Hello computer friend,

This time I've got calls to actions for you. Call to actions? CTAs!

I'm going to be honest here, I'm offering some special opportunities, but they won't give you anything tangible in return. But hey, I also get nothing in return for writing these newsletters for you! You might not know this, but my day job is at ForTomorrow, a small nonprofit doing effective climate protection in Europe. I could shoehorn a donation ask into every piece of content® I create™. Maybe that's exactly why I never do.

But this is different. My employer — also my spouse, yes — has been nominated for an award. We've won awards before, but not recently, and that matters more than it sounds. Awards open doors: new audiences, credibility, trust. The award is for this year's German Startup Impact Founder. They collect email votes to pick the winner. So here's what I want you to do:

1. Go to this page. Don't be scared by the German text.
2. Scroll down and click the first white surface that almost looks like a button and is labeled 'Für die Impact Entrepreurin des Jahres abstimmen'.
3. Select option 2: 'Ruth von Heusinger'.
4. Enter an email address under 'Bitte gib deine E-Mailadresse an'—AFAIK it doesn't have to be your own.
5. Click 'Abstimmen'!

Alright, now while we're at it: do you have VISA, MasterCard or an IBAN? We've set up a crowdraising campaign where donations are doubled by a bank. Where any other day I could ask you to donate for direct climate protection, this time your donation makes twice the impact. It's important that we raise at least €1500, because otherwise we get nothing and it was all in vain. So:

1. Go to this page and again, don't get be scared, it's only German!
2. Enter your donation amount under 'Jetzt unterstützen'.
3. Click the blue 'Projekt jetzt unterstützen' button.
4. Vibe read till the end of the end of the checkout process!

Cheers!

From my blog

I just published a long post with tricks I learned around organizing video compression and metadata: How to make a video archive. Feels pointless with all the evil things happening around the world—I do care about that too. At least keeping your files locally, you can avoid paying for American cloud services! I'm really disappointed by the state of tech and the decline of Apple: Will I regret buying a new Mac?.

All blog posts

Bookmarks

One of my best friends and one of the best industrial designers I've studied has a really cool project. It's an interesting, completely new analog watch. He's been working for six years and it's finally ready to be taken into production:

"Just push notifications for your devices. That’s it":

brrr

Push notifications for yourself. iOS and macOS.

NEW REPORT – The AI climate hoax – Ketan Joshi

A new report on AI greenwashing, analysing the rhetoric and evidence behind the idea big tech will solve climate change

A great argument for the value of design, except that the author fails to recognize that:

Coding Is When We’re Least Productive – Codemanship's Blog

One old dragon that’s reared its head again in this “age of AI” is the very wrongheaded notion that productivity == code. Managers aim to maximise the amount of code their dev tea…

Pandoc looks like a very useful utility for transforming many types of document files into other document types.

I think this is a great time for designers, because a lot of things that used to be a lot of work no longer are. But Pavel argues that if you're not careful, you just end up being your manager's accountability sink without doing much useful.

More bookmarks