campgrounds is increasing, going up by a dollar or more per night each year. We recently read an article in RVBusiness magazine, written by a campground spokesman, that stated the industry envisions campground prices will eventually reach a level of 50% the cost of a midlevel hotel or more. Consequently, if you would normally pay $100 a night for a hotel room, you would pay $50 a night in an RV park.
• Retail Stores and Restaurants
  Retail and chain stores often have large, well-lit parking lots. We have camped at Fred Meyer, Kmart, and Wal-Mart stores (or Camp Wally as they are more commonly called). In fact, Wal-Mart carries an edition of the Rand McNally road atlas with an insert that lists all of the U.S. and Canadian Wal-Marts. other options might include discount warehouses, such as Sam’s Club, or restaurants, such as Cracker Barrel and McDonald’s.
• Casinos are excellent places for convenience camping. We don’t know of any casinos that prohibit overnight camping, unless they have a commercial campground. Of course, they expect you to patronize the facilities, so at least eat in their restaurants, which often have excellent buffets at reasonable prices. … With the profusion of casinos being built all over the country, they can make great overnight stops with good food and entertainment. Some casinos have regular RV parks, but still allow boondocking in certain areas of the parking lot.
• We have two catalytic heaters — a small one (1,600 to 2,800 Btu), which is mounted on the wall, and a medium-sized one (3,200 to 6,000 Btu) we can move around as needed. We’ve kept warm in some below-freezing temperatures with the catalytic heaters as our only heat source.

• There is a bit of controversy over whether 6-volt or 12-volt batteries are better in a battery bank. Two of the arguments for using 6-volt batteries are (1) there are fewer cables involved in series wiring, so there are fewer connection to corrode; and (2) in 12-volt parallel wiring, one of the batteries in a two-battery bank will receive most of the load and most of the charge, and therefore will fail faster than the other.
  The first argument has some validity as there are fewer cables in series wiring, so there is less corrosion. The second argument is not necessarily true, if you wire the bank as shown above. if a battery goes bad in a 12-volt bank, you can just disconnect it and use the remaining one. You’ll still be getting 12 volts. With a 6-volt bank, however, one bad battery means the loss of the whole two-battery bank.

• Should you tilt your panels and follow the sun? … We have seen rigs with their panels mounted on racks that allow them to swing around to track the sun. Frankly, this just seems like too much work to us, plus we don’t really think it’s necessary. Also, when panels are tilted up, they can be more easily damaged by the high winds that occur during the winter months, particularly in desert areas.

Low rent nomads

Cheap RV Living

Roomier than a car, but cheaper than an RV, a retrofitted van makes a cool inexpensive house. Once popular during hippie days, the ancient American tradition of modifying a van is undergoing a resurgence as rents continue to rise. More folks each year commute from work and then park their home, instead of parking in front of it. On this lovely free website, you can find inspiring examples of cheap nomads, detailed instructions for conversions, gear recommendations, and lots of advice for living in a low rent or homemade RV from “them that’s doin’ it.” — KK

• And what about gas mileage? With a car you may get 50 mpg and with an RV you may get 5 mpg. Since we are living cheaply, this is a very important consideration. It’s hard to be too specific with mpg numbers. If you buy a 1975 1 ton pickup with a 454, you might get 6 mpg with a camper, but if you buy a 2005 diesel, you may get 20 mpg with the same camper. If you get a 1985 Ford van with a 460, you may get 6 mpg but if you get a 302 V8 you may get 22 mpg. Or, even better, get a Astro minivan, you could get 25 mpg.
• STEALTH PARKING: After I bought the van, I didn’t know where to go with it. I couldn’t afford to pay for an RV park (and they probably would not have accepted me anyway since my van was pretty beat-up looking) so I slept in the parking lot of the store where I worked. No one even noticed me! The great thing about the box van was that when I parked in front of any large store, it looked like it belonged there. I lived in that van for 6 years and never once paid for parking anywhere and was never bothered for where I did park.
• I have a cell phone, a loan payment, van insurance, and credit cards. One of the first things I did to handle this was go “paperless” – I now get all my statements by email and pay my bills online. I get wifi on my laptop, and many public libraries have computers & internet available.

• Kitchen:
  This changed several times as I was building it. I needed pantry space, drawers, and fresh/gray water for the faucet/sink. The kitchen is positioned along the passenger side so I can open the doors when cooking on my camp stove. The counter is actual Formica with a drop down leaf to give me more room when cooking. I have 2 six gallon containers, one is for gray water and one for fresh. I use a hand pump for water, or use gallons of water from the store for cooking and cleaning more often now. I may add a small pump in the future. The microwave sits underneath with enough space in the pantry for about a week’s worth of food. The spice rack is a must have for me, because while the portions are smaller and more challenging to make, I still don’t sacrifice on good food! Under the pantry I store my pans, lids, and plates in a magazine rack from Ikea. The fridge is a standard dorm minifridge I found on craigslist for $20 but I only turn it on when driving or when plugged into shore power, as it can drain my batteries in two days. Most of the time I use it as a glorified icebox, as I tend to buy fresh foods the day I use them.
• The Pee Bottle:First and foremost, the pee bottle must be leakproof and unbreakable for obvious reasons! For all my adventures, I’ve used a 1 liter, wide-mouth Lexan bottle made by Nalgene. They come in a variety of colors – I’ve settled on the dark yellow one for my pee bottle so I don’t mistake it for my drinking water bottle. Similar, less expensive brands can be found in the sporting goods department at WalMart or Target, or experiment with plastic food product containers with tight fitting lids and enough volume.
  Spill Proof – One fear I have in van or tent is fumbling and spilling the pee bottle before I have the lid screwed on all the way. To safeguard this, I made a wrist loop out of a piece of 1inch wide nylon webbing which I duct taped to the bottle (see photo). The wrist loop is loose enough to slip easily on and off and to hold the bottle with that hand, but tight enough that the bottle won’t fall if I loose my grip. Slip the loop over one hand, unscrew the lid, and away you go; just be sure to screw the lid on tightly before slipping out of the wrist loop. A piece of cord would work just as well as the nylon webbing – just get the loop the right size.I keep two pee bottles in the van just in case I forget to empty one during the day – and on long, cold nights sometimes one liter just isn’t enough!
  
• What vehicle to buy?If gas mileage and stealth are most important: Chevrolet Astro minivan–great mpg and super stealth.If room and stealth are most important: Full-size American van, especially the Dodge with a 318 V8.If headroom is most important: High-top American conversion van.For a couple, or if you need lots of room: Box van or Step-van, both with a diesel engine.If you want to go further into the back-country: Pickup with a camper with 4X4.

2024-12-23 00:00:00

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Random, unedited videos

IMG_0001 is a website that streams raw and unedited videos uploaded to YouTube between 2009 and 2012. All these videos were uploaded with default filenames of IMG_XXXX, and there is no identifying information except for the upload date. The random nature of this content and these glimpses into everyday life make me feel like an alien stumbling upon a time capsule of human existence. — CD

No plastic non-stick pan

We are slowly weaning ourselves away from teflon non-stick pans. So far we’ve found some good ceramic pans that keep their non-stick for years, but contain no plastics. Per a recommendation from Tim Ferriss, we got a titanium-ceramic hybrid pan, which has fantastic non-stick without plastic. We really like the 10-inch Titanium Always Pan Pro frying skillet from Our Place, coated inside with a matrix of alternating titanium and ceramic. It was expensive, a little deeper than a frying pan, but is now what we grab first. – KK

World history map

TimeMap.org presents a world mapwith a slider bar that starts at 4000 BC and ends at the present day. As you slide through time, you watch empires rise and fall. Any interesting civilization or event you spot can be instantly researched — just click on it and the relevant Wikipedia article appears in a side panel. — MF

Pet-friendly duvet cover

My dog is trained not to jump on the bed or couch unless his special blanket is laid out first. However, we recently discovered that our microfiber duvet cover ($30) repels dog hair, so our house rules have changed. We no longer lay out the blanket and we just invite him up, which he, of course, quickly adjusted to. I’m not sure where all his dog hair goes, but it definitely does not stick to our bedding. Another reason I’m happy with our duvet cover is that it’s made of seersucker, which means it never looks wrinkly. — CD

Zipper thermometer

I like this tiny thermometer that hangs on the zipper pull of my jacket or daypack. It settles the question of exactly how hot or cold it is. The Sun Zipogage ($21) weighs only half of an ounce (13g) and is digital with an on/off button. (Tiny analog thermometers are not readable or accurate.) – KK

Extra laptop display

This Cevaton Screen Extender adds two 15.6″ 1080p screens that wing out from my laptop. I use it when I’m working on my treadmill desk. It folds flat when done and comes with a sturdy carrying case for travel, but both monitors plus the stand weigh about five pounds, so I don’t plan to travel with it (I use an iPad as a second monitor when I’m on the road.). It comes with a variety of cables to connect to most laptops. (Note: it won’t work with basic M1/M2 MacBooks.) — MF

2024-12-21 00:00:00

Paleontologist-Futurist Michael Garfield works in mind-jazz across genres to help navigating our world of accelerating weirdness and cultivate the curiosity and play for people to thrived in it. Host of Future Fossils, former Digital Media Strategist for The Santa Fe Institute and host of Complexity Podcast, former Community Manager for The Long Now Foundation and Research Analyst for a stealth Mozilla AI spin out, his latest project Humans On The Loop examines agency in the age of automation through conversation, music, essay, social weaving, and the rearing of bespoke language models.

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TOOLS:
0:00 – Intro
1:01 – Boss RC-505 mkII Loopstation
16:53 – Brunton Transit pocket compass
25:47 – Black Diamond Storm 500-R headlamp
33:17 – FLUXX by Looney Labs
42:14 – Humans on the Loop

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