Beatle's NFT, Wandering Elephants, Music for Living Spaces and more...
#3 of 10+1 Things
Hello,
Welcome to the 3rd issue of 10+1 Things.
Here are 10+1 Things that I thought were worth sharing this week:
Designing Your Life
I'm currently reading Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, founders of the Design program at Stanford University. The books teaches us how we can build and design a life in which we can thrive at any age or stage. It explains how the same design thinking responsible for amazing technology and products can be used to design and build a life of fulfilment and joy with constant creativity.
NFT (Non-fungible Token)
NFTs are digital blockchain tokens that represent ownership of unique items such as art, music, videos, etc. NFTs represents a unique item and are not interchangeable. By paying small gas fees (service fees to add a block on the ethereum chain), anybody can create an NFT and sell it. To give you an example of the scale of things, a digital art by Mike Winklemann aka Beeple was sold for $69.3 million. While researching about the topic, I got curious and decided to list one of my photographs titled 'Beatles: Many Loners were here' on Mintable, an NFT marketplace for fun. You can place a bid and buy the art here for 20$ in 7days! If interested, read more about NFTs on Investrly.
Music for Living Spaces
Music for Living Spaces is s a collection of minimalist keyboard compositions with healing melodies and arpeggios by Green-House, an ambient producer from LA. According to the artist, “The intention of this project is to facilitate the connection between humans and nature. Instead of perceiving nature as something that's separate from us, or outside of our homes, we can recognize nature as something that is within us and in everything we do in our daily lives." The artist was recommended by FlowState, substack exploring music that's perfect for working.
Wandering Elephants of China
A herd of 15 elephants have left their nature reserve and have trekked more than 500kms across the country since last year. What exactly motivated them to make this epic journey is still a mystery but there is a more serious side to the issue. Over the last few decades expanding agriculture has led to a loss of elephant habitats resulting in conflict with humans. Prevention of a similar elephant exodus in the future requires the restoration of habitats and natural reserves.
Automate the Boring Stuff with Python
Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is a free-to-read book by AI SAl Sweigart. It is a practical programming guide for office workers, academics, and administrators who want to improve their productivity. The book will help you learn the basics of programming so that you can automate simple tasks like sorting 1000s of files, filling out online forms, formating spreadsheets, etc. The video version of the course is available on Udemy or you can buy the print version from Amazon.
Brave Browser
Brave browser is a privacy-first browser designed with a built-in ad and tracker blocker. It automatically blocks ads, website tracking, malware, phishing, plugins and all unwanted content. Brave looks familiar to Google Chrome users as it is built on top of the open-source Chromium web browser that Chrome is based on. Brave users can actually earn revenue in the form of Basic Attention Token (BAT) by opting to view anonymous, privacy-preserving ads. To get some perspective, I earned around 3.6$ worth BAT in May itself.
Draw A Box
Drawabox offers a set of free exercise-based lessons that focuses on the fundamentals of drawing. It helps you to gain the skills required to make sense of all other resources and tutorials available on the internet (I'm trying it and it's quite interesting!)
Portraits of Dissent
Masked is a photography series by renounced photographer Adam Ferguson on the 2019 student-led protests in Hong Kong. In his newsletter, he talks about how he photographed students in a photo studio in Hong Kong. To replicate the ambient low-key light he had seen during the protest, Adam used a setup with 4 fill lights in the studio.
Remembering What you Read
Remembering what you read is a tricky affair. Over the years I have failed to remember the things I've read and to replicate them in my life. Lately, I'm using a service called Readwise (only used for Kindle users), which uses techniques such as Spaced Repetitions and Active Recall to retain ideas that I've read. If you own a Kindle , check this article I've written on my reading workflow and how I try to remember what I read.
Google Cemetery
From Picassa to Google Goggles, Google Cemetery by Failory lists down 100+ products that were scraped by Google over the years. It's fascinating to see the number of failed products by a tech giant like Google.
Tiny Terrariums
Lately, I've been fascinated by terrariums and their closed self-sustaining ecosystems. If you don't know what a Terrarium is, think of it as an aquarium, but instead of fish, it has plants. I found this channel named SerpaDesign which makes amazing simple videos on building terrariums. I'm currently in the process of making a tiny terrarium after watching this video.
That’s 10+1 Things for this week.
See you next week!
With Love,
Rishikesh
Quote of the week: “The cat sat on a mat is not a story. The cat sat on the dogs mat is a story"
Loads of great stuff here Rishi. Will have to try some of these out!